As the Sri Lankan civil war reached its ugly culmination, the UN adopted a stance that probably made the conflict's endgame far bloodier than it otherwise would have been. The world body hastily acquiesced to the government's request that all humanitarian agencies (other than the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has a policy of confidentiality with respect to what it witnesses) pull out of Vanni in September of 2008. Although the government claimed humanitarian organizations were being expelled for their own safety, the move "paved the way for the ability of the government to sort of fight an absolutely no holds barred kind of war," Keenan says. If the UN was concerned about this possibility, it kept these concerns to itself. "The very least they could have done is objected publically," Keenan argues. "They could have said 'listen, we could operate there safely if you respected our safety' and made it clear that they're not simply going to leave and close their eyes."

They did neither, signaling the UN's accommodating policy towards the government of Sri Lanka. In the final stages of the conflict, Ban Ki Moon sent Vijay Nambiar, his chief of staff, to help negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict. While he was in Sri Lanka, Nambiar helped establish a line of communication between the government and LTTE officers, who were later killed while waving white flags in the no-man's land near the Sri Lankan army's front lines. Sree Tharan, an activist with the U.S.-based organization Tamils Against Genocide, says that Nambiar's role in the so-called "white flag killings" should be investigated. "We're not saying that anyone's faulted," says Tharan, "but there's enough evidence to know that he was part of the negotiating group." He also suggested that Nambiar, whose brother is a high-ranking Indian army officer who served as a consultant to the Sri Lankan government in 2002, "should never have been involved with anything having to do with Sri Lanka."

The UN also failed in treating the situation in northeast Sri Lanka like the humanitarian catastrophe that it was. Ross faulted the UN for refusing to publicize their casualty numbers during the closing months of the war. The report says that the UN's Sri Lanka country team estimated that 7,721 civilians had been killed before May 13 alone. Making those figures public could have brought much-needed global attention to the government's actions during the final months of the war. Keenan adds that the UN should have pressured the government into admitting that up to 300,000 civilians were living in Tiger-controlled areas in Vanni. The government claimed that only 75,000 to 100,000 civilians were caught in the conflict zone. But the UN could have shared their internal, more reliable population statistics with the public, perhaps forcing the government to allow more humanitarian aid into the northeast -- and making it more difficult for them to cover up the number of dead or missing after the war. But they did not, and the UN's refusal to publicize their casualty and population statistics during the conflict allowed the government to lie about the scope of the humanitarian emergency in Vanni.