Unprofessionalism revisited
Channel 4 News, Sri Lanka and ‘Fernando’:
Sri Lanka Media Watch is a project of Engage Sri Lanka. It was
established to monitor coverage of, and reporting on, Sri Lanka in the
international media. Sri Lanka Media Watch evaluates this coverage
against universally accepted journalistic standards of accuracy and
impartiality and, where necessary, a right to reply.
Engage Sri Lanka was established to make the case for the United
Kingdom engaging more closely with Sri Lanka. Britain has a close
historical, cultural and economic relationship with Sri Lanka and it is
important that we maintain and develop our connection with one of our
oldest partners. In an age of economic uncertainty, British business
should make the most of its reputation in Sri Lanka and expand its
involvement in the Sri Lankan economy. Sri Lanka’s commercial law is
based on that of the United Kingdom and this is coupled with a skilled
work force. Britain is already the second largest market after the
United States for Sri Lankan exports. World Bank figures show that the
Sri Lankan economy is growing by 8 percent a year. Sri Lanka is also a
strategic partner for British business in South Asia and a key point of
entry into the rapidly growing Indian market. Sri Lanka has the highest
ranking in the World Bank’s ‘Ease of doing business’ ratings in the
region. The United Kingdom needs to engage as fully and vigorously as
possible with Sri Lanka. British business already faces fierce
competition from China and other countries. Engage Sri Lanka will seek
to analyse and where necessary challenge any obstacles to our country’s
political and economic relationship with Colombo.
A soldier carrying an injured elderly Tamil civilian. File photo |
Copyright © Engage Sri Lanka 2011
July 27, 2011, Channel 4 News screened a programme in which they
claimed to have testimony from an eyewitness, ‘Fernando’, who said he
had seen systematic war crimes committed by Sri Lankan soldiers in the
final stages of the 26 year-long civil war between the Sri Lankan
government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE, also known as
the ‘Tamil Tigers’). Channel 4 claimed that 'Fernando', who as usual for
Channel 4 allegations about Sri Lanka was unidentified and disguised,
was operating with Sri Lanka’s 58th Division during the final assaults
in question. Channel 4 News claimed that he said “men, women, and
children were actively targeted with small arms by government forces”.
Channel 4 reported him as stating:
When I look at it as an outsider I think they’re simply brutal
beasts. Their hearts are like that of animals, with no sense of
humanity. They shoot people at random, stab people, rape them, cut their
tongues out, cut women’s breasts off. I have witnessed all this with my
own eyes. I have seen small children laying dead. I saw a lot of small
children, who were so innocent, getting killed in large numbers. A large
number of elders were also killed. They were shooting when a large
number of civilians were crossing through a lagoon, including women and
children.
The soldiers were shooting at them.
Channel 4 has already alleged that government forces deliberately
shelled civilians in the final months of the war, claims rejected by the
government. Channel 4 states that the 'Fernando' testimony is believed
to be the first eyewitness account to suggest civilians were actively
targeted by troops on the ground, a claim the Sri Lankan government also
denies. 'Fernando' claimed troops were allowed to act with impunity.
Channel 4’s ‘Fernando’ claimed that Sri Lankan soldiers had turned into
'vampires':
For the soldiers at the battlefront, their hearts had turned to
stone. Having seen blood, killings and death for so long, they had lost
their sense of humanity. I would say they had turned into vampires.
'Fernando' claimed that these inhumane acts extended to acts of
torture and mutilation: “I saw the naked dead bodies of women without
heads and other parts of their bodies. I saw a mother and child dead and
the child's body was without its head.”
A very different picture of the Sri Lankan Army and its behaviour on
the ground in the last few weeks and days of the war is provided by
Gordon Weiss, a former UN spokesman in Sri Lanka, and author of ‘The
Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers’, a
controversial, anti-government, view of the last few months of the war.
Weiss is clearly no friend of the government. Weiss has been presented
by Channel 4 as a credible commentator on Sri Lanka, and especially the
final phase of the war. He was interviewed extensively on Channel 4’s
June 2011 programme, ‘Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields’, making eight separate
appearances.
