Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations

Friday, December 21, 2012

Eating properly and smiling: The evasive Valerie Amos on Twitter

On 18th December 2012, at around 10pm in Sri Lanka, Valerie Amos, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator took to Twitter, ostensibly to answer questions related to the UN’s role, relevance and responsibilities regarding humanitarian aid and relief work. The event with Baroness Amos was announced via the Twitter account of,inter alia, UN OCHA, which also had a photo of her in front of a laptop, getting ready to face the questions.

The event was conducted with the hashtag #AskValerie. Baroness Amos is (whether through office aides or by herself it remains unclear) fairly active on Twitter via @ValerieAmos. However, despite her own and OCHA’s familiarity with web based social media interactions, yesterday’s Twitter question time with Baroness Amos was a cogent example of how not to curate and conduct public debates when one is ill prepared to take on, and answer, hard questions. It reflected extremely poorly on the professionalism of Baroness Amos, the chief participant, her staff, pictured in the photos with her during the session, UN OCHA as the institution represented and the UN system writ large. Vital questions repeatedly posed by Groundviews and others, which didn’t generate even a simple acknowledgement, are now a public and permanent record of the UN’s continued role as an infuriating firewall of information vital for a fuller record of the end of Sri Lanka’s war.

A partial account of the answers Baroness Amos gave over Twitter during the #AskValerie session can be seen below.

No sooner than the event started, Groundviews submitted two questions to Baroness Amos, the first in the session from Sri Lanka and on Sri Lanka.