The Citizens’ Movement for Good Governance (CIMOGG) has generally refrained from proposing any specific solutions to the ethnic conflict because successive governments have invariably gone against the advice given by moderate individuals and groups in this regard. It would have been counterproductive for CIMOGG to have tendered yet more unsolicited advice that was bound to be ignored. Even the interim recommendations made months ago by the Lessons Learnt & Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), within the circumscribed Terms of Reference given to it, have been largely ignored by the government. What will eventually happen to the recommendations contained in the Commission’s Final Report and the several earlier reports on solving the National Question is anybody’s guess.  

Without going into the complexities of the so-called class and ethnic problems, there is little doubt that, if our governments had not progressively made a mockery of the Rule of Law and good governance, there would, for example, have been no JVP uprisings, or the demand for Eelam or a Muslim Provincial Council, or increasing attacks on the Police, who are called upon far too often to protect politically powerful wrongdoers as well as to impose on the public ill-thought out laws, rules and regulations. In the absence of well-discussed and fair laws, properly administered, the average citizen, irrespective of group allegiances, is faced with the choice of suffering every kind of injustice in silence or resorting to violence.

Individual citizens, irrespective of race, religion, caste, gender or other affiliation, would probably have had occasion to feel, on some issue or another, that they were denied justice because of improper interference with the normal administrative and judicial processes. Although the majority does not suffer the adverse effects of misgovernance to the quite same extent as the minorities (on account of the history of the past thirty years and more), many of the former who do not have political patronage and protection do. This is an aspect of the reality that the minorities should not ignore. In the interests of building a productive partnership with the majority, they should adopt an inclusive approach on such matters and work with the majority for a level playing field for everyone rather than concentrate solely on their own special problems. The confrontational atmosphere that permeates discussion of minority problems will tend to become less sharp with time as the majority and minorities work together on broader national problems. In any event, on the basis that unity is strength, it is in the interests of the minorities to join hands with the majority to safeguard the common rights of all Sri Lankan citizens.

The rights which are most often violated in Sri Lanka are probably freedom from wrongful arrest and indefinite detention, freedom from torture, the right to life and the right to information. Some of us are liable, at some point of time, to be at the receiving end of these violations unless we happen to have powerful political backing.  Manifestly, what is required is for all citizens to demand jointly that there should be a stop to these perversions, which became rampant as a consequence of the barefaced violation of the 17th Amendment (17-A). The situation became much worse after 17-A’s subsequent reincarnation in the form of the diabolical 18th Amendment (18-A) which was created by a constitutional coup d’etat that has converted Sri Lanka into a comprehensive dictatorship.

In their preoccupation with their own problems, which are certainly matters of the greatest consequence, minorities have totally lost sight of the many ways in which they should and could fight many other equally important causes jointly with the majority.  For example, assuming – however far-fetched it may be – that the North-East Tamils get “13-A plus devolution” within a unitary or even united Sri Lanka, the retention of 18-A will make complete nonsense of whatever they achieve on paper. Consequently, the restoration and improvement of independent institutions for public administration and the dispensation of justice, as set out in 17-A, is of the foremost importance. All thinking people knew that there were some imperfections in 17-A which had to be rectified, but the right answers are not to be found in 18-A.

All citizens, irrespective of whether they belong to the majority or the minorities, should make every effort to do whatever is necessary to counter the wildly undemocratic content of 18-A. For a start, they should press loudly and clearly for the appointment of an independent Constitutional Council (CC) somewhat on the lines set out in 17-A. How the members of the CC are to be chosen should, however, not be left in the hands of one man or one party or even Parliament alone. An acceptable mechanism for ensuring that only persons of independence, integrity, ability and experience are selected as members of the CC can be designed.  CIMOGG, if called upon to do so as part of a constitution-making exercise, would be prepared to develop the framework of such a mechanism and submit it for wide public discussion.

Yet more cause for apprehension is that, in the course of time, there is bound to be yet another unfair Constitution foisted upon the People as an ‘urgent’ matter where only a privileged few and the Supreme Court will be allowed to have a superficial glance at its contents some hours or a couple of days before it is rushed through a Parliament, of which the government members, post 18-A, have been allowed less independence of spirit than a collection of castrated sheep.  Citizens of every provenance should move quickly before they are forced to ‘fall from the 1978 constitutional frying pan into a fire’ that would be much more incendiary. It should be obvious that, in the common interest, every citizen should oppose the surreptitious imposition of a new Constitution, with even worse provisions than the present one, being brought in to make vassals of all of those who do not belong to the privileged oligarchy. This is a matter of concern not only for the majority but also for all the minorities.

It is heartening to note that there are some well-intentioned people who are trying to take steps, outside the ambit of governmental initiatives, to bring together the diverse peoples of Sri Lanka so that the enmities of the past may be given decreasing importance, even if the injuries and hurt caused are not formally forgiven or forgotten.  The 6 January 2012 appeal in The Island by a group of thoughtful Tamils is a praiseworthy example of this kind of desire for concerted action. We welcome their initiative, just as several others have already done. But how does one convert these good intentions into actions that will actually result in reconciliation and greater justice for all?  This is where proactive citizens, of whatever community or group, should not remain silent but get together and lobby vigorously to have all proposed future legislation opened out to considered public discussion and comment, and have a panel of independent experts, appointed by the CC, to help eliminate the usual resort to deliberate vagueness of concept and wording.

