Archive for the ‘UN Panel Report’

Provoking, persecuting and pushing Sri Lanka: Enough!

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Photo credit REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte: Special Forces Combat soldiers ride in a parade during a war victory ceremony in Colombo May 27, 2011. Sri Lanka holds a military parade and memorial for fallen soldiers on Friday to mark the second anniversary of the defeat of the Tamil Tigers, which ended a quarter-century civil war in the Indian Ocean nation. “Revolution is not a dinner party, not an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly and modestly”. – Mao Ze Dong The matter is rather simple really. What do you do, or more correctly, what does a state do, and what does a leader at the helm of state affairs do, when faced with a situation of a heavily armed movement dedicated to dismembering the country through secession; a movement which has repeatedly resorted to terrorism; has repeatedly returned to war after episodes of ceasefires and negotiations with successive…

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“War Crimes” and Democracy in Sri Lanka

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Photo courtesy Online Focus Lieutenant William Calley of the Charlie Company was a confused man. It was just two months ago that his company and others took a heavy toll when the Viet Cong  attacked during the Tet festival and television screens around the world showed the carnage they wrought. So when Calley’s CO Colonel Oran K. Henderson advised his officers to “”go in there aggressively, close with the enemy and wipe them out for good.”Calley must be thinking whether or not he should spare unarmed men, women and children. However Calley and his men had already taken their decision when they descended on the hamlet of My Lai on that fateful day of March 1968 ostensibly to wipe out remnants of Viet Cong units after the devastating US counter attack, supposedly harbored in that village following the grisly Tet Offensive. By the time Calley and his men were finished 504 Vietnamese men, women and children were dead or dying….

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Sri Lanka ‘Killing Fields’: Will there be progress and what does that mean?

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‘Killing fields’ can be a phrase used to describe a most mundane fact known to humanity, or it could be a most provocative phrase to an ethnic majority or minority group. When viewed from the standpoint of a human being, one need not try hard to realize that the moment one factors in the number of killings that may have taken place, the amount of brutal wars that have been fought by man against man in the past, the kind of death and destruction that resulted in policies and practices of various states, such as colonialism etc., all of us belonging to the human race belong to one large ‘killing field’. But we are sentient beings with a lot of dust in our eyes, we are easily provoked and even enjoy being provoked at times, and we often view things from a narrow ‘ethnic’ or ‘nationalist’ lens (merely conventional truths or sammuti-sacca, as a great philosophical teacher has stated; or,…

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Thoughts on a documentary: We are complicit in Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields

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It was the most gruesome of visual feasts and it when it ended, the most disorienting sense followed. One is struck, not by the extremity of human suffering; but by stillness, by the insouciance of the pools of blood. They appear on screen as almost as if they are the everyday aftermath of one of the island’s heavier monsoon rains. Excepting, of course, the fact that happy children do not float paper boats in these pools, nor is the water that comfortable colour of milky tea. The children are dead; the water runs red with blood. And it is simply, understatedly there. “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields” is a damning indictment of the various parties involved in the last few months of the civil war. It must be watched critically, and to do so, it is necessary to separate Jon Snow’s narration and open your eyes to the story that you must yourself piece together. Image upon images plays towards you,…

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Exclusive interview with Callum McCrae, Director of ‘Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields’ produced by Channel 4

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Groundviews caught up with Callum McCrae, Director of the highly controversial and very disturbing film by Channel 4, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, in New York, a day before the film was due to be screened for senior diplomats, UN staff and others at the Church Centre, in front of the UN Headquarters. Callum was joined by Marion Bentley, Channel 4′s Publicity Manager. The interview is around 43 minutes. Download the MP3 (~51Mb) of this interview here to listen offline. This podcast is anchored to the following questions. General What was your objective in doing the C4 video now, more than 2 years after the end of the war? Killing of unarmed civilians, collateral damage, has occurred in other wars, other contexts British troops have been involved in? Has C4 covered them in as great detail? What is accountability for you? Do they think the video will help in achieving accountability in the SL case? How so? Who is your primary…

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Assessing the Validity of Legal Challenges to the UN Panel Report

