June 18, 2011,
A major topic of conversation last week was the Channel 4 documentary aired last Tuesday. Channel 4 is a small British TV Channel but the documentary it aired got more publicity in this country than a similar documentary on Sri Lanka aired on the international TV channel Al Jazeera several weeks ago. To make that documentary, an Al Jazeera team had visited Sri Lanka and was taken around to see the conflict zone.
When the Al Jazeera journalist was shown the Puthukudirippu hospital, it was described as the scene of atrocities and the journalist asks the young army officer accompanying her what would have caused the damage to the building. The young officer hazards a guess and says small arms.. and some shells.. Then the journalist asks the officer whether there were civilians in the hospital when it was shelled. The officer says "No, I don’t know whether there were civilians in this hospital." When that part is broadcast the viewer gets the impression that there were indeed civilians in that hospital at the time it was shelled – a major accusation hurled at the army by the compilers of various international reports.
However, the point is that no army officer in that area after the war can be expected to know what happened at the Puthukudirippu hospital. The division that went down that road during the final push, is no longer in that area and those stationed there now were probably in Jaffna or or Mannar or Trinco or even Colombo at the time. So the first question the Al Jazeera journalist should have asked the officer she spoke to is "Were you in this area during the final offensive? No? Well then can you put me on the phone with someone who was?" Anyone really interested in knowing the truth, should make sure the person she directs her question to knows what he is being questioned about. The question that Al Jazeera asked however was just a question for the cameras.
The fact is that the patients in the Puthukudirippu hospital along with their relatives were evacuated to Vavuniya in a convoy of ambulances and buses in a joint UN and ICRC operation on January 29, 2009, before the army went in. And this was not an evacuation that was done without anyone knowing. The whole world knew about it because the LTTE refused to allow the patients to be evacuated. There was a hue and cry about this with Amnesty International reporting that the LTTE had stopped the convoy of 24 vehicles and prevented anyone from leaving. The next day, the LTTE was forced to agree to the evacuation due to international pressure. After the hospital was evacuated, it was used by the LTTE for offensive purposes and the buildings were damaged in retaliatory fire and that is what people see today.
It appears that every overseas TV crew that comes to this country is hell bent on portraying the country in the dimmest light possible even if it takes some cooking of the facts to do so. This is not a media savvy government and they have become helpless victims of predatory journalism. The present writer would like to suggest that whenever a foreign TV crew comes to this country to do documentaries about the war or to interview top politicians and officials, the government should also independently film the proceedings. If the foreign TV crew objects, the proceedings should be filmed on powerful concealed cameras. The bottom line is that no TV crew should be allowed to film without being filmed themselves. This is a precaution that the government should have taken much earlier. But better late than never, as the old saying goes.
Interview
Some years ago, Michael Jackson gave an interview to a journalist from an international TV station and he took the precaution of filming the proceedings himself. When the programme was aired, it portrayed Michael in the worst possible light. That programme would have been the end of Michael’s career and his popularity if he had not then aired the tape he had made himself of the proceedings and highlighted the way in which that TV channel had edited and manipulated things to get the result they finally aired. That predatory journalist is not heard of any more in the field of TV documentary making. This should be a lesson for the present government as well. Michael’s reputation and indeed his whole life was saved because he took the precaution of filming the whole interview himself.
Coming back to the Channel 4 video, it is certainly a cleverly compiled piece of work. The producer Jon Snow is held in high regard in Britain. What was new in the documentary were two additional clips of men in camouflage uniform killing LTTE captives and another clip of soldiers in uniform piling dead bodies of LTTEers into a truck. Then there was the earlier clip aired on Channel 4 some time ago, of men in uniform executing several naked men. In the latter two clips, dialogue in Sinhala is clearly audible. And the dialogue is of the kind one may expect of soldiers in such circumstances. In the two clips depicting the execution of LTTE prisoners, the faces of the soldiers are not shown. But in the clip where dead bodies are being disposed of, one face is clearly visible. The entire duration of all these clips are not more than 3 to 4 minutes. The rest of the documentary is made up of footage that has been around for a long time on various Tamil controlled websites.