Not only will the minority automatically benefit by any improvement achieved in governance and the dispensation of justice, they will get to have a better rapport with the majority so that all could live and work together peacefully as Sri Lankans with a firm commitment to the welfare of the next generation.

* speaking as President of CIMOGG Aand author of Good Governance and the Rule of Law –see http://www.globalpeacesupport.com/globalpeacesupport.com/post/2011/09/12/e28098Good-Governance-and-the-Rule-of-Lawe28099-by-Dr-A-C-Visvalingam-%28for-CIMOGG%29-September-10-2011-536-pm-Reviewed-by-Leelananda-de-Silva.aspx

Gananath Obeyesekere

This massive, ambitious project by a distinguished historian of religion contains a series of essays that span a long time period from Sri Lanka’s mythic origins to the terrifying 25-year insurrec­tion of the Tamil Tigers – the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – and its final eradication by the Sri Lankan army. It is difficult to review a comprehensive collec­tion of this magnitude without bringing to bear the reviewer’s own prejudices.

My criticism of this work is that it plans to do too much and therefore achieves too little. It is “all you wanted to know about Sri Lanka” within the frame of a single vol­ume which to me is an impossible task. The work is sprawling and lacks an organising principle and “history, culture, politics” is too broad to be manageable. The editor brings together disparate essays by social scientists, colonial historians, poets and novelists along with journalistic articles in newspapers, but they lack an overall analytical or interpretative framework that will benefit students and scholars alike.

Glimpses of History: The book’s cover with its romantic setting of fisherfolk near a lagoon against the backdrop of a beautiful house or hotel seems to me at odds with much of what the editor wants to say about the Island’s recent trou­bled history. One might have been able to make sense of this work if the editor had a long essay that tied together into a mean­ingful whole the five “parts” that constitute this volume; or for that matter if there was a long introduction to each part. Unfortu­nately, the editor’s own introductory notes are too brief to serve this function.

Part I dealing with Sri Lanka’s pre-mod­ern period is, I think, the best because it is comprehensive and the essays contained there are both interesting and give us val­uable glimpses of the nation’s past. This is followed by Part II with shorter essays on the “colonial encounter”, i e, the Portu­guese, Dutch and British periods (from 1,505 onwards). In Part III we move into the politics and culture of the last king­dom of Kandy and on to our own times where the excerpts deal with Buddhist, Muslim, Burgher and Tamil identities. Part IV is on another vast topic entitled “Independence, Insurrections and Social Change” and then on to Part V, a “Political Epilogue” on the post-war situation after the defeat of the Tamil Tigers.

The book is generously dedicated to those Sri Lankans who have died as a re­sult of political violence and those who work for peace but it tells us very little on the violence and anomie that the long war and its aftermath have produced. Violence in recent times is not simply confined to the long war and its suppression, but also re­lates to the brutal Janatha Vimukthi Pera­muna insurrection of Sri Lankan youth in the late 1980s and the equally brutal sup­pression by the then government of Presi­dent Premadasa in which it is estimated that about 60,000 people were killed. Even if we reduce this official estimate to 20,000 dead, we are confronted with a searing commentary on violence by Sinhalas against Sinhalas, an issue that Holt does not discuss.

Alongside these brutalities Sri Lanka is proud to be the first or the near first in other areas: it has maybe the highest rate of suicides in the world, followed by equally horrendous homicide rates. And if one can rely on official statistics the nation’s Sinhala and Tamil males are among the largest consumers of alcohol in the world, assuming, of course, that most Muslims and women in general abstain from alcohol or are only moderate consumers. Violence against women, sexual abuse of children and multiplying cases of incest (owing to absent women working in west Asia) that have been highlighted in recent times do not merit mention anywhere in this collection.

Instead, the editor has chosen an essay “Sarvodaya in a Buddhist Society” by Ariyaratne, the Sarvodaya chief, who at­tempts to produce a Buddhist version of socio-economic and political development. Ariyaratne, in his numerous publications, seriously believes that, prior to western contact, Sri Lankan villages expressed Buddhist ideals and lived harmonious lives where inequalities did not prevail. Such an idealised model of village life simply did not and could not exist in Sri Lanka or else­where in the world. I doubt that Sarvodaya has made the slightest impact on the issues that I have highlighted, including matters relating to peace and human rights viola­tions following the end of the long war.

Precolonial Sri Lanka: I mentioned that the largest and best section of this collection is on precolonial Sri Lanka with one serious exception. The editor believes that the Vädda hunters or “people like them” had lived here for perhaps “millennia” without offering a scrap of evidence to substantiate this vision of his­tory and without examining whether such groups or so-called tribals, like many other south Indian peoples, continued to migrate into Sri Lanka from the neighbouring subcontinent. All of us after all have been “aborigines” at some point in our un­known pasts!

