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: 4:27 pm on 17/04/09
Category: World News Blog
We obtained some disturbing footage of apparent attacks on Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka yesterday.
The pictures – many of which we didn’t broadcast because they were too gruesome – showed rows of dead children, who had allegedly been killed by government shelling of the supposed “safe area” in the north of the island.
Note the use of those journalistic terms: “apparent”, “allegedly”. That’s because Channel 4 News doesn’t have a reporter in Pokkanai, where this footage was seemingly (there’s another one) shot. read more
Author: |Posted: 1:45 pm on 07/04/09
Category: World News Blog
It is surely the beginning of the end. The end of a generation-long brutal civil war in Sri Lanka. And without question the most secret war of our age.
I’ve personally spent nights wandering lost in the Sri Lankan jungles of the northeast only to end up in a Sri Lankan police cell, simply trying to evade the government forces in order to report the war independently.
