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Dear Mr. Foley,
Your article ‘What really happened in Sri Lanka?’ is full of inaccurate information. You seem to have seen things from a wrong perspective with negative attitude towards the recent developments in Sri Lanka. Let me explain some of the main points.
1. You say that “the doctors were one of the few sources of first-hand information” during a time where there were no independent observers. This is wrong. On the one hand there were independent observers all the time; the ICRC and the UN were present there continuously. On the
other hand, the doctors were not source of ‘first hand information’ due to the following reasons:
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The doctors were involved in treating the patients and not reporting on the situation. They did
not carry cameras, shoot films, and relay it to the world. Then who did this reporting by interviewing the doctors in regular intervals? It was the LTTE’s propaganda arm who was busy in the area dispersing misinformation to the world.
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It is then clear, to anyone who knows the LTTE and its misinformation capability that they
wanted the world to believe that the civilians are dying due to government military activities and not due to LTTE terrorism. It was the last resort that they had during the last phase of the war, to portray a false picture and gain sympathy of the other countries and the Tamil
expatriates abroad.
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These doctors (except one of them) were appointed by the government to the hospitals in
those areas and the LTTE had no other person better than them to make their case look credible and believable, because people generally believe doctors, specially in a situation like that.
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Now you in your own article say that the doctors had said that they were not under pressure
by the government to make statements. Therefore, you contradict your own claim that they were under pressure. Whoever knows about the LTTE’s ruthlessness would never doubt that they had to lie during the period that they were in LTTE controlled areas for their survival.
2. You refer to the Times report of 20,000 civilian deaths but the Times credibility was tested in
this. The Times said in its report that they have obtained ‘secret’ UN documents to substantiate their claim but the UN Secretary General, UN Under-Secretary General Sir John Holmes and others in the UN vehemently rejected this. I wonder whether you were not aware of this. Please
read the following quotes:
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UN Secretary General has said to the UN General Assembly on 1 June that the media reports
alleging that some 20,000 civilians may have been killed during the last phase of the conflict “do not emanate from the UN and most are not consistent with the information at our disposal.””
Source: UN News Centre > www.un.org/news
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Sir John Holmes, the UN, Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief
Coordinator said on 31 May "That figure [20,000] has no status as far as we're concerned,"
Source: Al Jazeera (English) www.aljazeera.com/english
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Spokesperson for UNSG, Ms. Michele Montas on 1 June at the noon press briefing said that “In the
month of May we had absolutely no way of knowing what the casualty figure was. The number of 20,000 is not a UN number” [The Spokesperson later added that as regards to the media reports on the figure of 20,000 civilian casualties in Sri Lanka, it was verified with the concerned
United Nations staff who were present at meetings of United Nations senior officials that no such internal report was made at those meetings]
Source: UN web Site>
http://www.un.org/News/briefings/docs/2009/db090601.doc.htm
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On 29th May 2009 at the noon press briefing Ms. Marie Okabe, Deputy Spokesperson for UNSG said
“Okay, on that, first of all, the media reports of the latest figures that you’re speaking to, I did check with OCHA and they do not know where these specific figures are coming from”.
Source: UN web Site>
http://www.un.org/News/briefings/docs/2009/db090501.doc.htm
3. Despite this, the Times went on again recently and said that there are 1400 people dying every
week in welfare centres. You have quoted this as well. This is completely wrong. It is the post-conflict period now and the conditions in the welfare centres are getting better every day. If this is to be true, there should be 200 deaths a day (200 funerals). Have you seen this
figure come up anywhere else other than the Times? There are 52 Non Governmental Organizations in these camps and there are very vocal opposition politicians as well. They should be talking about such mass funerals if they are true.
4. You are unhappy that the UN human rights council has praised Sri Lanka's human rights record but says that Sri Lanka’s “government cannot defy international opinion indefinitely”. UN is considered the best representative body of the international community and they have
concluded that Sri Lanka has been successful in defeating terrorism and it has to be assisted.
5. You refer to Medicines sans Frontieres (MsF) report and say that the number of patients they have treated is proof of higher number of deaths than that claimed by the doctors. It is not a professional way of arriving at the number of deaths by looking at the number of people
treated for war-related injuries. This is very puerile exercise that is similar to determining the number of deaths by way of deciphering a mass grave of 20,000 by looking at an aerial photograph. This is insulting the intelligence of the readership!
Finally, it seems that you have not been able to see the things in perspective and a subjective and biased analysis of this nature would not do any good to improve the situation of affected people in Sri Lanka.
First Secretary
Sri Lanka High Commission
London
Original Article ...................................
What really happened in Sri Lanka?
With civilians still suffering and the government revising casualty figures, we need a real inquiry into the Sri Lankan conflict
Conor Foley - guardian.co.uk, Thursday 16 July 2009 15.30 BST
The Moscow Trial Was Fair wrote the British lawyer and MP Dennis Pritt, who was subsequently awarded the International Stalin Peace prize, having been expelled from the Labour party in the interim for backing the Soviet invasion of Finland.
