Where are the pictures of the Sri Lankan war?

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Where are the images of horror from Sri Lanka?
History shows us that there is always the need for a witness to war
Don McCullin
timesonline.co.uk

Pictures of the beach near Mullaitivu, the last outpost of Tamil Tiger resistance in Sri Lanka, would have been among the greatest visual images of what war does to people. They would have been, if anybody had been there to take them. Those pictures don’t exist. The Sri Lankan Government has been amazingly successful at keeping people away from this conflict and, as a result, appalling atrocities have been committed.

There is always a need to be a witness to conflict. When the war in Sri Lanka started 25 years ago I went to Trincomalee to cover it. Journalists are usually good at getting into places where they are not wanted, but not on this occasion. Nor at any time since. This has been an invisible war.

That beach on the Indian Ocean will be a bloodbath. Families have been sheltering without food or water in holes dug in the sand, subjected to shelling for days. A doctor in the area has spoken of thousands of bodies lying unburied and the “stench of death” hanging over the war zone. For the victorious soldiers there is always the temptation to take revenge for friends killed earlier in the conflict.

Some of our most powerful images of war are from beaches. Think of the photography of Eugene Smith, war correspondent for Life magazine, who witnessed the American offensive against Japan during the Second World War. Or Robert Capa’s images of battle from the Normandy beaches. We have nothing like this to tell us what has happened in Sri Lanka — a Buddhist country, a place that teaches us to live in peace. It is a tragedy to see war tear apart its people like this.

Governments around the world are getting more savvy about excluding journalists from war zones. The US Government partly blamed its failure in Vietnam on the freedom of the press rather than on its military strategy. That led to me being banned from reporting the Falklands war. I had dinner recently with some senior military men from that time who said “we missed you”. There are no images to remind them — and us — of what happened.

In Iraq and Afghanistan it has been convenient for governments to keep journalists away from the front line. It was in pursuit of some real pictures of the Iraq war that poor Terry Lloyd and his cameraman were killed. I am 74 now and I have been watching this conflict in Sri Lanka unfold with the same horror I felt 50 years ago. We cannot afford to be shielded from what people do to each other in war.

Don McCullin has produced a new book for Reporters Without Borders, which fights for press access

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His words painted a thousand pictures...

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Distant voices, desperate lives
14 May 2009
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the catastrophe facing the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, whose distant voices have appealed to the world for almost as long as the Palestinians.

In the early 1960s, it was the Irish of Derry who would phone late at night, speaking in a single breath, spilling out stories of discrimination and injustice. Who listened to their truth until the violence began? Bengalis from what was then East Pakistan did much the same. Their urgent whispers described terrible state crimes that the news ignored, and they implored us reporters to “let the world know”. Palestinians speaking above the din of crowded rooms in Bethlehem and Beirut asked no more. For me, the most tenacious distant voices have been the Tamils of Sri Lanka, to whom we ought to have listened a very long time ago.

It is only now, as they take to the streets of western cities, and the persecution of their compatriots reaches a crescendo, that we listen, though not intently enough to understand and act. The Sri Lankan government has learned an old lesson from, I suspect, a modern master: Israel. In order to conduct a slaughter, you ensure the pornography is unseen, illicit at best. You ban foreigners and their cameras from Tamil towns like Mulliavaikal, which was bombarded recently by the Sri Lankan army, and you lie that the 75 people killed in the hospital were blown up quite wilfully by a Tamil suicide bomber. You then give reporters a ride into the jungle, providing what in the news business is called a dateline, which suggests an eyewitness account, and you encourage the gullible to disseminate only your version and its lies. Gaza is the model.

From the same masterclass you learn to manipulate the definition of terrorism as a universal menace, thus ingratiating yourself with the “international community” (Washington) as a noble sovereign state blighted by an “insurgency” of mindless fanaticism. The truth and lessons of the past are irrelevant. And having succeeded in persuading the United States and Britain to proscribe your insurgents as terrorists, you affirm you are on the right side of history, regardless of the fact that your government has one of the world’s worst human rights records and practises terrorism by another name. Such is Sri Lanka.

This is not to suggest that those who resist attempts to obliterate them culturally if not actually are innocent in their methods. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have spilt their share of blood and perpetrated their own atrocities. But they are the product, not the cause, of an injustice and a war that long predate them. Neither is Sri Lanka’s civil strife as unfathomable as it is often presented: an ancient religious-ethnic rivalry between the Hindu Tamils and the Buddhist Sinhalese government.

Sri Lanka as British-ruled Ceylon was subjected to a classic divide-and-rule. The British brought Tamils from India as virtual slave labour while building an educated Tamil middle class to run the colony. At independence in 1948, the new political elite, in its rush for power, cultivated ethnic support in a society whose real imperative should have been the eradication of poverty. Language became the spark. The election of a government pledging to replace English, the lingua franca, with Sinhalese was a declaration of war on the Tamils. The new law meant that Tamils almost disappeared from the civil service by 1970; and as “nationalism” seduced parties of both the left and right, discrimination and anti-Tamil riots followed.