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Apologists for the Sri Lankan government have marshaled a number of arguments in response to the growing pressure on accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Some are less clever than others. The argument that the Panel Report is part of a Western witch hunt against Sri Lanka as punishment for defeating terrorism needs only be restated for purposes of rebuttal. The claim is so self-evidently puerile a response to mounting evidence of serious international crimes that meaningful rebuttal is difficult. While some conspiracy theories are amusing, others are tiresome. The suggestion that a South African apartheid era human rights lawyer and a former Attorney General of Indonesia together with one of the world’s most respected international humanitarian law scholars conspired themselves to or fell prey to a conspiracy to restore the idea of a separate Tamil state is as stunning as it is idiotic. The better arguments are at least falsifiable and therefore more honest. Examples include those…

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Sri Lanka’s Post-War Crisis: War Crimes and Channel 4

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Following the broadcast of ‘Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields’ on the 14th of June and its public release – for seven days – on Channel 4’s website, there has been an overwhelming international reaction to what has been described as ‘brutal,’ ‘horrific’ and ‘shocking’ footage of war crimes. In an effort to collate the reportage following the release of the documentary, we have created a bundle that features the most significant news reports, blogs, comments and videos by international networks, which have been published on the web over the last few days. We have clipped several sources that include responses by ambassadors, civil servants and soi-disant advisors to the government. The news agencies featured in the bundle include the Guardian, New Statesman, Independent, Telegraph, Hindu, Hindustan Times, International Business Times and numerous other sources including leading blogs from Sri Lanka. Groundviews will continue to curate the bundle and upload new reports as soon as they are published. Please note that each…

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The ramifications of the Channel 4 documentary ‘Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields’

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The recently telecast Channel 4 documentary on ‘Killing Fields of Sri Lanka’ sheds no new light (despite claims to the contrary), in terms of groundbreaking evidence, regarding the incidents related to the end of the war in Sri Lanka.  If anything, it will seek to entrench already hardened attitudes and decrease the ever reducing space for dialogue and reconciliation. From the government’s perspective, it will seek to discredit the documentary as fake as it feeds into the insecurity that it surrounds itself with, of a perception that the west has been influenced by a highly successful pro LTTE lobby.  The end result will be the securing of its ‘credibility’ especially as a ‘victim of an external conspiracy’ consequently rallying the people’s sympathy, thereby making any genuine attempt to hold the government accountable for anything fruitless. On the other side, for the pro LTTE lobby (largely represented by their supporters in the UK, US and Canada) this will be a ‘vindication’ of…

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Twitter explodes with reactions and responses to Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields

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Channel 4 broadcast Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields tonight in the UK, which it describes as “a hard-hitting investigation into the final weeks of the Sri Lankan civil war, featuring devastating video evidence of horrific war crimes.” Sri Lanka’s response to the video has been unsurprisingly ham-fisted, but already, the video is having an impact internationally. As noted by Bloomberg, the UK’s Foreign Office Minister Alistair Burt, after watching the video, urged Sri Lanka to initiate an “independent, thorough and credible investigation” into allegations of war crimes. Twitter provides one measure of how the video was received. Viewers were encouraged by Channel 4 to tweet with #killingfields, and the responses from those who saw the documentary just after it was first broadcast on public television are quite revealing. If the Twitter search widget below doesn’t load, click here for an RSS feed generated live from tweets tagged with #killingfields, or click here to access Twitter’s search page directly. Repost This Article

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Checkmate, Rajapakse! The UN Report, Militarism and Public Religion in Sri Lanka

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The author of this article, in January 2012, wanted us to take it down. Although published under a pseudonym on Groundviews, the real name of the author and the full content of the article is available online on a number of websites. Repost This Article

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When allegations become evidence

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Media and advocacy groups make mistakes. It’s true. The reason for the errors can vary from simple human error, time constraints resulting in insufficient research to subtle manipulation of facts and wording to push an agenda. Once a mistake has been pointed out, most reputable organisations will publish an acknowledgement along with the correction. Less reputable organisations may ignore the error or correct the error without any acknowledgement. How organisations deal with errors are a great indicator of the quality of the publication. The United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, appointed an advisory panel to report on the final stages of Sri Lanka’s separatist war. The Darusman report was published in April and human rights advocacy groups, including Amnesty International, International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch, initiated a controversial media campaign accusing Sri Lanka of war crimes. The most glaring error propagated by this media campaign is the assertion that there was “credible evidence” of crimes. There was not. The…