It is a simple fact, albeit one possibly not totally acknowledged or
even realised by Channel 4, that the LTTE and its supporters have a
particularly active and well-honed propaganda machine, rooted within the
Tamil Diaspora. A Western intelligence service has noted that “the LTTE
international propaganda war is conducted at an extremely sophisticated
level.” In “The Sri Lankan soldiers ‘whose hearts turned to stone’”, it
appears that Channel 4 was spoon-fed, and accepted at face value,
questionable claims without even the most basic of fact checking. A
basic check would have been to evaluate the claims made by ‘Fernando’
against the observations of Weiss, as outlined in his book covering the
same events. This was not the first time Channel 4 had accepted and
broadcast what could easily be described as semi-digested propaganda:
Channel 4’s ‘Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields’, screened a month before
this news item, had broadcast very questionable narratives, presented
very questionable witnesses and made equally questionable claims.
The background to conflict
The Sri Lankan civil war was fought from 1983 until the defeat of the
LTTE in May 2009. The LTTE was a militant organisation which sought to
establish an independent Tamil state in the North and the East of the
island, separate from Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority.
The LTTE was internationally recognised to be a particularly vicious
terrorist group and was listed as a terrorist organisation by 31
countries. The Economist noted that “The Tigers were as vicious and
totalitarian, a bunch of thugs as ever adopted terrorism as a
national-liberation strategy.”
After several failed rounds of peace talks and an
internationally-mediated ceasefire agreement which failed – the
government claimed the LTTE had violated the agreement over 10,000 times
– the war recommenced. The Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa and
his government decided that it would bring the LTTE’s hold on parts of
Sri Lanka to an end and to do that the government had to reoccupy the
territory controlled by the organisation. government action drove the
LTTE out of the entire Eastern Province of Sri Lanka with remarkably few
civilian casualties and in 2007 the government launched an offensive in
the North of the country. government forces gradually re-established
control of the rest of LTTE-controlled areas, including their de-facto
capital Kilinochchi and the main LTTE military base at Mullaitivu, in
the Vanni region. From late 2008 onwards, as their area of control
shrank, the LTTE illegally forced 300,000 Tamil civilians to accompany
their fighters as human shields. By 25 April 2009, the area held by the
LTTE, a shrinking pocket of land on the North-East coastline, was
reduced to some 10 square kilometres in size. The government declared
several ‘no-fire zones’ to protect civilians. These were nevertheless
caught up in the relentless fighting between government forces and the
LTTE. The LTTE admitted defeat on May17.
It is against this backdrop that the allegations made by ‘Fernando’
must be examined. The difficulty of dealing with the Tamil civilians
being held and used by the LTTE as human shields was a stated concern of
government forces. The Sri Lankan government has outlined the detailed
protocol it devised to avoid civilian casualties. Weiss correctly notes
that “the (Sri Lankan Army), it made no tactical sense to kill
civilians.” He also notes that “for 37 months (the Sri Lankan Army) had
worked its way meticulously across the territory controlled by the
Tigers, at great cost to young Sinhalese soldiers”. Weiss also wrote of
the dangers facing the Tamil civilians attempting to flee the LTTE
controlled area: “if they survived the jungles, minefields, booby traps
and shelling, and managed to cross the Tiger lines, they might be shot
in error by government forces.” (Emphasis added.)
Weiss confirmed that the government was very aware of the need to
prevent the deaths of civilians: “Up until the beginning of 2009, the
army’s tactic of driving civilians away from the frontlines had been
relatively successful in limiting the propaganda advantage that the
Tigers might gain from images of dead civilians.”
He also noted that “the SLA’s strategy...had limited the deaths of
non-combatants for the previous two years.”
By chance, Weiss provides a snapshot of the behaviour of the very
unit of which ‘Fernando’ claimed to have been a member: 58th Division
troops overran 20,000 civilians crouching in bunkers inside the No Fire
Zone. Using loudspeakers as they inched forward through the jungles and
across the rice paddyfields, troops summoned people towards their lines,
despite the ferocious fighting and shelling all around...On the
whole...the vast majority of people who escaped seem to have been
received with relative restraint and care by the front-line SLA troops,
who quickly passed them up the line for tea, rice and first aid.
