Claims about the ‘Gash Despatches’ exposed

Jun 14, 2018

At the end of last year, the Sri Lanka Campaign published a critique of an
intervention in the House of Lords by Lord Naseby. In that intervention, Lord
Naseby sought to discredit prevailing UN accounts about the nature and extent
of atrocities committed during the final stages of the civil war in Sri Lanka, and
urged members of the international community to row back pressure on
bringing perpetrators to justice.[1]These arguments were based on what he
referred to as “real gems” of fresh evidence contained in 39-pages of war-time
diplomatic despatches from UK Military Attaché Colonel Anton Gash, obtained
through a Freedom of Information request to the UK Foreign Office.
Prior to the publication of our critique, the Sri Lanka Campaign made multiple
written requests to Lord Naseby to share the entirety of the despatches with us,
in order that we could properly verify and scrutinise the limited extracts that he
had disclosed in Parliament. Those requests were repeatedly refused, amid a
series of evasive and at times farcical responses.
Initially the Sri Lanka Campaign was told that we should try and locate the
documents online, despite the fact that they had not been published to the web
by the FCO or anyone else. Then we were told that the files were in hard-copy
only, and that since Lord Naseby did not have a personal secretary, it would not
be possible for us to receive duplicates or an electronic version. Our offer to
meet Lord Naseby in person so that we could scan the documents for him was
flatly ignored.
Later, we made multiple requests for the release of the despatches to the head
of a UK-based advocacy group, named by Naseby in Parliament as having
assisted his FOI request and engaged in circulating press releases from Naseby’s
office to Sri Lankan journalists.[2] Those too were not taken up, and it was again
suggested that we contact the FCO.
One of our colleagues did just that, and earlier this year we received the
documents in full.
Their contents make clear why those in possession of them may have been so
unwilling to release them: they expose many of the citations provided by
Naseby in the House of Lords as both selective and misrepresentative of the
source material. We are pleased to finally be able to publish the despatches
here, along with some (non-exhaustive) analysis below. [3]
Civilian casualty figures
In our critique of Naseby’s statement to the House of Lords, we began by taking
issue with the following quote from the despatches on the issue of civilian
casualty figures:
 “Civilians killed Feb 1-Apr 26 – 6432” (26 April 2009)
We speculated that this figure did not derive from any independent assessment
by Gash, but rather was an estimate that had been produced by the UN Country
Team (UNCT) in Sri Lanka. The full email excerpt from the despatches (below)
finally confirms this. As we pointed out in our earlier piece, the casualty figures
cited by Naseby do not therefore represent a new and independent source of
information, as appears to have been implied by him in Parliament.

26th April 2009, ‘DA SITREP’

Indeed, the figure of 6,432 had even been published in the Guardian newspaper
on 24 April 2009, two days before Gash’s email.
Later, in 2011, the UNCT civilian casualty figures were evaluated on their own
merits by a UN Panel of Experts. Highlighting the “quite conservative” nature of
the methodology deployed,[4] the Panel concluded UNCT’s subsequent figure of
7,721[5]as “likely to be too low,” stating that, “in reality, the total number could
easily be several times that of the United Nations figure.” The report went on to
conclude that “a range of up to 40,000 civilian deaths cannot be ruled out at this
stage.”[6]
This is consistent with subsequent post-war evidence about the intense nature
of the violence that occurred during the very final weeks of the war, with
eyewitness accounts attesting to much higher rates of death, and which itself
made gathering accurate reports more difficult.[7] Notwithstanding the
concerns around the methodology behind the UNCT figures, this is something
which Naseby’s total of 6,432 from 26th April – with more than three weeks of
ferocious fighting still to go before the war’s end – fails to account for
entirely.[8]
At no point in the despatches is any precise independent estimate of civilian
casualties, covering the whole period of the war, ventured by Gash.[9] Indeed,
at several points the despatches reveal just how reluctant he was to offer an
assessment. For example, writing on 6 February 2009 – more than three months
prior to the war’s end – he wrote:

5th February 2009 10:02, ‘RE: UBS Urgent briefing request – casualties and
timeline’
Therefore, the argument – made by Naseby and many of those who have
endorsed his intervention – that the despatches offer the new and concrete
evidence that should prompt us to radically revise prevailing UN estimates of
the scale of civilian casualties is nonsensical. The figures in the Gash despatches
must be read as what they really are: as based on second-hand, partial and
uncertain information, the gaps in which have largely been filled in the 9 years
that the UNCT data has been in the public domain.
Cluster munitions
Another issue we raised in our critique concerned this quote from the
despatches provided by Naseby:
 “No cluster munitions were used”. (20 January 2009)
We argued that the principal problem with this small excerpt, so provided, was
its failure to mention, much less engage with, the credible evidence from various
sources – including UN experts and NGO whistle-blowers – suggesting that
cluster munitions may have in fact have been used against civilians during the
war.
But an analysis of the despatches reveals something even more troubling about
Naseby’s presentation of the quote from Gash. On any reasonable
interpretation of Naseby’s statement to the House of Lords, an individual would
rightly conclude that the phrase quoted from Gash represented the independent
assessment of the Military Attaché himself. The truth, however, is quite
different.
A closer inspection of the despatches reveals that the quote was not the Military
Attaché’s own observation, but rather that of another person altogether: Sri
Lanka’s Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

20th January 2009 08:30, ‘RE: Military Sitrep’

