Malice in Wonderland

It was the British Broadcasting Corporation which first broadcast using television and for many years it had a monopoly of the medium in Britain. Stuffy old ‘Auntie Beeb’ featured newsreaders dressed in coat and tails and chat shows with hosts in evening dress in elegant living rooms, all speaking in the clipped accent recommended by Lord Reith.

Opening the British airwaves to commercial television did help to break the monotony and it was thought by many to have brightened up TV screens. Of course, on the other hand, there were many others who complained that commercialisation had brought down the tone of broadcasting.

For many years the Queen of TV programming was BBC 2, which was a welcome counter to the demand-run low-brow material coming out of ITV, the commercial broadcaster. BBC 2 served the intelligentsia, an important, better-educated and relatively better-off section of the viewing public.

Intellectual competitor

Barbara Cartland Born : July 9, 1901 Died : May 21, 2000 (aged 98) Occupation : Novelist Nationality : British Period : 1925-2000 Genres : Romance, health and nutrition

This desirable segment of consumers was, hence, unavailable to the advertisers (the BBC’s charter forbade commercial advertising) and the private sector lobbied for years to set up an advertising-driven ‘highbrow’ channel - which eventually became Channel 4.

For all its pretensions, Channel 4 could not really emerge as an intellectual competitor to BBC2, which was the Manchester Guardian of the broadcasting world - providing probably the best programming in the world.

So, in order to become the Queen of the hearts of the British viewing public, Channel 4 became sensationalist, covering up its lack of substance with a tawdry, ostentatious garment which exhibited its parvenu nature.

To match BBC2’s arts programme ‘The Culture Show’ and its popular motoring series ‘Top Gear’ Channel 4 came up with the game show ‘Countdown’ and the ‘reality’ show ‘Big Brother’.

And now, with its ‘documentary’ on the ‘Killing Fields’ of Sri Lanka, it crowns its sensationalism by taking a trip to Wonderland. It does manage to become the Queen of Hearts, though not in the sense that Barbara Cartland had in mind but, rather with all the connotations intended by Lewis Carroll.

Lewis Carroll Born : January 27, 1832 Died : January 14,1898 (aged 65) Occupation : Novelist Author, mathematician, Anglican clergyman, photographer Nationality : British Genres : Children’s literature, fantasy literature, poetry, literary nonsense Notable work(s) : Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, ‘The Hunting of the Snark’, ‘Jabberwocky’

This piece of imaginative film-making paints an idyllic picture of contented Tamil people living happy lives under the benevolent eyes of the Liberal-Democratic Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. As Alice would have said, curiouser and curiouser!

Public servant

There is no mention of the fact that the LTTE was a totalitarian fascist pseudo-religious cult, which lived by the adage that ‘he who is not with me, is against me’; which murdered any opponent, including members of other militant organizations fighting for the same goal of Tamil Eelam.

It does not wonder that every militant opposed to Prabhakaran ended up on the government’s side.

Amidst the talk of LTTE run banks and TV stations and popular support, there is no mention that the entire terrorist enterprise was being under-written by the Sri Lankan state. That every morsel of food, every bit of fiduciary tender, every volt of electricity, yes and the salary of every public servant was being supplied by the government of Sri Lanka.

No-fire zones

It seems that trouble only started when the Sri Lanka government decided unilaterally to break the ceasefire.

There itself one can see any wisp there might remain of balanced, unbiased reportage flying out of the window.

This was not a programme that attempted to get to the truth. Channel 4 approached the matter of alleged war crimes by presuming that the Sri Lanka government set out with murderous, nay genocidal intent and herded Tamil civilians into no-fire zones in order to fire upon them.

Like the Queen of Hearts in ‘Alice in Wonderland’, Channel 4 declares - Sentence first - verdict afterwards’.

It was not by accident that the LTTE was originally called the ‘Tamil New Tigers’ - the initials TNT being the same as for the explosive Trinitrotoluene. The Tigers aimed at destroying the Sri Lankan polity with all the explosive force of TNT.

The abbreviation of Channel 4 is C4 - the same as for the plastic explosive known as cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine, the material used in the LTTE’s weapon of choice, the landmine. And Channel 4 gave its viewers pyrotechnic material galore.

At the heart of the programme are the videos which allegedly show rapes and executions by Sri Lankan troops.

These videos originated with LTTE-run websites and have been bruited around the internet for the past two years, in various incarnations.

However, there are anomalies: obvious ones such as those pointed out by Rajiva Wijesinha: changing languages, changing dates, changing sequences; and not so obvious, abstruse technical ones as identified by Australian digital video systems expert Siri Hewavitharana, for instance the use of an optical zoom, not available on the mobile phones on which these videos were allegedly shot.

Human rights abuses

Like the Cheshire Cat’s smile, all that is left is the smear, not the substance.

All objections made to the videos will be given short shrift, however. It should be remembered that we are in the Wonderland of the (not so new) New World Order. The world is ruled by infotainment and sound-bites not by news and information.

In this Wonderland, Third World governments have no conceptions such as human rights; citizens are treated brutally and murdered for no apparent cause. This is a world-view which has been reinforced by countless MIA movies.

This Malice in Wonderland does nothing to serve the course of justice.

What individual cases there may have been of human rights abuses get drowned under the storm of video-invective, making it difficult to get to the truth. But then, this is show-biz.