Author: |Posted: 6:37 pm on 23/10/09
Category: World News Blog
The United States government has not accepted Sri Lankan claims that a video broadcast by Chanel 4 News apparently showing Sri Lankan soldiers executing Tamils is a “fake”.
The film – sent to us by an independent group of Sri Lankan journalists – was broadcast in August this year. Since then, the Sri Lankan government has commissioned experts to analyse the film and concluded it wasn’t genuine.
But a report released by the US State Department says there has yet to be any “independent” analysis of the pictures, which were said to have been recorded by a soldier on his mobile phone. Sri Lanka has resisted calls by the UN for an independent investigation into this and other alleged war crimes. read more
Author: |Posted: 1:26 pm on 18/09/09
Category: World News Blog
There is really very little to actually report when you cover Sri Lanka. That sounds ridiculous, but let me qualify myself: there is no real, first hand information or experience that you can lay your hands on. It’s all potentially tainted somehow.
You spend your time explaining that the other side disagrees with the other side’s claim, and that you can’t tell who’s telling the truth as you’re mostly stuck in a hotel in the capital unable to independently witness the events they are making entirely disparate claims about.
After 26 years of conflict, both sides in the Sri Lankan war – broadly Sinhalese government or Tamil insurgent – have their information war honed. read more
Author: |Posted: 5:22 pm on 07/09/09
Category: World News Blog
These are the big question at the end of the longest of wars. What will happen to the displaced Tamils, herded from the former conflict zone into huge sprawling internment camps?
Based around the town of Vavuniya, they are known as Manik Farms. Channel 4 News has been given video by the activist group War Without Witness which, they say, shows the deteriorating conditions inside these camps. read more
Author: |Posted: 8:36 pm on 26/08/09
Category: World News Blog
On 3 June 2005 I sat in the Channel 4 newsroom watching a video of six young Bosnian Muslim men being taunted and then murdered in cold blood by members of a Serb militia called the Scorpions in a village near Srebrenica ten years earlier.
Their paramilitary tormentors sneered at their captives; they smoked cigarettes and cracked jokes; the cameraman complaining that his handycam battery was dying, urging the others to “get on with it.”
The men and boys were forced to lie down with their hands tied before they were shot in the back. After watching the video, I put together this report:
This video contains images that some may find distressing.
Last night I watched another video in our newsroom, this time from Sri Lanka.
It was sent to us by a group of exiled journalists. It was chillingly reminiscent of the Bosnia video.
Author: |Posted: 7:55 pm on 18/06/09
Category: World News Blog
Eyewitnesses interviewed during a week-long undercover investigation for Channel 4 News told of thousands of civilian deaths as government forces advanced on the Tigers’ final stronghold.
The deaths, they said, were the result of government shelling. The Sri Lankan president and senior government ministers have repeatedly denied causing a single civilian death in what the government had desginated a “no-fire zone.”
Author: |Posted: 7:19 pm on 17/06/09
Category: World News Blog
Sinhalese Sri Lankans are so relieved their war is over that most appear blinded by patriotism, drunk on victory and deaf to the clamour from outside their island for investigations into possible war crimes.
The country’s pliant media speak with one voice, exhorting their loyal compatriots to celebrate this great triumph over terror.
But the only terror I saw there was in the eyes of vanquished Tamils. Those I met were terrified in case they were caught talking to us, constantly looking over their shoulders. A Tamil journalist pulled out of a meeting claiming he’d be killed were he caught. read more
Author: |Posted: 9:51 am on 19/05/09
Category: Snowblog
spent yesterday afternoon in the environs of the House of Commons. An extraordinary experience.
Normally, ostentatiously crawling with MPs and peers anxious to be recognised, stopped and interviewed – yesterday the place was completely deserted.
Author: |Posted: 1:07 pm on 15/05/09
Category: World News Blog
For a while it’s been almost impossible to imagine how savage life must be inside the no-fire zone. But now it’s got even worse.
The shelling of the 3km square patch of coastal land has been going on at an accelerated pace, most accounts suggest, since the weekend.
It’s impossible to know how many have died, but most estimates suggest hundreds, others even thousands. read more
Author: |Posted: 6:07 pm on 10/05/09
Category: World News Blog
It’s not often that the most powerful man in the country rings you.
I’d spoken amicably to defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa 45 minutes earlier about getting some better access to Sri Lanka’s 25-year war. But this time he was calling me, and seemed to have remembered something.
“Who is this? You rang me earlier? 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.”
Author: |Posted: 2:35 pm on 08/05/09
Category: World News Blog
As the week comes to a close, we notice Nick Paton Walsh’s report on a camp in Sri Lanka has consistently been the most-watched video on the Channel 4 News website since its broadcast on Tuesday – a likely reflection of the large international appetite for news from the country.
The report features the first independently filmed pictures from the internment camps set up by the Sri Lankan government to house Tamils who have fled the country’s civil war.