Weiss records that “the army probed the Tiger defences, and
calculated how to separate civilians from cadres.” That is to say to
differentiate who, as LTTE fighters, were legitimate targets and who as
civilians were not. And he notes further that in the last few days
“Commandos were fighting their way through a tent city, hurling
grenades, trying to distinguish Tiger fighters from
civilians...Thousands of people streamed across the lagoon to the safety
of army lines as soldiers urged them on. Tiger cadres fired at both
soldiers and civilians.”
The contrast with the grotesque claims made by Channel 4’s
unidentified witness ‘Fernando’, and the reality provided by Weiss –
could not have been starker:
It remains a credit to many of the front-line SLA soldiers that,
despite odd cruel exceptions, they so often seem to have made the effort
to draw civilians out from the morass of fighting ahead of them in an
attempt to save lives.
Soldiers yelled out to civilians, left gaps in their lines while they
waved white flags to attract people forward and bodily plucked the
wounded from foxholes and bunkers. Troops bravely waded into the lagoon
under fire to rescue wounded people threading their way out of the
battlefield or to help parents with their children, and gave their
rations to civilians as they lay in fields, exhausted in their first
moments of safety after years of living under the roar and threat of
gunfire.
Weiss, therefore, clearly states that civilians coming into contact
with the army were able to enjoy ‘first moments of safety’ in years.
‘Fernando’ and Channel 4 would have the world believe that exactly the
opposite took place. They claim that the Sri Lankan Army were ‘simply
brutal beasts’, that ‘their hearts are like that of animals’ and that
they had ‘no sense of humanity’. Rather than going out of their way to
save civilians – as repeatedly reported by Weiss – Channel 4 claims that
they instead shot, stabbed and raped them – and if that was not enough
they also found time during the intense combat to ‘cut their tongues
out’ and ‘cut women’s breasts off’. One version comes from an opponent
of the government. One version sounds like crass propaganda.
Weiss also provides another, very different picture of the last few
hours – the very moments allegedly featured in the Channel 4 news item –
that differs in all respects from that claimed by ‘Fernando’:
The army did their best to retrieve the wounded and transport them to
hospitals. One old man, left alone and with a wounded leg in the burning
tent city, was retrieved by soldiers and was then able to notify his
family that he was alive because he could recall his son's telephone
number in Germany. There were many acts of mercy that emerged from the
inferno of civil war. The bedraggled columns of civilians were massed
and counted, fed as well as possible and then transported by truck and
bus to waiting internment camps in Vavuniya. Front-line soldiers gave
their own rations to the terrified civilians.
Weiss provides an additional description of the treatment of
civilians as they encountered government forces:
“The frontline soldiers who received the first civilians as they
escaped to government lines, those who guarded them in the camps and the
civilian and military doctors who provided vital treatment distinguished
themselves most commonly through their mercy and care.”
There was an additional observer of events towards the end of the
conflict, the University Teachers for Human Rights (UTHR). Weiss
describes the University Teachers for Human Rights as a ‘highly
regarded’ and ‘independent’ human rights organisation. Like Weiss, UTHR
has historically been very critical of the government. Nonetheless, UTHR
stated:
In the context of the present war which took a heavy toll on the
lives of soldiers, these ordinary men have shown remarkable restraint
towards civilians when they come to contact with them. The civilians are
uniformly scathing about the LTTE, and frequently found the Army helpful
and considerate...It is hard to identify any other Army that would have
endured the provocations of the LTTE, which was angling for genocide,
and caused proportionately little harm.
This attitude appeared to be across the services. It is also worth
mentioning that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
commended the Sri Lankan Navy for its role in the medical evacuations by
sea of sick and injured civilians during the Vanni operation.
The ICRC noted that the navy personnel “displayed a strict discipline
and respect of rules of engagement and at the same time a very
respectful and kind attitude to help those in need. In that regard in
addition to all others who contributed to this medical evacuation, we
wish to express our special thanks to the Director General for
Operations, at the Navy HQ, the Officiating Commander Eastern Naval
Command, in Trincomalee, and to the Deputy Area Commander North, in
Jaffna. They spent many sleepless hours coordinating the operation and
played a crucial role to make it a success. These days demonstrated that
soldiering is a noble profession”. (Emphasis added.)
