To answer many of these questions, you should probably study the UN internal inquiry. It's notable that it was leaked—and not published in full—last November. It's the Charles Petrie report. It talked about a grave failure of the UN in Sri Lanka, putting it in the context of Rwanda and saying all lessons that should be learned for other conflicts in the future. It talked about how senior UN staff didn't prioritize the saving of human lives. There was this constant debate about access and development as opposed to human rights.
The fact that the UN had two expatriate staff, independent eyewitnesses, because the government has basically smeared all Tamil eyewitnesses as partisan. It had two expatriate staff in late January in the war zone witnessing, documenting, photographing, and GPSing massive shelling of a humanitarian zone, an area where the UN was handing out food. They didn't put those people in front of diplomats, let alone on TV. They held back that information, and that was really first-hand, independent evidence of war crimes in January 2009, and to my mind that is problematic.
It may not have changed the outcome of the war. It may not have changed the behaviour of the Sri Lankan government, but I think we all had a right to know that when the UN had that information. There were very good people who worked in Sri Lanka, many of them were very dedicated and very traumatized, the UN expatriate staff, by what they were part of, and some of them set up a long-distance casualty counting system. Basically, they would telephone people in the war zone, and there were 240 NGO Tamil workers and the ICRC staff, the priests, the doctors. So there were quite a lot of reliable people inside the war zone, some of whom had satellite phones, and they would triangulate every death or injury report. There had to be three witnesses to every death, preferably one of them a UN staff member. They counted 7,700 deaths until about mid-April, when it became absolutely impossible for anyone to count. But they had a huge number that weren't corroborated and triangulated, so they knew of unconfirmed reports of dead and injured, at least 50,000 according to this UN report.
If you look at the UN report and you chart what the UN officials said in public compared to what we now know from this internal inquiry, what they knew in terms of death toll, you see that they always downplayed it. You chart the two lines and one is always lower than the other. I think that's really questionable if they had that information and they knew that it was triangulated and it was rigorous and not a very vague estimate as some people tried to say. Then they should have stuck by the figures and made them more publicly aware. In fact they were leaked to diplomats, because some people in the UN were unhappy about them being withheld.