While it barely requires saying that the Sri Lankan Defence Secretary, an alleged
perpetrator of serious human rights violations, is not a credible authority on
whether cluster munitions were used by the Sri Lankan armed forces – it is
worth highlighting the fact that at no point does the Military Attaché
actually endorse his statement. Gash merely reports as fact that the statement
has been made; not that the contents of the statement are factual. Whether
Naseby’s presentation of the despatches constitutes an accidental, negligent, or
wilful misrepresentation of the evidence, we leave it to readers to form their
own opinions.
Why does this all matter?
For many Sri Lanka watchers familiar with Naseby’s long-standing
support[10] for members of the Rajapaksa regime – and his consistent
opposition to a credible mechanism to investigate human rights violations
allegedly committed by them – the exposure of his “real gems” of evidence as
selective and misrepresentative of the source material may come as no surprise.
Equally, the publication of full despatches here is unlikely to change the minds of
those who have already chosen to embrace his claims whilst closing their eyes to
credibly established accounts of how Sri Lanka’s civil war ended.
But Naseby’s recent attempt to re-mould widely accepted truths lies at the heart
of a growing constellation of forces and actors currently seeking to ensure that
no one responsible for atrocity crimes in Sri Lanka is brought to book. It is a
constellation that now includes many senior figures in the current regime,
including the President himself, as well as influential figures in the Sri Lankan
press. Unopposed, the risk is that the revisionism they peddle ends up hollowing
out, or completely undoing, the promised agenda for dealing with the legacy of
mass atrocities in Sri Lanka – an agenda that is already seriously struggling, as
our recent research shows.
Members of the international community have a vital role to play in stopping
this from happening. But unless they stand with war survivors – by
acknowledging much more vocally the crimes committed at the end of the war,
and the need to bring perpetrators before credible trials – they stand little
chance. If they fail to speak the truth about what happened to civilians during
the final stages of the war, others will surely succeed in filling the silence with
noise.
A final point remains. What ongoing debate around ‘best estimates’ tend to
obscure is the fact that the government has both the information and authority
needed to form a true picture about how many civilians were killed during the
war and the nature of their deaths. In addition to establishing the pledged
institutions – including a Special Court and a Truth Commission – capable of
doing this, the government could begin by conducting a proper demographic
survey of war-affected areas and ensuring the release of relevant population
records taken from 2006 onwards.[11] The continued failure to take even these
most basic of steps represents a shocking lack of concern on the part of the state
for the fate of so many of its citizens. Whatever the true scale and nature of
civilian deaths, the very fact that there is still a debate is a stain on Sri Lanka’s
international reputation.
Footnotes
[1] “I hope and pray that, as a result of this debate, the UK will recognise the
truth that no one in the Sri Lankan Government ever wanted to kill Tamil
civilians. Furthermore, the UK must now get the UN and the UNHCR in Geneva
to accept a civilian casualty level of 7,000 to 8,000, not 40,000. On top of that,
the UK must recognise that this was a war against terrorism, so the rules of
engagement are based on international humanitarian law, not the European
Convention on Human Rights. The West, and in particular the US and UK, must
remove the threat of war crimes and foreign judges that overhangs and
overshadows all Sri Lankans, especially their leaders.” Lord Naseby, Hansard, 12
October 2017.
[2] As confirmed in emails shared with us.
[3] The files released to us included nine separate PDF documents, containing
multiple emails arranged non-chronologically and in some cases in duplicate. In
order to make them more accessible, we have split the documents into separate
files, corresponding to individual email chains and documents, and arranged
them chronologically in this online folder. An index of the re-organised folder
can be read here. In the interests of transparency, a folder containing the
original files can be accessed here.
[4] “In early February 2009, the United Nations started a process of compiling
casualty figures, although efforts were hindered by lack of access … In order to
calculate a total casualty figure, the [Crisis Operations Group] took figures from
the RDHS [Regional Directors of Health Services] as the baseline, using reports
from national staff of the United Nations and NGOs, inside the Vanni, the ICRC,
religious authorities and other sources to cross-check and verify the baseline.
The methodology was quite conservative: if an incident could not be verified by
three sources or could have been double-counted, it was dismissed. Figures
emanating from sources that could be perceived as biased, such as Tamil Net,
were dismissed, as were Government sources outside the Vanni. […] The number
calculated by the United Nations Country Team provides a starting point, but is
likely to be too low, for several reasons. First, it only accounts for the casualties
that were actually observed by the networks of observers who were operational
in LTTE-controlled areas. Many casualties may not have been observed at all.
Second, after the United Nations stopped counting on 13 May, the number of
civilian casualties likely grew rapidly. Due to the intensity of the shelling, many
civilians were left where they died and were never registered, brought to a
hospital or even buried.” Report of the [UN] Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts
on Accountability in Sri Lanka, 31 March 2011 [emphasis added].
[5] A figure covering an even wider period, between August 2008 and 13 May
2009.
[6] In 2012, a UN report concluded that there was “credible information
indicating that over 70,000 people are unaccounted for”. Leaked World Bank
population statistics suggest that the figure could be over 100,000.
[7] See, for example: Let Them Speak: Truth About Victims of Sri Lanka’s Civil
War, University Teachers for Human Rights – Jaffna (UTHR), 13 December
2009; Sri Lanka’s dead and missing: the need for an accounting, International
Crisis Group, February 2012; Still Counting the Dead, Frances Harrison,
September 2012; and Report of the [UN] Secretary-General’s Internal Review
Panel on United Nations Action in Sri Lanka, November 2012.
[8] Sri Lankan government forces declared victory on 18 May 2009.
[9] Or, at least, any unredacted estimate.
[10] See footnote 3 within the hyperlink.
[11] Including, for example, those collected by the Grama Niladhari
Administrative Divisions and the Divisional Secretariats.
Posted by Thavam