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.