The University Teachers for Human Rights also described the behaviour
of the very Sri Lankan army unit referred to by ‘Fernando’:
Soldiers who entered the No Fire Zone on April 19, 2009 and again on
the May 9 and 15 acted with considerable credit when they reached the
proximity of civilians. They took risks to protect civilians and helped
across the elderly who could not walk. Those who escaped have readily
acknowledged this.
Once again, this independent perspective, from a human rights
organisation hostile to the government, totally contradicts the claims
made by Channel 4 and ‘Fernando’.
Weiss additionally reports on the response of the rest of the Sri
Lankan society – overwhelmingly Sinhalese – to the reception of the
freed Tamil civilians: “As the injured evacuated by the ICRC ships began
to overwhelm the hospitals in government territory, hundreds of
Sinhalese doctors and nurses were drafted in from the South.”
He notes that:
In Colombo, as television images appeared of those civilians who had
escaped and were not in internment camps, many dozens of private
individuals, schools, banks, religious institutions, department stores
and newspapers began drives to raise money, food and clothing for the
bedraggled ‘enemy’, to the considerable credit of a population that had
lived in fear of random Tamil Tiger terrorism for three decades.
This description also provides a marked contrast with the imagery
presented by Channel 4 and ‘Fernando’.
They claim that the government forces acted with ‘impunity’. If, as
we will subsequently see, ‘Fernando’s’claims that the army were allowed
to kill 50,000 civilians it would point to a clear policy of the army
wanting to maximise Tamil civilian casualties and suffering.
The positive attitude shown to the ‘enemy’ both during the fighting
and afterwards, as reported by Weiss, presents a very different picture.
One further point must be made. The propagandistic nature of the
claims made by Channel 4 and ‘Fernando’manifests itself in another
important respect - which is what he chose not to say. If ‘Fernando’ had
fought his way through the Vanni up to the final few days of the
conflict, it is without question that he would have witnessed or heard
of a pattern of human rights abuse and war crimes committed by the LTTE.
Weiss fills in what Channel 4 and ‘Fernando’ chose to ignore:
Disturbingly, it became increasingly clear from reports emerging from
the combat area that the Tamil Tigers were...exercising a brand of
ruthless terror on their own people that defies imagination. As the
combat area shrank and their desperation increased, their brutality
increased exponentially. They would shoot, execute and beat to death
many hundreds of people, ensure the deaths of thousands of teenagers by
press-ganging them into the front lines, and kill those children and
their parents who resisted.
Weiss notes that the LTTE shelled their own civilians. He also notes
that the LTTE “shot many hundreds who tried to cross to the safety of
government lines”. In one instance alone, University Teachers for Human
Rights reported that, on May14, the LTTE killed 500 civilians near a
palmyra nursery near Nanthikadal Lagoon as they tried to cross to the
other side or to Vattuvakkal to the South. There were dozens of other
examples. The evidence of these LTTE atrocities, in the shape of
corpses, would have been staring ‘Fernando’ in the face. He steadfastly
ignored them.
To say that ‘Fernando’ is an unreliable witness is a gross
understatement. His claims about the conduct of the Sri Lankan Army are
categorically disproved by the observations of Gordon Weiss, Channel 4’s
own Sri Lanka expert, and the UTHR. The UN, Weiss and common sense also
refute the wildly sensationalist claim that he could have personally
seen 50,000 dead civilians.
Channel 4 News comes out of this news item in a particularly
unprofessional light. Given the very serious claims that Channel 4 have
been making about war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sri Lanka,
and the statutory requirement to be balanced and fair, one would have
expected a duty of care on their part to fully research the claims they
are making. Given that Gordon Weiss and his book The Cage: The Fight for
Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers, are the only real
source - albeit controversial and challenged by the government - did
Channel 4 ask Weiss to comment on the credibility of ‘Fernando’,
especially given that the claims he made jarred so much with Weiss’s
observations? |