By Matthew Russell
Lee
UNITED NATIONS, February 20 --
As news
of the summary execution of a 12 year old boy by the Sri Lankan Army in May 2009
spreads worldwide, Inner City Press on Wednesday asked UN Secretary General Ban
Ki-moon's spokesman about it, citing Ban's “two reports and a third one still
ongoing.
Ban's spokesman
Martin Nesirky began with a correction, saying that this third report “is an
internal task force looking at how recommendations will be carried out in the
UN... it's not to do with looking into the actual events in Sri
Lanka.”
Some wonder how
the UN can fully assess its inaction in Sri Lanka without taking into account
new evidence of war crimes, including the murder of children in the days the UN
was playing middleman for surrenders which ended in summary
executions.
Nesirky went on
to say “we are aware of the video footage and reports about it,” but he had “no
specific comment” beyond Ban's general statement on the “importance of
accountability.”
He again
referred to a “national process,” when it is clear to many that has not and will
not happen in the run-up to the UN Human Rights Council session in
March.
In Sri Lanka, the release of
e-mails from Stratfor, the privately owned intelligence
company, has sparked a controversy regarding Reuters' bureau
chief there, Bryson Hull.
One 2010 e-mail
depicts Hull promoting his “ace-in-the-hole analyst, Reva Bhalla of
Stratfor... a consummate information dealer... we had a very successful
relationship during the end of the war in Sri Lanka.”
Groundviews has been asking Hull to explain
the e-mail. (Inner City Press has learned from some Hull reports in the past,
for example in 2012 on the Maldives.) Hull has
replied, among other things, that Reva Bhalla "was quoted by name in a
Reuters story.”
That would be far better than Reuters' UN
bureau, whose chief Louis Charbonneau in 2012 played a leading role in a
campaign to try to oust Inner City Press first from the UN Correspondents
Association then from the UN as a whole.
Triggering the campaign was a story Inner
City Press wrote about Sri Lanka, war crimes and conflicts of interest - click
here for the account of the UK-based Sri Lanka campaign, chaired by Kofi
Annan's former communications chief Edward Mortimer.
Most troubling, when the UNCA proceeding
Reuters' Charbonneau was pushing led to Inner City Press receiving death threats
from extremist supporters of Sri Lanka's Rajapaksa government, Charbonneau
refused to stop or even suspend the proceedings. “Go to the New York Police
Department,” he said dismissively.
The campaign only stopped when Inner City
Press requested then obtained documents from Voice of America, which reflected
among other things Reuters
support forVOA's June 20 request
to the UN to “review” Inner City Press' accreditation, and Reuters
contemplating a (SLAPP) lawsuit against Inner City
Press.
Inner
City Press wrote several times to the top editors at Reuters, Stephen J. Adler, Walden Siew, and Paul Ingrassia,trying
to make them aware of the death threats that were triggered by the actions of
their UN bureau chief.
But as reflected in the
documents obtained from VOA under FOIA, Reuters had adopted and apparently
continues a policy of not responding to any issue raised by Inner City Press --
including the receipt of death threats.
On October 2012, Charbonneau was asked in
writing to explain some of the documents obtained under FOIA; he made no
response.
Charbonneau
remains in 2013 the first vice president of UNCA, which in connected to
several anonymous social
media accounts which have said without any basis that Inner City Press is
funded by Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers.
Reuters' record of using,
even stoking, extremism in Sri Lanka goes well beyond the Wikileaked email of
Bryson Hull about Stratfor. But who will answer for it? Watch this
site.