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Giving the middle finger: Sri Lanka’s conflicting responses to war crimes allegations

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Mr. A Nawan, Deputy Solicitor General of Sri Lanka This symbolic screen grab is from a short video on Channel 4′s website, on the occasion of screening in Geneva a one-hour documentary into the denouement of the war in Sri Lanka. As Channel 4′s website notes, “Disturbing footage in the film includes the apparent extra-judicial massacre of prisoners by government forces, the aftermath of targeted shelling of civilian hospitals and the bodies of female Tamil fighters who appear to have been sexually assaulted. Also examined in the film are atrocities carried out by the Tamil Tigers, including the use of human shields, and footage depicting the aftermath of a suicide bombing in a government centre for the displaced.” The Deputy Solicitor General of Sri Lanka notes in response to the screening of the documentary, “We have already made a preliminary investigation on the video and we have scientific material established that this particular video is not authentic.” Clearly he knows…

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Is the war crimes video confirmed by UN as authentic “unrepresentative and irrelevant”?

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The Report of the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial summary or arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns, presented at the 17th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council sessions in Geneva today found, after digital forensic investigations, new footage from the final days of Sri Lanka’s civil war as authentic and proving that war crimes took place there. As noted in this AFP report, “What is reflected in the extended video are crimes of the highest order — definitive war crimes,” the U.N. investigator, South African law professor Christof Heyns, said in a report released Monday to the global body’s Human Rights Council. Heyns said he reviewed the footage showing the apparent execution of unarmed men and women with technical and forensic experts. “The overall conclusion reached by the experts is that the video is authentic and the events reflected in the video footage occurred as depicted,” he told the council. Sri Lanka’s government has maintained that the video is not real.”…

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The Indo- Sri Lanka Joint Communique: Delineating the Parametres of Action in Response to the Panel Report

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[Editors' note: An edited version of this article appeared in the Daily Mirror on the 26th of May 2011.] 4. Both sides agreed that the end of armed conflict in Sri Lanka created a historic opportunity to address all outstanding issues in a spirit of understanding and mutual accommodation imbued with political vision to work towards genuine national reconciliation. In this context, the External Affairs Minister of Sri Lanka affirmed his Government’s commitment to ensuring expeditious and concrete progress in the ongoing dialogue between the Government of Sri Lanka and representatives of Tamil parties. A devolution package, building upon the 13th Amendment, would contribute towards creating the necessary conditions for such reconciliation. 5. In response, The External Affairs Minister of India urged the expeditious implementation of measures by the Government of Sri Lanka, to ensure resettlement and genuine reconciliation, including early return of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) to their respective homes, early withdrawal of emergency regulations, investigations into allegations of…

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A robust debate on No Fire Zones (NFZs) and International Humanitarian Law: Artful dodging of war crimes in Sri Lanka?

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Original image courtesy PEDRO UGARTE/AFP/Getty Images A central challenge of curating content on Groundviews is that some of the most interesting discussions which occur on comment threads get obscured over time, and are less visible than the primary material published here. A case in point is the recent thrust and parry of wit over the establishment of the No Fire Zones towards the end of war in Sri Lanka. The debate was between two leading voices on this site and the Sri Lankan new media landscape, Aachcharya and David Blacker, in response to a review of The Cage, the explosive new book on the end of war by former UN spokesperson Gordon Weiss. What follows are key excerpts from this comment thread. To read the exchange in full, click here and scroll down to see the nested comments. In all of the following excerpts, points in bold are by us and not in the original. The debate began with a…

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About Groundviews

Located at the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Groundviews is a citizen journalism website that uses a range of genres and media to highlight critical perspectives on governance, reconciliation, human rights, the arts and literature, democracy and other issues. The site has won two international awards, including the prestigious Manthan Award South Asia in 2009. The grand jury's evaluation of the site noted, "What no media dares to report, Groundviews publicly exposes. It's a new age media for a new Sri Lanka... Free media at it's very best!"

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