The government of Sri Lanka must be hoping for a similarly credulous reaction to its decision last week to parade the five doctors who witnessed the bloody climax of the country's civil war in May and now claim that they deliberately overestimated the number of civilian casualties.
Since the government blocked access to the conflict zone by all independent observers, the doctors were one of the few sources of first-hand information at its height. Up to a quarter of a million people were crammed into an areas the size of New York's central park, which was
repeatedly bombarded over a four-month period. The UN estimated that between 7,000 and 8,000 civilians were killed during the bombardment. A report by the Times claimed that the death toll – from artillery fire, summary executions, disease and starvation – could have been as high
as 20,000.
Last week the doctors, who have been held in incommunicado detention since their arrest, claimed that only 750 civilians died and that they had made up their earlier accounts for propaganda on behalf of the Tamil Tigers (LTTE). Looking nervous and flanked by government officials,
they said that the only shortages of food and medicine in the blockaded area were due to LTTE appropriations and that there had been little damage to medical facilities. They said that they regretted their previous "lies" and that no pressure had been exerted on them to change
their statements. Sri Lanka was a democratic country, one said, and so they were no longer lying. As the Times has noted, the main impact of the press conference was to raise "fresh fears that Sri Lanka, known as a holiday paradise to millions of western tourists, has quietly
become a quasi-Stalinist state".
The tragedy is that Sri Lanka is indeed a democracy, with an independent judiciary and, until recently, a free press. It has suffered a brutal civil war in which the LTTE has committed countless atrocities from suicide bombings, to ethnic cleansing, deliberate attacks on civilians
and the forced recruitment of child soldiers. The LTTE compelled hundreds of thousands of people to remain in its last stronghold as human shields and the protests of its diaspora sympathisers about the resulting carnage deserve to be treated as hypocritical cant.
With the conflict now over, the government could have seized the moral high ground. Instead it has clamped down hard. Around 300,000 civilians remain interned without trial in "welfare centres" that are concentration camps in all but name. As an al-Jazeera report noted:
Contrary to international law there is no freedom of movement for the displaced, and no transparency in registration and interview processes. The standards and amounts of water, food and sanitation are well below what they should be and half of the children under age five are
suffering from malnutrition. There have been outbreaks of diseases such as Hepatitis A, chicken pox and skin ailments, and there are fears that cholera may develop.
One estimate said that 1,400 are dying in the camps every week.
The Sri Lankan government could have made a reasonable case that some security restrictions are necessary in the conflict's aftermath, but it has instead treated all those who question their proportionality as "fifth columnists". Earlier this week, the International Bar Association
(IBA) expressed its alarm at the publication of an article on the ministry for defence's website entitled "Traitors in black coats flocked together?" which contained the names and photographs of lawyers defending a Sri Lankan newspaper in a court case. The IBA had earlier
criticised the government for a similar article which implied that defence lawyers were terrorist suspects.
Another article a few months ago accused aid workers of being terrorists and stated that:
... humanitarian agencies, aid agencies, free media, civil rights movements, etc, have made the continued bloodshed on Sri Lankan soil a lucrative business for them. The only difference observed between them and the LTTE is that the terrorists have been fighting a war on the
ground, which is supposed to end in the achievement of their ultimate goal of a separate state, while the latter fights a different battle on the media and in diplomatic circles, to ensure that the LTTE's war would never end at any cost.
Foreign aid workers are now regularly having their visa requests denied, forcing them out of the country, while local staff are being arrested on trumped up charges. Journalists, lawyers and human rights activists are being abducted, beaten up, tortured and killed. Sri Lanka's
president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, is basking in popularity amongst the country's Sinhalese majority and the Economist recently described him as "cultivating the image of an elected monarch" and deliberately whipping up Sinhalese chauvinism. Meanwhile the UN human rights council has yet
again disgraced itself with a resolution praising Sri Lanka's human rights record.
But last week's press conference may come to be seen as overkill. The conflict almost bankrupted Sri Lanka, which is currently seeking a $1.9bn loan from the International Monetary Fund, and its government cannot defy international opinion indefinitely. The pressure for an
independent investigation into alleged war crimes at the end of the conflict is not going to go away and the more news that emerges the less credible the government's position becomes. Although aid organisations have deliberately refrained from commenting on the political
situation, simple accounts of their work contradict the official line. Medecins sans Frontieres, for example, has just reported that its staff performed 4,000 surgical operations on conflict-related injuries and dressed 3,000 wounds in the last few months, which is hardly
compatible with the doctors' new claims.
The irony is that the doctors almost certainly were pressurised to lie about the situation by the LTTE but are now clearly under pressure to support the government's narrative. Only an independent inquiry can establish the truth, and the government's latest stunt should strengthen
the calls for one.
© The guardian
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