Skip to main content

Sri Lanka again shows its dark side

It is bad enough that the Sri Lankan Government is presently engaged in unmitigated violence on and against the Tiger Tamils - and the world effectively remains mute - but now a team of journalists from Britain's Channel 4 have been deported from the country. Their "crime?". Reporting on the slaughter and mayhem wrought by the Sri Lankan Government.

Channel 4's Asia correspondent, Nick Paton Walsh, describes what happened in a piece in TheGuardian:

"When Sri Lanka's defence secretary, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, rang he got quickly to the point.

"Is this Channel 4? You have been accusing my soldiers of raping civilians? Your visa is cancelled, you will be deported. You can report what you like about this country, but from your own country, not from here."

Our 'crime' had been to broadcast a report from internment camps at the northern town of Vavuniya, which can only be reached with the permission of the Sri Lankan army. The army orchestrates the visits and escorts you wherever you go. But someone working for us had managed independently to get a camera into the camps and record a series of interviews. The allegations were startling: bodies left for days, children crushed in the rush for food, the sexual abuse of women, disappearances.

We went out of our way to get a government response: the army spokesman, Brigadier Nanayakkara, eventually agreed to appear on camera saying any wrongdoing would be punished.

The day after the broadcast I went to the media centre for national security. There [military censor] Lakshman Hulugalle explained that I had damaged the country's image and would later hear of their 'measures' against me. Three days later came the call from the defence secretary.

What followed was 10 hours in police custody, searches of our vehicle and a barrage of questions, asked to sign statements which we had not given. We were finally driven to the capital, Colombo, and deported.

Now that we're out of the country Mr Hulugalle claims we have admitted we had 'done something wrong'. That is nonsense. The government is intolerant of a critical press. Journalists get killed, most notoriously Lasantha Wickrematunge, an editor assassinated in January. The line we at Channel 4 crossed was at passport control.

But you realise what crossing the line for Sri Lankan journalists means."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

As some countries consider imposing a no-fly zone in relation to Libya, the pertinent question must be what does that mean and entail? FP provides the answers: "It depends on the circumstances. There are two primary types of no-fly zones imposed by air forces. The first is imposed by one military over another, while the two sides are at war. In practice, this type of no-fly zone amounts to a warning from one side that it will engage the other's aircraft if they are spotted in a given territory. The second type, more applicable to the situation in Libya, is when an outside power possessing overwhelming air superiority restricts flights over a given country in order to discourage an internal conflict or humanitarian crisis. This is a relatively recent tactic, which was used most famously in Bosnia and Iraq during the 1990s. No-fly zones are often a compromise in situations where the international community is demanding a response to ongoing violence, but full military interven...
6 comments
Read more