Holt applauds the account of the Väddas by the famous Scottish prisoner Robert Knox in the mid-17th century (who was free to travel in a large area demarcated by the king) and who in his work The Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon spoke of two sorts of Väddas, wild and tame, based on the perennial western preoccupation with nature and culture, the wild living like the beasts of the jungle. Knox probably did not even see a single so-called wild man of the woods, except for fleeting glimpses of them when he was fleeing the Kandyan kingdom. Surely, an excerpt from the classic work The Veddas (1911) by CG and Brenda

Z Seligmann (especially their excellent ac­count of Vädda religion) would have been more apt, not to mention the recent im­portant collection of historical essays on Väddas with a scholarly commentary by Peter Schalk, Vädi into Vanniyalätto (2004). Colonial Sri Lanka I have serious qualifications on Holt’s selections from the colonial period and I will admit this might be due to my own anti-colonial prejudices. The excerpts from the Portuguese period are entirely by Europeans. Sri Lankan scholars and the many texts written by local historians during the period of the wars with the Portuguese do not enter the picture.

The Dutch period articles fortunately include two Sri Lankan historians, but the excerpts from the British period are most unsatisfactory because the voice of Sri Lankans has been stilled. Even John Davy, who in general emerges as a sympathetic colonial officer, has in this volume an appalling, gratuitous and unverified dis­course on the brutality of the last king of Kandy, Sri Vikrama Rajasinha. It is as if the editor has accepted uncritically Davy’s account, including the king ordering the wife of his enemy Ähälepola to pound her infant child on a mortar, a myth that the Sri Lanka historian P E Pieris has effectively deconstructed, pointing out its colonial origins in “The Tragedy of Ehelepola’s Family” (pp 175-85 in Tri Sinhala: The Last Phase). There is no doubt that this was a time when a great deal of brutality pre­vailed on both sides of the warring divide, but one must remember that the last king built the beautiful “palace of the tooth relic” and the adjacent lake in Kandy and that he was popular with many sections of the Sinhala population.

The key event of the resistance against the British was the 1817-18 rebellion that was put down with terrifying violence by the British. While the account by the colonial historian Jonathan Forbes might, as Holt rightly recognises, provide an insight into the British representation of these events, it unfortunately has the effect of sanitising the devastation and brutality unleashed by the colonial regime. As late as 1896, the British judge Archibald Lawrie could say in his Gazetteer of the Central Province of Ceylon (Vol 1, p 203): “The story of the English rule in the Kandyan country during 1817 and 1818 cannot be related without shame. In 1819, hardly a member of the leading fam­ilies, the heads of the people, remained alive; those whom the sword and the gun had spared, cholera and smallpox and privations had slain by hundreds.”

The Pax Britannica that followed the re­bellion was initially erected on a terrifying base in Sri Lanka as it was in other lands that the empire subjugated. The excerpt from the much less significant rebellion in 1848 is again by Governor Torrington, the very person responsible for its brutal suppression. Holt does recognise that Torrington’s account is a kind of self-vindication and also as with Davy and Forbes, a justification and rationalisation of colonial power, but he does not mention that Torrington was, in fact, recalled by the government in Britain for the excesses committed by him and his advisers.

The essays on colonial rule are followed by a brief series of excerpts on “Kandyan culture in the colonial era”, that unfortu­nately tells us very little of this important period. The Kandy period also saw consid­erable literary activity but Holt’s examples are poems on two local gods Pitiye and Dadimunda. He seems to be unaware that these poems or “ballads” are really texts sung in collective rituals or in shrines for local deities. Such local deities are found everywhere in Sri Lanka from very an­cient times and cannot simply be seen as a “result of Tamil migrations” or as “resist­ance to Portuguese rule” during the Kandy period (p 308).

Emergence of Identities: For me it is a relief to move to Part III on “Emerging Identities”. Here Holt is familiar with his material, and moreover, he deals with “identities” that have been little known previously, namely, that of Muslims and Burghers, the mixed descendants of Europeans. The excerpts on “Buddhist identities” are extremely useful as also to a lesser degree the discussions on “Tamil identities”. I suppose someone teaching a course on Sri Lanka might be able to com­plement the excerpts on identity with a discussion on what is meant by term “identity”, so sadly misused nowadays.

Part IV on “Independence, Insurrection and Social Change” is also, unfortunately, a vast topic embracing a long historical trajectory and so can only end up by tell­ing us very little of independence” or of “insurrection” or “social change”. But a teacher using this text might be able to fill in the blanks. The last section on “Political Dialogue” is a brave attempt to deal with the aftermath of the long war and the spectre of human rights violations, but based entirely on newspaper articles or popular accounts.

I find the concluding essay “Kingship in the Making” by Doug Saunders particu­larly offensive. On the basis of propagan­da from the president’s office that many did not take seriously, the author implies that President Rajapaksa himself has aspi­rations to wear a crown. I doubt this. But I will confess that, as I write this essay, many do see him as someone who “saved” the nation from the brutal LTTE. Surely such a view is not without its truth. But that truth cannot excuse human rights vio­lations that currently afflict the nation as a whole; or for that matter obscure the looming threat of the cultural and political colonisation of the north by the Sinhala Buddhist majority. Conclusions I would have liked to see these issues dis­cussed in much greater detail and with moral sensitivity, rather than rely on newspaper articles familiar to most of us. As far as Saunders’ paper is concerned, I would add that self-glorification and ego-inflation of political leaders via posters is endemic here as in the neighbouring sub­continent, especially south India, and also in much of the non-western world. But such continuing propaganda will surely begin to wear thin in the public which will lose interest in them just as it is also beginning to lose interest in the vulgar “hoardings” and crass advertisements that deface our beautiful country-side. Nevertheless, the omnipresent images of the president often enough accompanied (metaphorically speaking) by all the king’s men do not mean that the public at large is naïve enough to believe, as in the Kipling short story, that Rajapaksa is “a man who would be king”.

