THE United Nations failed to protect civilians in the 2009 close of Sri Lanka's civil war, says an internal review leaked to the BBC and New York Times.
"Many senior UN staff simply did not perceive the prevention of killing of civilians as their responsibility," the two news outlets cited a draft of the report as saying late on Tuesday.
It charged UN staff with "a sustained and institutionalised reluctance" to help the people they were sent to Sri Lanka to assist while calling the UN's response "a grave failure".
The UN said as many as 40,000 civilians died in the final months of the 26-year conflict, in which both the victorious government troops and defeated ethnic Tamil separatist rebels were accused of atrocities.
UN staff in Colombo "had insufficient political expertise and experience in armed conflicts and in human rights" and were not given "sufficient policy and political support" from headquarters, the BBC cited the draft report as saying.
The UN did not make public its figures of mounting civilian casualties or that "a large majority" of the civilians killed died because of government shelling, the draft report said. The Sri Lankan government, which denied shelling civilian areas, pressured the UN to withhold the information, the BBC reported.
The draft report, compiled by an investigative panel headed by former senior UN official Charles Petrie, said the UN was a victim of bullying by the Sri Lankan government, including "control of visas to sanction staff critical of the state", the BBC said.
"Decision-making across the UN was dominated by a culture of trade-offs" as it chose not to speak out against violations of international law by both sides in the conflict to try to increase the UN's humanitarian access to the war zones, the draft report found, according to the BBC and Times.
John Holmes, former UN humanitarian chief, told the BBC that while the UN could be criticised for its record in Sri Lanka he doubted that a change of tactic would have achieved different results.
Another former senior UN official, Edward Mortimer, charged that UN staff left the war zone in September 2008 when the population needed them most.
"I fear this report will show the UN has not lived up to the standards we expect of it and has not behaved as the moral conscience of the world," he said.
The UN did not comment on the leaked report but said it would soon publish the final version and Secretary General Ban Ki-moon intended to draw lessons from it to improve the UN's response to other crises, such as Syria.
Sri Lanka on Wednesday denied allegations in the leaked report that it had intimidated UN humanitarian workers during the final stages of the island's Tamil separatist war.
"There was no intimidation," Plantations Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe told reporters in Colombo.
"No such thing. How can you intimidate them? They don't get intimidated by anyone."
Samarasinghe, who is also the country's human rights envoy to the UN Human Rights Council, said he did not want to comment directly on the report, but added that Colombo was willing to address any shortcomings it raised.
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