The government argues that the incriminating footage is bogus. Detractors insist that it is genuine. The producer of the Channel 4 documentary says the footage was filmed on mobile phones and small cameras. Perhaps the only litmus test that can be applied in such cases, is whether such footage can be fabricated. If it can be fabricated, then authenticity becomes a 50:50 probability and not a certainty. The attitude towards the whole issue in the documentary is also a matter that has to be looked at. It is not sober, balanced assessments that draw attention but biased, scathing attacks, and it is perhaps unfair of the Sri Lankan government or anybody else for that matter, to expect a commercial TV channel to be fair. The documentary starts with a UN staffer talking about the UN being asked to leave Killinochchi which is only to be expected when the government was poised to take a town held by terrorists. And indeed it was the duty of the UN itself to ensure that their personnel did not get caught in the crossfire. Yet while making much of the fact that the UN was asked to move out of Kilinochchi, the producers of the documentary fail to say that Kilinochchi was held by the LTTE. It is only much later that they mention in passing that Kilinochchi was in fact a ‘tiger stronghold’.
The bias of the documentary maker is obvious when he says that the Tamil civilians were ‘driven from their homes by government forces’ who see civilians as ‘indistinguishable from Tamil Tigers’. This despite the fact that it was the LTTE that had been forcibly taking the people with them from Mannar upwards. The LTTE took the population of Jaffna with them when they retreated in 1995 too, and this modus operandi of the LTTE is known to everybody who knows anything about the Sri Lankan conflict. In fact the only reason why the army was able to make such rapid progress was because there were no civilians in their path. This story of the government driving civilians out because they were thought to be indistinguishable from tigers sits oddly beside the fact that over 250,000 civilians fled from LTTE control to the government side after the army breached the Puthumathalan defences of the LTTE. This was a scene witnessed by the president, western ambassadors and foreign media men live from UAV cameras while it was taking place on the 20th April 2009. Yet nothing at all is said about this great escape of civilians from LTTE clutches.
There is only a pretense of being balanced with a passing reference made to the fact that the LTTE held the civilians as human shields and that they sent suicide cadres to explode themselves in an IDP reception center killing both military personnel as well as Tamil civilians and that they also shot at civilians trying to escape.
The documentary also says that tens of thousands of Tamil civilians died after being deliberately targeted by the military. Towards the end of the documentary, it actually says that the no-fire zones were set up so that civilians would be concentrated in one area and therefore easy to target! If the Tamil civilians were deliberately being targeted by the military, the documentary does not explain why the LTTE had to shoot Tamil civilians to prevent them from going over to the side of the alleged executioners. After the war was over says the documentary, the Tamil civilians were kept in camps and deprived of food, water and medicine and raped!
Obviously one cannot expect impartiality and honesty from a producer who can make such assertions. This is what convinces the present writer that the three incriminating video clips shown in the documentary were most probably fabricated. The attitude displayed by the producer is that he would use anything, true or false to tell a compelling story. Both the government and their detractors have been concentrating on the technical argument whether such footage could have been shot on a mobile phone at all and transferred into broadcasting format and so on. Perhaps another matter that has to be looked into is whether there was a possibility of the whole thing being acted out for a camera.
None of the three short clips of an incriminating nature, showed anything of the surroundings. It is a well known fact that when the focus is very narrow, what is seen can be misleading. Years ago, a film maker it (Vasanatha Obeysekera unless memory fails me) told the present writer that the ‘Vijaya on top of Malini (or Geetha?) in the bushes’ scene in Lester James Peris’s Baddegama was shot in the back garden of Lester’s Dickman’s road residence whereas the viewer is led to believe that it was in the scrub jungles of the Hambantota district.