Gananath Obeyesekere (sekere@Princeton.EDU) is with Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, United States.

Ramesh Thakur

 Pics from Reuters

From The Island, 23 January 2012

Senior Sri Lankan Journalist, Vijitha Yapa with Vice President of the Republic of South Sudan Dr Rick Machar Teny. They were at an international conference held in mid January titled ‘making democracy real’ where Mr Yapa presented a paper on the future of Sri Lanka’s democracy. Mr Yapa said that it was not a question of asking who was right after a bitter war but what was left. “It is from there we need to pick up the pieces and work towards reconciliation.” He said that more than preaching to Sri Lanka, countries need to assist Sri Lanka in ensuring democratic rights and a future for all her people.

Dr Rick Machar was interested to hear of Sri Lanka’s initiatives for reconciliation with the minorities after the 30 year war. Speaking on South Sudan’s challenge on national reconciliation and good governance, he said that 30 years of war and 2.5 million dead had left his country traumatized.

He said 72% of the population was under 30 and knew nothing but violence and that simmering violence remained under the surface and asked for the help of the international community in national reconciliation. Riek Machar obtained a PhD in mechanical engineering in 1984 and then joined the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army(SPLM/A) during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005).

The Opposition Leader from Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi in a special video message asked the delegates to concentrate as much on the responsibilities as on rights. “How do we develop a sense of democratic responsibility? Where does it start? in the family? in school? in University? in the homes? There are so many different ways to start it but I believe that it starts in the family. From the family into society we should understand what democracy entails not just in the matter of rights but in terms of responsibility.”

Some 200 delegates from 37 countries attended the four day conference held in Panchgani, India. It was organized by the Initiatives of Change.

NEW DELHI, January 22: Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka has won the US$ 50,000 (LKR 5.68 million) DSC prize for South Asian Literature for Chinaman at the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF). The prize and a unique trophy were presented to the 36-six-year-old Singapore-based Sri Lankan by Bhutan’s Queen Mother Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuk in Jaipur on Saturday night.  The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature celebrates the richness and diversity of South Asian writing. It was instituted last year by DS Constructions Ltd, an Indian infrastructure and construction company.It is a literary prize, awarded annually to writers of any ethnicity or nationality writing about South Asia themes such as culture, politics, history or people for an original full-length novel, written in English, or translated into English.

“Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew” is the story of a retired Sri Lankan sports journalist’s hunt for a long-forgotten, and a fictional, Sri Lankan cricket player, Pradeep Mathew.

A jury, chaired by Ira Pande along with renowned literary figures Dr Alastair Niven, Dr. Fakrul Alam, Faiza S Khan, and Marie Brenner, chose the book from a short-list of six extraordinary books that included: UR Ananthamurthy: Bharathipura, Chandrakanta: A Street in Srinagar, Usha KR: Monkey-man, Tabish Khair: The Thing About Thugs, and Kavery Nambisan: The Story that Must Not Be Told. Ira Pande, chairperson of the jury said, “The winner was chosen last night unanimously by the jury, it just took us half an hour to decide who deserves this prize.”

In January 2011, the inaugural DSC Prize was won by Pakistani author HM Naqvi for his debut novel Home Boy.

Karunatilaka works for an advertising firm in Singapore. Educated at Saint Thomas Preparatory School, Kollupitiya, and Saint Thomas College, Mount Lavinia, he obtained a BA in English literature from New Zealand. Karunatilaka says he used cricket as a device to write about Sri Lankan society. “Chinaman” was first published in Sri Lanka, where it won the 2009 Gratiaen Prize. It is a first person narrative of a manic alcoholic retired sports journalist, WG Karunasena. It skillfully uses cricket and the notion of fair play to look at Sri Lanka in “a fresh and exciting way.”

His debut novel “The Painter” was short-listed for the Gratiaen in 2000, but was never published. “Chinaman” began as short stories and cricket anecdotes that slowly took the shape of a longer work. He wrote it over an year and a half between 5am and 8am.

A TOP Australian diplomat heavily criticised for her role in ”rehabilitation” ceremonies for alleged Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka has been rewarded with a job in Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s department. Kathy Klugman will become head of the international division in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, a key foreign policy job.

Ms Klugman, who was high commissioner in Colombo until this month, was condemned by rights groups in October for handing out certificates to Tamils after they were held for two years in a detention camp by the Sri Lankan government.

She was earlier criticised for publicly praising Sri Lanka’s security forces after they intercepted a boat carrying 44 asylum seekers, including two children, bound for Australia. The Australian branch of the International Commission of Jurists and the Greens complained at the time that Australia had ignored obligations under refugee conventions. Six of the asylum seekers were later detained under anti-terrorism laws in Sri Lanka as alleged former fighters with the Tamil Tigers. Up to 10,000 Tamils were later rounded up and kept in camps.

