The airwaves were spinning on Wednesday March 3rd with the claim that the ICRC had said that there was an impending humanitarian catastrophe in north-eastern Sri Lanka. It was highlighted on BBC World and, apart from having to answer vaious Sri Lankan media outfits who called me about this well before dawn, I even had to face an interview on World Radio Switzerland, with what seemed yet another gung-ho Britisher.
The problem was, there was no such assertion by the ICRC. Having perhaps a more rigorous academic background than all these youngsters, I asked my pre-dawn wake up call to send me the ICRC statement, and got a BBC report instead, by a certain David Loyn, the International Development Correspondent of BBC News, based on statements by Jacques de Maio, the ICRC Head of Operations for South Asia. I was able therefore to respond that it was difficult to distinguish what was ICRC and what was BBC, and certainly it seemed that some assertions could not have been by the ICRC since they contradicted what the ICRC had said previously.
I was particularly anxious not to be critical of the ICRC, because we had had a meeting the previous day with the Vice-President of the ICRC, who had seemed appreciative of our point that the ICRC had to be very careful about what they said, since it could so easily be twisted. I cited early reports by the current ICRC Head in Sri Lanka, Paul Castella, about which I had written to him confidentially, to get back a very helpful reply which explained what had happened, but that they would reconsider the question. The more recent statements by the ICRC in Colombo have been restrained, and have not been twisted, and I had in fact conveyed my thanks to Mr Castella about this.
Earlier I had pointed out to him a particularly misleading statement by Mr de Maio, and it was therefore surprising, after our meeting on the 2nd, to find Mr de Maio reported as talking what seemed nonsense. However it seemed best to give him the benefit of the doubt, and I did so in the morning, and then got in touch that afternoon with the Vice-President, who checked and told me that Mr de Maio had been misquoted. She promised to put up the actual text of the interview he had given the BBC on the ICRC website, and to send it to me the following morning, which she duly did. The text of the interview is appended.
I was therefore able to tell the World Radio Switzerland interviewer that he really should check his sources. He claimed initially to be citing the ICRC, but this turned out on questioning to be the BBC and other media sources, which again turned out to be the BBC and other media sources based on the BBC report. Thus do falsehoods spread, and unless one assumes that young David Loyn is singularly obtuse, these are deliberate falsehoods.
I have long learnt not to suspect villainy when incompetence is a possible explanation, but unless BBC standards of intelligence have declined considerably since my youth, this I am afraid is clearly villainy.
I have not included here the BBC report, but it is worth noting that it begins with the assertion that the ICRC warns of an impending humanitarian catastrophe. All these words are those of the BBC, as is the word tragic. Mr de Maio certainly describes the situation as disastrous, but immediately says that the suffering and death could be avoided ‘by allowing civilians who want to leave to get out of the area’.
This indeed was the thrust of his comments according to the Vice-President, as we had in fact discussed, because obviously the priority now was to ensure the safety of these civilians. But the BBC ignores de Maio’s words, which emphasise the fact that those who want to leave are not being allowed to do so, and instead of the seminal ‘by’ introduces abstract phrases preceded by ‘to allow’, which suggests the blame lies elsewhere. It goes further and declares categorically that ‘the government has allowed in far less (aid) than is needed’, which of course was not said by Maio at all.
Maio talks of a ferry that regularly evacuates wounded civilians, but the BBC, with its Boys’ Own Magazine mentality, says ‘In one place, the ICRC has succeeded in landing a boat to take off the wounded’.