http://www.dailynews.lk/2012/03/21/fea03.asp


Channel 4 - a review
Indi SAMARAJIVA
It's a long video, so my commentary is long. I've
tried to break it up. It's loosely chronological. The start of Killing Fields 2
is about Killing Fields 1 and how awesome it was and how many international
bodies and governments it influenced. There is no talk about how it influenced
or improved Sri Lanka, because it didn't. Ignoring how thousands of civilians
got someplace they didn't live.
The major error they make is saying that government forces drove the LTTE
Tigers and hundreds of thousands of civilians into an ever-smaller area. That
isn't true. The LTTE herded those people at gunpoint, and they used these people
as a human shield to avert general threat in front of them. The strategy was to
provoke international response based on sympathy and terror to preserve a
terrorist group. This is the strategy that Channel 4 has unwittingly become a
part of. Even dead, Prabhakaran is playing.
Without this context, of course, the Sri Lankan government looks terrible,
firing on innocent civilians. Yet it is vital to remember that the LTTE set this
up as a ploy to achieve its strategic objective of continuing the war - a far
worse fate. Based on this omission alone, I think the Channel 4 video is deeply
compromised.
Helpless victims
These are scenes that the LTTE cynically set up for international
consumption, and Channel 4 is eating it up. Making pointing at photographs look
more serious than it is.
Then there is the magic reliance on forensic pathologists to look at
photographs and tell you what they see. In all, there are so far no voices of
people from Sri Lanka (even saying this happened to me, which I have heard),
brown people are either shown as monolithic bad guys or helpless victims, and it
is all about the white man's burden, ie, 'the international community failed
them'.
Kernels of truth
A soldier carrying an elderly Tamil woman during the
conflict.File photo
Anyways, these are Channel 4's indictments.
* Shelling of a UN compound within the no-fire zone
* Denial of food and medicine
* I somehow missed the third one
* The killing of Prabha's 12 year old son
Again, all of these things happen during war, which is why war is horrible.
In the case of shelling, the LTTE promptly moved into any designated zone to mix
with civilians and fire from there. That was their strategy since Kilinochchi
fell. Food and medicine also had to generally go through the LTTE, who would
take if for their cadres and dole out as they pleased. That said, the government
did downplay the number of civilians in there, particularly Mahinda. But that's
not even the issue here. The issue is that these are all situations that the
LTTE set up. Thus the choice wasn't do or not do, it was either do and end the
war, or not do and let the terrorist force get away with it and continue to
wreck havoc for God knows how many more years, or decades. That was the brutal
calculus which the myopic video never addresses - yet it was the decision most
vital to the people of this island.
I still think these allegations are serious and bear discussion, within
context. They just don't lead to the clear indictment that Channel 4 presumes.
At one point Jon Snow simply says it wasn't a hostage operation, but they
never question why people were simply shuffled around a war zone without being
allowed out. Because it was the LTTE not allowing them out, and there is
evidence of them literally herding people at gunpoint. I've spoken to people who
were there at the final moments and they couldn't leave. It ended when they
crossed to the government side, which is what the LTTE prevented. If there was
international pressure at that point it should have been on the LTTE to let
people out, but instead they gerrymandered the emotionomics to turn scrutiny in
the opposite direction.
White man's burden
Throughout the video Channel 4 uses austere announcement and words like
'analyze' and 'evidence' to describe video they got from uncited sources and
people sitting around and looking at photographs or giving opinions from abroad.
It's driven by agenda, not actual facts and analysis, and certainly not context.
They go for a few cases and emotional impact, but it's not the reality. It's
just war porn, staged by the LTTE and distributed by Channel 4 with foreign
announcers. They use a lot of cinematic tricks like filming documents and
computer screens to cover up for the fact that they talk to no one in or even
from Sri Lanka. It's all second-hand data and third-hand analysis when there are
people on the ground who actually can talk - even through a difficult government
to do media work through.
Channel 4 uses infographics and voice-over to substitute for actual
journalism, however hard it is to do. It's all UN documents, UN reports, US
cables, TamilNet-style videos, it's innuendo around a distant truth. They even
set up fake desks with rotating fans and video backgrounds to cover up for the
fact that they don't have direct evidence.
The killing of Prabhakaran's young son I think is pretty bad, but in the
video they have an anonymous source saying that his info led to Prabhakaran's
whereabouts. I dunno. Then they get into the legitimacy of how Prabhakaran was
killed, which is a bit like asking about Bin Laden's assassination by the US. I
mean, really?
I think Channel 4 is also wrong to brush over the LLRC report as not being
substantive. I thought it would be eyewash and it wasn't, it actually did
correct a lot of the original lies. That, however, didn't fit into the Channel 4
narrative so they largely leave it out.
Story over history
Throughout it all there's this underlying agenda that this latter phase of
war shouldn't have been fought at all, that the LTTE should have gotten away
with their hostage maneuver, and that - in effect - the war should have gone on.
I disagree, but it's also a shame to wrap this agenda in a humanitarian flag.
That was the deception the LTTE tried to pull, and it's what Channel 4 is
continuing, I think through decent if arrogant intentions.
The problem with Channel 4 is that they put their agenda before the trial,
and ultimately before the facts. They frame a five-year phase of war as if it
was the war, ignoring the history that brought such a brutal impasse to pass.
They frame the LTTE's human shield as if it happened naturally, which it didn't.
Thus they completely ignore the context of 30 years' of war and terrorism and
the wholesale suffering it caused, making the terrible last phase of the war
still proportional, which is the horrible calculus of a just war. Not whether
suffering happens (it does), but whether it achieves a worthy objective - most
notably ending war.
What about the good of Sri Lanka?
What of the people in the middle, like the people that died in the war and
continue to live here?
So within that context, this documentary is bad. Channel 4 put their
predetermined agenda ahead of inconvenient circumstances and facts, and it does
a disservice to Sri Lanka. They've made a lazy doc, using agenda and 'experts'
to fill in for complexity and actual research. I still think we need to talk
about the subject, but this documentary sucks.
Source: http://www.nation.lk/edition/feature-viewpoint