Ms Klugman’s appointment was announced in an email to departmental staff. The government is struggling to fill several senior positions in the bureaucracy, including the Labor-created role of National Security Adviser.

Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd announced diplomat Robyn Mudie would be the next high commissioner to Sri Lanka.

A spokesman for the Prime Minister’s Department said: ”This was a competitive, merit-based selection. Ms Klugman is an experienced officer with a strong record of service.”

ADDENDUM: This article drew the followiing retort from an Australian lady in WA Today:

As the US and Iranian governments escalate tensions in the already volatile Straits of Hormuz, and China and Russia begin openly questioning Washington’s interference in their internal politics, the world remains on a knife-edge of military tension. Far from being a dispassionate observer of these developments, however, the media has in fact been central to increasing those tensions and preparing the public to expect a military confrontation. But as the online media rises to displace the traditional forms by which the public forms its understanding of the world, many are now beginning to see first hand how the media lies the public into war.

ONE by Carl Sessions Stepp  in American Journalism Review

Here’s one of the perverse conundrums of journalism: If you fail to cover a story, you do wrong; but if you cover it, you can go wrong, too. That is an exaggerated and unfair rendering of Susan Moeller’s point in “Compassion Fatigue,” but it gets at the nature of the problem. Moeller argues that the volume and character of disaster coverage can lull audiences into a “compassion-fatigue stupor” and damage prospects for remedy and recovery.

A former journalist who teaches at Brandeis, Moeller examines coverage of a range of calamities, from Ebola in Zaire and famine in the Sudan, to assassination in Israel and war in Iraq. Almost always, she concludes, news coverage is formulaic and sensationalized. Stories “all sound alike”; causes and solutions are oversimplified; and characters must “fit into the parts of victim, rescuer and villain.” As one crisis bleeds into the next, “it takes more and more dramatic coverage to elicit the same level of sympathy as the last catastrophe.”

“Suffering becomes infotainment–just another commodity, another moment of pain to get its minute or column in the news,” she writes. “Our experience and our understanding of a crisis is weakened, diluted and distorted.” The images and story lines so overload the senses that public response can be exhaustion and defeatism rather than mobilization.

Moeller’s proposed solutions include better overall coverage of international issues to prepare people for crisis outbreaks; better follow-up so the public understands that rescuers don’t always rush in and fix every problem; and less dependence on sensationalism and graphic images in coverage.

Moeller offers a careful, thorough and convincing study, then ends it with a passionate reminder: “Reporting the news is both a political and a moral act. An element of shame is involved in not reporting responsibly and reporting equitably.”

TWO by Anna Ritman in 2009 — http://anna-reitman.suite101.com/compassion-fatigue-by-susan-d-moeller-a142354

Compassion Fatigue is an ambitious analysis of the how the media sells disease, famine, death, and war in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

Compassion fatigue, also known as a Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder, is defined by Wikipedia as a psychological term that refers to a gradual lessening of compassion over time. It is common among victims of trauma and individuals that work directly with victims of trauma. Sufferers can exhibit several symptoms including hopelessness, stress and anxiety, and a pervasive negative attitude. These symptoms can have detrimental effects on individuals, both professionally and personally, including the development of new feelings of incompetency and self doubt.

Compassion Fatigue, The Media, and the American Audience: Susan Moeller uses this affliction to describe the American audience’s response to international events that fit into the biblical “four horsemen of the apocalypse” scenarios as reported by mainstream media. In her opening chapter, she bluntly states, “It’s the media that are at fault. How they typically cover crises helps us to feel overstimulated and bored all at once.”

Moeller is the Director of the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda (ICMPA) and Associate Professor of Media and International Affairs at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, USA. Compassion Fatigue was published by Routledge; 1999, ISBN-0-415-92097-3.

She writes, “Just as the overuse of antibiotics has made people immune to their benefits, the constant bombardment of disasters, with all their attendant formulaic, sensationalist, Americanized coverage, has made the public deaf to the importuning of news stories and relief agencies.”

Moeller explains, without excusing, the many factors that editorial decisions are based on:

• How much money is in the      budget?
• Is the story entertaining?
• Does it have a visual hook?
• Is there already a crisis      story in the region?
• Is there a clear bad guy and      good guy?

She is careful not to become black and white in her blame as well, and effectively portrays the inner conflict that journalists and editors face with deadlines, audience apathy, budget limitations, advertiser demands, corporate editorial influence, among other things.

At first, the book reads as a jumble of facts, dates, headlines, and global situations scattered over the 20th century. However, into the third chapter, a method begins to emerge. She seems to be fighting the temptation of being formulaic and sensationalistic herself, while still respecting the reader’s need for organized ideas.

How International News Stories are Reported: Some of the most well-known international crises are categorized into four chapters; pestilence, famine, death, and war. Each of these chapters details how the media handled the kinds of stories coming from locations like Bosnia, Rwanda, Israel, Pakistan, India, Somalia, Sudan, among others. For each topic, Moeller provides:

• An overview of the coverage      in broadcast and print media, specifically television, newspapers, and      news magazines
• An analysis of how the      coverage fits the same formula
• An explanation of why      certain images are selected to tell the stories, and why some images move      an audience to action
• A debriefing of specific      crises for level-headed perspective and context
• A tie-in to how compassion      fatigue sets in due to editorial decisions on how to report the critical      events

By the end of the book, readers are wondering, is it history that repeats itself, or those tasked with recording it?

