The Island Editorial

What UNSG forgot

 

03 September 2016

UNSG Ban Ki-moon has concluded what his office may describe as a successful tour of Sri Lanka. He squeezed as many meetings as possible into his tight schedule and whether he was able to ascertain anything substantive from his powwows is anybody’s guess. He is sure to deliver the message prepared well in advance before leaving the country.

This comment, however, is not about the UNSG’s visit or the statements he has already made or is likely to make from his office. It is about something he forgot to do here. He should have tendered an apology to the people of Sri Lanka on behalf of the UN.

The UN chief and other panjandrums wouldn’t have had to take the trouble of coming all the way here to press for probing accountability issues etc if the UN had not failed here. The war which was thankfully ended in 2009 had lasted for nearly 25 years with the UN doing precious little to help tackle a terrorist group hell bent on destroying a UN member state.

UNICEF pathetically failed to liberate the child soldiers from the clutches of the Tigers. There were some UN officials like Olara Otunu, who courageously took up the cudgels for the child combatants and strove to pressure the UN to adopt stringent measures against the outfits including the LTTE for forcible child conscription. But, the Security Council chose to skirt the tough measures proposed by human rights groups; only a list of shame was issued as if terrorists had any sense of shame!

The UN also did not care to prevent its member states such as the UK, Canada, France, the Scandinavian countries etc from harbouring LTTE activists who raised funds and coordinated terrorist activities internationally. But for the funds the LTTE received from its activists operating freely in those countries it wouldn’t have been able to destroy so many lives and graduated from a ragtag army to a conventional combat force with air and naval capabilities to plunge this country into a conflagration, only the last phase of which the UN is now probing at the behest of the western bloc.

The UNHRC issues condemnatory statements on this country at the drop of a hat, but never did it utter a word against the LTTE. After the resumption of hostilities in 2006, Prabhakaran had the UN compound in Kilinochchi stormed and the UN flag pulled down and desecrated. Then he had two UN workers abducted for allegedly helping a group of civilians leave the LTTE-held terrain. The UN Colombo Office kept the abductions under wraps and chose to act illegally; it had clandestine talks with the LTTE in a bid to secure their release. The then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was kept in the dark about the incident until we exposed it much to the embarrassment and consternation of the LTTE backers in the garb of UN workers in Colombo, who had even tried to arrange for a meeting between Annan and the LTTE in the Vanni on the pretext of helping tsunami victims. This shows the extent to which terrorist groups have infiltrated the UN system through various rich, influential fronts.

The UN again failed to ensure the safety of its own staff here. While the war was raging with the LTTE using civilians as a human shield, the UN struggled desperately to secure the release of its staff and 75 of their dependents including 40 children and 35 women, whom the LTTE prevented from leaving the war zone, though 15 of those children had contracted respiratory diseases.

Such was the impotency of the UN vis-à-vis LTTE terrorism. Today, we are not short of UN bigwigs and civil society Rip Van Winkles championing human rights and calling for war crimes probes. The UNSG should have apologised to Sri Lankans for the pathetic failure of the UN to be of any help to them during the war years.