The formation of a Tamil resistance, notably the LTTE, the Tamil Tigers, included a demand for a state in the north of the country. The response of the government was judicial killing, torture, disappearances, and more recently, the reported use of cluster bombs and chemical weapons. The Tigers responded with their own crimes, including suicide bombing and kidnapping. In 2002, a ceasefire was agreed, and was held until last year, when the government decided to finish off the Tigers. Tamil civilians were urged to flee to military-run “welfare camps”, which have become the symbol of an entire people under vicious detention, and worse, with nowhere to escape the army’s fury. This is Gaza again, although the historical parallel is the British treatment of Boer women and children more than a century ago, who “died like flies”, as a witness wrote.

Foreign aid workers have been banned from Sri Lanka’s camps, except the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has described a catastrophe in the making. The United Nations says that 60 Tamils a day are being killed in the shelling of a government-declared “no-fire zone”.

In 2003, the Tigers proposed a devolved Interim Self-Governing Authority that included real possibilities for negotiation. Today, the government gives the impression it will use its imminent “victory” to “permanently solve” the “Tamil minority problem”, as many of its more rabid supporters threaten. The army commander says all of Sri Lanka “belongs” to the Sinhalese majority. The word “genocide” is used by Tamil expatriots, perhaps loosely; but the fear is true.

India could play a critical part. The south Indian state of Tamil Nadu has a Tamil-speaking population with centuries of ties with the Tamils of Sri Lanka. In the current Indian election campaign, anger over the siege of Tamils in Sri Lanka has brought hundreds of thousands to rallies. Having initially helped to arm the Tigers, Indian governments sent “peacekeeping” troops to disarm them. Delhi now appears to be allowing the Sinhalese supremacists in Colombo to “stabilise” its troubled neighbour. In a responsible regional role, India could stop the killing and begin to broker a solution.

The great moral citadels in London and Washington offer merely silent approval of the violence and tragedy. No appeals are heard in the United Nations from them. David Miliband has called for a “ceasefire”, as he tends to do in places where British “interests” are served, such as the 14 impoverished countries racked by armed conflict where the British government licenses arms shipments. In 2005, British arms exports to Sri Lanka rose by 60 per cent. The distant voices from there should be heard, urgently.

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As soon as I read the first article above I thought that Mr Pilger would have something to say...

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It's pretty odd that a tabloid rag would be the first to get in there, but at least they have.

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Bob Rae flays Sri Lanka: They should be ashamed
Jun 11, 2009
Johann Sebastian
TNS

A statement issued by Canadian Parliamentarian Bob Rae after being refused entry into Sri Lanka at the Colombo Airport flayed the Sri Lankan Government. “…the government of Sri Lanka is afraid of dialogue, afraid of discussion, afraid of engagement. All I can say is shame on them,” Rae said in his statement.

Rae had traveled to Sri Lanka on a private visit with a visa issued by Sri Lankan authorities, his statement said. Upon arrival, he was detained for over 12 hours, accused of being a national security threat by the government and refused entry into the country. “I am clearly not welcome here to discuss the humanitarian situation and the future of reconciliation in this country. But the government of Sri Lanka knew my views, and granted me a visa. I have flown a very long way only to be told the door is firmly shut,” Mr. Rae noted in his statement.

His statement went on to observe: “If this is how they treat me, imagine how they treat people who can't speak out and who can't make public statements.”

Rae’s history with Sri Lanka goes back to the inception of the Sri Lanka peace process early in the decade. As President of the Forum of Federations, he supported Sri Lanka’s now-failed peace process providing expertise on federalism to both parties – the Tamil Tigers and the Government of Sri Lanka – in an attempt to provide a federal option to find a negotiated settlement to the island’s decades-old war. The peace process, however, collapsed 18 months ago with the current Sri Lankan government unilaterally abrogating the ceasefire agreement.

As a Member of Parliament, Rae has been critical of the current Government’s war efforts and had insisted that it would not bring about a lasting peace. He has also been equally critical of the Tamil Tigers.

Meanwhile, the Government of Canada dismissed allegations of Rae being a threat to Sri Lanka’s security as “absurd.” “We have registered to the Sri Lankan government our dismay and displeasure concerning this unacceptable treatment of a Canadian parliamentarian," said a spokesperson with Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs.

Last month, Canada accused Sri Lanka of failing to protect its High Commission in Colombo when it was attached by protesters and had demanded a full inquiry.

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It's quite ironic that a Canadian MP has been banned as a national security risk considering Canada banned Galloway for the same reason. Maybe that's why the Sri Lankan government did it - diplomacy is a global game of bollocks after all...