Final Thoughts: Moeller ends the book with a challenge. “The solution is to invest in the coverage of international affairs and to give talented reporters, camera people, editors and producers the freedom to define their own stories,” she writes.

If there is anything to add, perhaps it is advice to the audience itself. Possibly, the success of journalism in reporting events should not be measured by how much money is donated to an associated cause. As has been proven time and time again, throwing money at the problem does not always solve it. That is not to say that charitable giving is not an important outlet, but it is not the only one.

Other solutions exist that promote self-care, a strategy that psychologists endorse to deal with the symptoms of compassion fatigue. These self-care ideas can be as involved as volunteering with refugees that have arrived in a new country and including them in social activities, or even as simple as renting a light-hearted comedy or buying a musical work by an artist from an associated country. There are many ways that people can empower themselves without adding stress, while also professionally and personally developing themselves, but feeling pity, helplessness, or wlllful denial probably does not lead down the road of self-efficacy.

Another missing component is the explosion of the blogosphere and its impact on the way information is delivered in the ten years since the book was published. It would be interesting to see a follow up analysis from Moeller that takes into account the prevalence of citizen journalism in the twenty-first century and its influence on how crises are being reported.
************

Hailed as a ‘great accomplishment’ by the Philadelphia Inquirer , Susan Moeller’s Compassion Fatigue warns that the American media threatens our ability to understand the world around us. Why do the media cover the world in the  way that they do? Are they simply following the marketplace  demand for tabloid-style international news? Or are they creating an audience that has seen too much – or too little – to care? Through a series of case studies of the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ – disease, famine, death and war – Moeller investigates how newspapers, newsmagazines and television have covered international crises over the last two decades, identifying the ruts into which the media have fallen and revealing why.

ALSO SEE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGCEDRB-MoI&feature=related … FOR Hitlers Secret Science: In the crucible of World War II, Germany’s most brilliant scientists race to create terrifying new weapons of mass destruction. Before the war is over, Germany will produce many technological firsts that remain the basis for many air and spacecraft today.
Did they have outside help?

 Frontispiece images in the Gordon Weiss web-site — http://www.gordonweissauthor.com/press.html#

                                                 ONE

In the course of my researches into the emergence of Ceylonese nationalism in the British period, I delved in considerable detail into an event that was referred to then as “the 1915 riots” – the term “riots” in South Asia being a mechanical reproduction of the terminology of the British legal lexicon to describe affrays of all sorts. In 1915 this shorthand phrase referred to the assaults on the Mohammedan Moors (as they were called then) in the south-western quadrant by elements of the Sinhalese population (Roberts 1981). Amidst the complex processes that promoted this outbreak let me isolate a particular factor: a critical force inspiring the attacks was the incitement by those whom I have referred to as “stirrers” (Kannangara 1984; Roberts 1981; 1994a).

The outbreak of the July 1983 pogrom against Tamils living in the south-western and central regions of Lanka encouraged scholars to redefine such events as “pogroms.” On this occasion too, anecdotal testimony from friends and the article by Valli Kanapathypillai (1990) indicate that incitement by a diverse body of chauvinist stirrers was one factor behind a campaign that legitimised the terror wrought by depicting these activities as acts that would “teach Tamils a lesson.”

Dwelling on some anecdotal tales I was motivated in the 1990s to pen a literary essay of protest against the horrendous acts of July 1983: “The Agony and Ecstasy of a Pogrom: Southern Lanka, July 1983.” This article was written during a lonely sojourn in Charlottesville, Virginia, where my isolation promoted reflexivity. Central to this intervention was the deployment of two horrifying photographs extracted from the Tamil Times. In subsequent years I discovered that these images had been captured by a brave cameraman, Chandragupta Amarasinghe, who supplied me with better copies and clarified details about the mayhem around Borella Junction that 24^th/25^th night in July (Roberts 1994b, 2003).

These engagements with ethnic extremism and zealotry encouraged me to seek comparative material on race riots in USA and pogroms in Eastern Europe; while a Research Fellowship at Teen Murthi enabled me to spend four months in Delhi in 1995 delving into “communal violence” in India – mostly attacks on the Muslims by Hindus, but also the attacks on Sikhs in 1984 after Indira Gandhi was assassinated (Roberts 2010a).

During this work I dwelt on the possibility of creating composite picture of a typical riot-pattern, a constellation which I would set out in order to provoke readers and governments into reflective counter-action. Central to such a purpose was the deployment of photographic imagery of the type Amarasinghe, namely, pictures that horrify and reveal man’s inhumanity towards man. My reasoning was that it is far more difficult for people to transfer horrendous images into the nether regions of the mind in contrast with prose reports on violence.

Thus motivated, I even approached a German NGO in Colombo with this idea. I got nowhere and confess that my efforts in this direction were not sustained. However weak my endeavours, it would seem that the NGO world of the 1990s did not possess the type of interest we have seen in recent times.

Given this experience I find it ironic that visual imagery, whether You Tube videos, still photographs or documentaries, have been so powerful in the moral storm about “war crimes” (a controversial concept as it is) in both Sri Lanka and elsewhere. The controversial apotheosis of this power of imagery has been the Channel 4 video presented by Jon Snow which bears the title “Killing Fields.”

