UNITED NATIONS, April 26 -- The UN was unable or unwilling to answer questions about its Panel of Experts report into Sri Lanka war crimes on Tuesday, a day after Secretary General Ban Ki-moon belatedly released the report.
Inner City Press asked Ban's spokesman Martin Nesirky three questions at Tuesday's noon briefing, not one of which was answered.
Ban's cover letter accompanying the report stated that for an “investigation mechanism, [Ban] is advised that this will require host country consent or a decision from Member States through an appropriate intergovernmental forum.”
Inner City Press asked, twice, BY WHOM was Ban advised that he doesn't have the power to investigate? Nesirky would not say. At opening the briefing, Nesirky had called it an “advisory” report. But the advise on what Ban can't do is not from the report.
Given a number of seeming errors in the report, such as misidentifying in Paragraph 171 the role of Presidential brother Basil Rajapaksa in the so-called White Flag killings in which Ban's own chief of staff Vijay Nambiar has acknowledged he was involved, without recusing himself from review of the report, Inner City Press asked Nesirky to explain this error, and to clarify Basil's role. Inner City Press had previously posed this question, and ones about Nambiar, by e-mail to Nesirky and his deputy Farhan Haq.
I will have to check that, Nesirky said, adding that the Panel's work has ceased when it turned the report in. Why this is being done differently that Ban's panel on the murder of Benazir Bhutto, on which a press conference with questions and answer with the Panel chairman was held after the release has not been explained.
Even if one accepted Ban's argument for his own powerlessness, which Amnesty International and others do not, Ban could formally ask an intergovernmental body to vote on an investigation of war crimes in Sri Lanka.
Ban will be briefing the Security Council then the press on Tuesday afternoon. He will tell the Council not only about this recent trip to Ukraine, Hungary, Russia and elsewhere, but also about Cote d'Ivoire and, Nesirky said, Sri Lanka.
Inner City Press asked Nesirky if Ban will be asking the Security Council to take up and vote on his panel's recommendation for an international investigation of war crimes in Sri Lanka, since Ban is advised -- by whom, we still do not know, beyond noting it is the Rajapaksa's and Vijay Nambiar's position -- that he cannot order an investigation himself. Nesirky did not answer that either. -Inner City Press