In these clips too nothing is shown of the surroundings so we can’t be certain as to where the footage was shot. The LTTE lobby is well known for fabricating visuals – the immediate example that comes to mind is that photograph of Prabhakan smilingly watching his own dead body being displayed on TV on the 19th May 2009. This was published on a Tamil website and would have perpetuated the myth that Prabhakaran was still alive somewhere if not for the fact that someone had unearthed the original photograph and showed exactly how the image had been digitally manipulated. With the whole of the Tamil Nadu film industry solidly behind the Eelamist cause, producing footage such as that shown on Channel 4, is nothing. So that incriminating footage could be genuine, but it could also be a total fabrication.
Certainly the Tamil Diaspora has the resources to produce fabricated video clips. In fact the documentary begins with a clip of a family crouching in a shallow trench bewailing their fate, which could have been filmed anywhere. The fact that fluent Sinhala is heard on the three incriminating clips also means nothing as even Sinhala films shot in Sri Lanka are sent to Tamil Nadu for dubbing. Certainly, the motivation to produce such clips is there both in the case of the Tamil diaspora as well as the producers of these documentaries, because it is such footage that provides the sauce for the documentary.
It was NOT Douglas!
On Thursday night, a meeting of the TNA in Jaffna had been disrupted, the audience assaulted and dispersed. According to TNA parliamentarian Mavai Senathirajah, who had been present when the incident took place, the meeting venue had been invaded by a group of 25 to 30 men wielding clubs, iron rods, and armed also with guns who attacked those present. Only about 30 to 40 people had been present at this meeting which had been a meeting of the TNA local government candidates and key activists of the Alavetti Pradesheeya Sabha area in the Kankesanthurei electorate. The audience had been assaulted and asked to leave the hall. Senathirajah, M.Sumanthiran, Suresh Premachandran, and Sridaran had been present at the meeting. Another parliamentarian Vinayagamoorthy had spoken and left the meeting when the incident took place. The meeting had started at around 6.30 in the evening and the attack had taken place about 45 minutes into the meeting at around 7.15.
When asked who he suspects, Senathirajah said that it was military personnel. All this while whenever anything untoward happened in the Jaffna peninsula it was always Douglas Devananda who was blamed. Any act of thuggery and intimidation, any abduction for ransom, any killing, any unidentified dead body in a well, any case of making money and even the availability of heroin in Jaffna was always blamed on Douglas by his political rivals. When asked whether this could not be by the ‘political rivals’ of the TNA, Senathirajah indignantly rejected it asking the present writer "Who said such a thing?". Senathirajah’s point is that such a number of men with weapons could not have moved about passing the various checkpoints unless they were military personnel.
Douglas should rejoice. Someone else is being blamed for a change which is surprising really as the second leg of the local government elections is now due and the fight is between Douglas and the TNA in the Jaffna peninsula. At all previous elections in the north since the end of the war, it was Douglas who was always blamed for any act of violence. Douglas himself was fed up of the way everything ended on his door step. The last time the present writer met Douglas, he went on and on about an abduction for ransom and a killing in Chavakachcheri which was being blamed on him. And now, unexpectedly, he has been given some respite. Be that as it may, the fear of the TNA as Senathirajah says is that people will now be too scared to come to their meetings. Senathirajah says that the motive behind this obviously was to prevent the TNA from speaking to the people.
After the incident, the TNA parliamentarians had all gone to the Telippalai police station where they lodged a complaint. The police had started getting statements from those present at the meeting. The silver lining in the whole thing is that the Ministerial Security Division (MSD) personnel assigned to the Tamil parliamentarians had done their duty and protected the MPs. All the MSD personnel had been Sinhalese. Senathirajah said that the MSD personnel had shown their ID cards to the intruders who he kept referring to as ‘military personnel’ but the MSD cops too had been beaten up.
The JVP, commenting on this attack said that there is no freedom to engage in political activities in the north. Their activists too had been beaten up and chased out of Jaffna.