Killing Fields cannot, however, be comprehended without attentiveness to one of the principal forces behind some of the terrifying footage deployed within it, namely, the LTTE and its many arms abroad. Such investigative work must begin with awareness of the degree to which the Tiger leadership invested in pictorial modalities in their propaganda and training programmes from very early on. The LTTE set up two-person video teams within a department that has been called “The Truth Tigers” to film specific operations (Journeyman Pictures 2002). Their video work supplemented the LTTE investments in street theatre, radio, newspapers et cetera. The innovative character of the LTTE’s diverse means of presenting their liberation struggle has to be grasped by anyone reviewing the present propaganda war. In their heyday the LTTE’s use of pandals, buntings, poster art, billboards et cetera was quite phenomenal. The most pronounced moment in such endeavours occurred in the week leading up to Māveerar Nāl at 6.05 pm on 27^th November every year (Roberts 2005) – a process of grieving, celebration and dedication that occurred in all the major cities in the West beside the territories embraced by the de facto state of Thamilīlam from 1990 to 2007.

Pictorial imagery was a major dimension of the reportage and propaganda in such LTTE web sites as Tamilnet.com and TamilCanadian.com. I was taken in once by a Tamil supporter who sent me a photograph of the corpses produced by the suicide bomb attack that killed Janaka Perera in Anuradhapura as proof of killings caused by shelling in the north-eastern Vanni pocket in 2009 (see my illustrative entry in Senaratne 2011). One must therefore attend to the possibility that some video footage of alleged government atrocities was manufactured in 2008 as the LTTE realised that it was on the back foot. Grapevine information indicates that Channel 4 was working secretly in LTTE territory from 2007 or 2008 and that Nick Paton Walsh entered Sri Lanka to complete the final phase of this cooperation; but was deemed suspect and unceremoniously turfed out by the Sri Lankan government in May 2009 – a humiliating outcome which added revenge to the other motivations promoting Channel 4s commitment to the Tiger cause and its targeting of the Sri Lankan government for a public hanging.

   In early 2009, as we know, the Sri Lankan government was subject to pressure from some Western governments, UN agencies and INGOs demanding that they resort to a unilateral ceasefire in order to reduce the civilian death toll. As Simon Jenkins indicated in his strictures on David Miliband’s grandstanding on several fronts in that period:  “in Sri Lanka a rudimentary study of the past three months of fighting would have told Miliband that a ceasefire would be pro-Tamil, not just “pro-humanitarian” (2009). This was precisely the position I pressed then in criticising Hilary Clinton and other world leaders for their simpleton approach, one that encouraged the LTTE to use the impending general elections in mid-May in India as well as human rights vocabulary as a foundation for their Machiavellian policy of using the Tamil population of Thamililam as a buffer and bargaining chip to gain some bolt-hole (also see Tekwani 2011).

Since then, after the demise of the LTTE military regime, the campaign to crucify the Sri Lankan state has been promoted by processes that I do not have the expertise to decipher, but which can be treated as an alliance of sorts between five categories of actors. These are

1. The LTTE’s various international arms — bolstered now by new recruits among Tamil migrants stirred by the emotional heat of 2009.
2. UN, INGO and NGO agencies directed for the most part by human rights discourse and the either/or epistemology that governs the currents of secular fundamentalism that are so vibrant now in Western countries.
3. The hidden agendas (and double standards) of several Western states as well as the UN agencies in their pockets.
4. The sensationalist tendencies of several media outlets in the West who thrive on “churnalism,” encouraged as they are by a principled hostility to the intimidation of their colleagues in Sri Lanka during the period 2006-09.
5. The activities of several Sri Lankan journalists and cameramen who were forced to flee their land in 2007-09 as a result of the assassinations and threats that surrounded those with liberal or Left inclinations. On a priori grounds one can say that ideology, motives of vengeance and occasionally that of profit combined to encourage such individuals to supply Channel 4 and other Western media outlets with some of the wherewithal to cane the government. In some ways this could be seen as poetic justice; but the issue remains whether some of the lynching evidence is fabricated and thus contrary to the moral norms of others in the alliance as well as the concept of justice via truth.

                                                            TWO

When Channel 4 chose the title of “Killing Fields” for its documentary of 2011, it cleverly deployed a metaphor from the Pol Pot era as a sensational sales pitch to support its highly weighted and partisan reading of the last stages of Eelam War IV, when the LTTE and its Tamil hostages and supporters were caged into what can be called the “Vanni Pocket” (that is, the shrinking area in the north eastern corner of Sri Lanka under LTTE control in the period Janaury-mid May 2009).  It used the visual power of film juxtaposed with interviews in a blitzkrieg compilation that reverberated throughout the Western world and persuaded many non-partisan viewers — from Michael Atherton to Peter Roebuck — that something awful happened in the north eastern corners of the Vanni. That such individuals were persuaded is proof of visual power when it is cleverly compiled – though in my view it is also indicative of some measure of credulity and some unfamiliarity with the details of the context among those so swayed.

