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Petrie Report baseless and unsubstantiated: Govt.
The External Affairs Ministry reacting on Friday, to the “Petrie report”, or the UN Secretary General’s Internal Review panel, on action in Sri Lanka, said the statistics in the Petrie Report were based on “unnamed sources” quoted in the Darusman Report, and unsubstantiated allegations made by NGOs and certain lower level UN officials.
However, a censored section of this Report refers to a meeting of the Policy Planning Committee to discuss Sri Lanka, where several participants including the then Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and the Resident Coordinator did not stand by the casualty numbers, saying that the data was ‘not verified’, and questioned the proposal by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, to release a public statement containing references to the numbers and possible crimes, the Ministry said in a statement.
No mention has been made of the intransigence of the LTTE, which held the people as human shields, and even shot in cold blood, those who tried to escape to freedom, the statement added.
The ministry said its attention has been drawn to certain issues with regard to allegations directed at the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL), which it said was “regrettably unsubstantiated, erroneous and replete with conjecture and bias”.
The statement also said:
The ministry said through its Permanent Mission in New York, that it protested against the leak of the Report on the very day after this questionable action, to the Office of the Secretary General.
The “Petrie Report” is an internal document to assess the working of the United Nations system in Sri Lanka, during a given period, following a recommendation in the Report of the advisory Panel of Experts appointed by the Secretary General, known as the “Darusman Report”.
While noting that both these Reports are internal advisories to the UN, it is disconcerting that the Darusman Report, initially came into the public domain through a leak, and in this instance of the Petrie Report too, the unacceptable procedure of leaking has been resorted to, establishing a disturbing pattern which brings into question the bona fides of the authorship of the document and its underlying motivation.
This Report seems to seek to endorse the baseless and discredited allegations in the Darusman Report, of an exaggerated civilian casualty figure during the last stages of the terrorist conflict, which has not been agreed upon even among senior UN officials at the time, because of the speculative nature of the information which could not be verified.
While the Report admits that the LTTE positioned its artillery among civilians, the allegation of Government shelling into civilian concentrations does not take into account the principles of self defence or reasonableness of retaliation, proportionality, or a technical analysis of the trajectories of the shells allegedly fired, to determine their source.
The allegation relating to the Government deliberately restricting food and medicine to the North is another unsubstantiated statement which, as in the Darusman Report, is repeated in the Petrie publication.
Repeated characterisation of the welfare villages, without any basis, as “military run internment camps,” demonstrates the ignorance on the part of the author of the Report, as well as the resolve to ignore the efforts taken by the Government to provide basic needs and essential services to the thousands of displaced civilians who fled from the stronghold of the terrorists, to the Government side.
Furthermore, while it refers to the military campaign to defeat the LTTE, the Report makes scant reference to the long series of negotiations engaged in by successive Governments, to arrive at a peaceful settlement, while all those efforts and brief periods of ceasefire were used by the LTTE to regroup and rearm, to be subsequently unilaterally violated.
A Report of this nature could serve to dangerously have the statistics and unsubstantiated information acquire a life of their own. In fact, the initial statements emanating from some countries seem to disregard the fact that the basic purpose of the Report was to engage in a critical appraisal of the UN system’s performance. Ignoring this vital aspect, they have taken the opportunity to resort to criticism of the GoSL in a manner that reflects patent bias and unwillingness to examine the developments with any degree of objectivity.
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