The pinkam war
The Friday before last, Ranil Wickremesinghe had summoned a meeting of the Central Provincial Councilors and Karu Jayasuriya and Tissa Attanayake were associated with him at this meeting. Sajith Premadasa is routinely kept out of such meetings. RW said that meetings of the provincial council were held only on two days a week, and most UNP provincial councilors had not gone to the council meetings even on those two days. A disappointed RW instructed Attanayake to obtain the attendance lists of the various PCs from their respective opposition leaders, and to forward them to him once every three months.
Last Sunday, the electoral organizers of the 64 LG institutions going for the elections in the second leg of the local polls, had been summoned to Sirikotha, and Karu Jayasuriya, Tissa Attanayake, Jayalath Jayawardena and Jayawickrema Perera were associated with Ranil at this meeting but not co-deputy leader Sajith Premadasa. The manner in which the election campaign was to be carried out was discussed there. One of the organizers had said that leaders in the party were criticizing one another in public and that this was harmful to the elections campaign. RW said that he never says anything in public about the internal problems in the party and that he will take some action about this in the future.
About three weeks ago, Sajith Premadasa and the Yovun Peramuna of Kotte had said that they want to have an ice cream dansala for Poson at Sirikotha. This was also in view of the fact that R.Premadasa’s birth anniversary falls on June 23. The Buddhist committee of the party headed by Jayawickrema Perera had approved the suggestion and Tissa Attanayake too had approved it. They had accordingly put up a banner at Sirikotha announcing the dansala. After a couple of days however the banners had been cut down and an alternative programme was formulated to have a bana and a kadala dansala. Ultimately a compromise was worked out with the Kadala dansala held from 5.30 to around 7.30 and the ice cream dansala from 7.30 onwards. The problem was that Sajith was holding his dansala at Sirikotha located in the Kotte electorate which Ravi Karunanayake regards as his own turf even though he has now moved to the North Colombo electorate.
Sajith Premadasa and Sujeewa Senasinghe had gone to Colombo North to speak to the people affected by evictions. They promised legal help to those facing eviction. This is a move that is definitely going to irritate Ravi K whose turf this is. In the meantime Karunanayake has started openly taking swipes at Sajith’s Sasunata Aruna programme by saying that Buddhist temples could not be uplifted by donating Rs 50,000. A Sathsathiya Ruwangeya is to be donated by Sajith to the Sri Maha Bodhi in Anuradhapura at a cost of Rs 2.6 million on June 23 in memory of his father and many UNP parliamentarians were due to attend. But we hear that a protest campaign elsewhere has been announced by the party hierarchy on the same day.
So what we now have is a pinkam war inside the UNP with the issues being the Rs 50,000 donation, then the ice cream dansala and finally the Sathsathiya Ruwangeya. After the dust settles on this one day, this may well turn out to be a boomerang like the stance that the UNP ill-advisedly took on the war. They unthinkingly ridiculed the government’s war effort and they have now ended up being branded as traitors. If they had simply kept quiet without insisting on putting their feet in their mouths, there would have been less damage done to them politically. Similarly, the wisest policy to follow in the case of Sajith may be to say nothing about his Buddhistic doings, because criticizing giving may be interpreted as an anti-Buddhist conspiracy on the part of a section of the UNP, especially in a context where he gives more, whereas others give less!
Last week, we reported the suggestion made by Douglas Devananda to the Indian National Security Advisor Shivshankar Mennon that a parliamentary select committee be appointed to look into the ethnic question. This suggestion has not gone down well with the JVP. When their politburo met last week, they came to the conclusion that the government had promised India to go beyond the 13th amendment and this proposed parliamentary select committee was just for the sake of foisting the responsibility on others. They also said that All Party Conferences and other such committees had been set up in the past and they have held discussions for months and years but nothing has come out of them. The JVP says that instead of appointing parliamentary select committees and the like, the government should explain to the public their stand on this issue.
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