No right of appeal against the public’s verdict

COMMENT

Martti Ahtisaari

Bishop Eero Huovinen

Yrjö Länsipuro

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By Kari Huhta
     
      Former President Martti Ahtisaari has stated that he will not be looking to attach guilt in the report by the board of inquiry he is leading into the response to the Asian tsunami catastrophe.
      Equally, Eero Huovinen, the Lutheran Bishop of Helsinki, did not go in search of guilty parties but concentrated instead on helping the victims both in the disaster area and at home in Finland.
      Both choices appear to be wise ones. Huovinen’s work in an often harrowing situation has won him widespread respect. When it is completed, the report by the Ahtisaari board of inquiry should be public and open to appraisal.
     
Nevertheless, guilt and responsibility are two different things. Those who were responsible for the handling of the aftermath of the disaster should shoulder the responsibility for the choices they made.
      I was myself among those making the decisions that delayed by roughly one day the perception in the pages of Helsingin Sanomat of the dire straits of the Finnish victims of the catastrophe.
      The responsibility belongs here. It is of no use to say that as a general rule enormous disasters only take shape with a time-lag, because they destroy communications links, or that elsewhere in the world this delay was often the same or greater still.
     
Speaking in a YLE TV panel discussion on Wednesday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Press and Culture Director-General Yrjö Länsipuro would not agree to take responsibility for mistakes, because he did not believe he had made any. In his view, the task of the Foreign Ministry was to pass on "confirmed, so-called solid information".
      The result of this was that the initial status reports coming out of the Foreign Ministry in no sense provided a picture of the true situation in the devasted areas of Thailand, and Helsingin Sanomat, along with others, confused the ministry's solid information with reality.
     
The justification for the existence of the media and the Foreign Ministry derives ultimately from the fact that they serve the needs of Finns, and in this case, these needs were not served.
      It is not sufficient that one has done nothing wrong. Things should be done right. One can learn from the judgement of the public, but there is no appeal against it.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 14.1.2005
     
The writer is the head of the Helsingin Sanomat foreign desk.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Foreign Ministry line has eroded media confidence in the wake of tsunami (14.1.2005)

KARI HUHTA / Helsingin Sanomat
kari.huhta@hs.fi