The shortcomings of a great deal of the Channel 4 film footage have now been outlined in several productions. The most revealing is the visual power-point documentary assembled by a Canadian collective associated with the Sri Lankan government who incorporated Siri Hewavitharana’s visual decoding analysis (2011a, b, c) within their product. The most thorough textual criticism is that presented by a media outfit marshalled by the Ministry of Defence: “Appalling Journalism. Jon Snow and Channel 4 News on Sri Lanka.”

Both sources above may immediately be viewed as tainted by those hostile to the Sri Lankan state. However, Godfrey Gunatilleka’s recent summary of the findings of a Marga team supports their thrusts in providing a measured, yet severe, set of strictures on the yardsticks directing both Ban Ki-Moon’s Darusman Panel and the Channel 4 documentary. There are also useful insights in the remarks of such independent analysts as Shyam Tekwani (2011) and Kalana Senaratne (2011).

Because I was familiar with the LTTE’s capacities in using pictorial and video material, I surveyed the first airing of the open-air execution scenes by Channel 4 in August 2009 with suspicion. These doubts became conviction when I read Siri Hewavitharana’s forensic analysis in article form in the Asian Tribune and local newspapers immediately afterwards (see Rajasingham 2010 for a subsequent overview). I reached this conclusion because Hewavitharana’s decoding report seemed to be the work of a technologist rather than a literary giant – a broadcasting engineer who knew his onions. The time discrepancy between the audio and visual moments in one execution scene highlighted by Hewavitharana, and his insistence that this was video or cinematic camera footage rather than the work of a mobile phone (as claimed by Channel 4), seemed clinching arguments. This incisive work has now, in 2011, been incorporated in power-point documents.

When this execution scene was subsequently incorporated within Killing Fields in mid-2011, my suspicions increased — the more so because Killing Fields moved on in rapid blitzkrieg fashion to depict other gory scenes, including one series where the video-documentary depicted a terrified man tied to a tree and subject to torture, with the coup de grace for the message being an image of his bloodied corpse at the conclusion of this segment.

This latter series of images aroused my scepticism immediately. The doubts did not arise from any faith in the goodness of the SL Army. Anyone with experience of war, whether vicariously or in real time, knows that frontline soldiers sometimes execute captured adversaries. It is well-known that during the last months of World War Two Allied troops killed soldiers of the Wehrmacht (German army) who had killed some of their comrades in the course of continued resistance that everyone knew to be futile. The Sri Lankan wars of the last 30 years have been littered with atrocities from both sides. The atrocities in the Eastern Province in 1990 were particularly extensive. After the LTTE executed over 600 policemen Sinhalese and Muslim who had surrendered in June 1990 [Tamil policemen being spared], the SL army indulged in massacres at Kokkadichcholai and other places in 1990-91. If one wanted “Srebenica” moments, it is here that the best examples can be located.

However, the Channel 4 footage simply smelled “fake” because it purported to convey events occurring in the last stages of Eelam War IV in 2008-09.  During that phase the SL armed forces were not only well kitted, but were  in command of the situation and had taken control of many buildings in the northern Vanni, especially those in the town of Kilinochchi, which had been abandoned by the LTTE once Paranthan fell in late December 2008. SL army torturing would, in my speculative reasoning, have occurred within closed doors. On this ground I thought then that this set of images indicated a killing of a dissident or deserter by the LTTE, acts which were frequent in Thamilīlam from 1990 through to 2009 and which have been documented over the years by the UTHR collective; and which are even marked by Gordon Weiss himself in The Cage (2011: 69, 141-42).

The doubts were subsequently supported by the insights offered by the Tamil dissident, Noel Nadesan: “I was told by sources in the Vanni that this was an LTTE operation and [that these] pictures were taken for propaganda purposes by LTTE. Have a close look and you will find among the so-called soldiers a man in slippers. Sri Lankan soldiers never go about in slippers when they go out on operations.” Nadesan is referring to operations in the late 2000s and told me that his sources are former LTTE functionaries associated with its propaganda wings. He is not free to name them, so this evidence is open to sceptical responses from those who believe the Channel 4 version of this visual story.

Nevertheless, I insist that there is reasonable ground to conjecture that this segment of Killing Fields is a LTTE production developed as part of its propaganda operations in late 2008. The three reasons for this verdict are (a) the resort to open-air torture and execution with the use of a tree as a stanchion; (b) the presence of a soldier wearing slippers; and (c) information garnered by Nadesan from well-placed sources within the LTTE camp. Such suspicious signs and testimony do not, of course, enable a definitive verdict; but they are strongly indicative. At the very least they suggest that the jury should remain out on any conclusion about the perpetrators of this atrocity.

It is therefore of some significance that one photograph from this set of concoctions by the LTTE should turn up in the marquee images fronting – yes fronting — the web site maintained by Gordon Weiss with the caption: “Torturing a Victim, Northern Sri Lanka, 2009.”

This same image, cropped even tighter, is reproduced in his The Cage with the following description: “One of a series of photos, video, and testimony from Sinhalese soldiers that gradually emerged after the war. This one shows a man thought to be a captured Tamil Tiger fighter being tortured. Other photos in the sequence show him being bludgeoned to death.” In the credits for his illustrations inserted at the head of the book we are told that this image is from the “author’s own collection.”

We are not told where Weiss derived this particular selection from the video sequence. But BEWARE. This image has been cropped by someone, presumably by whoever delivered the photograph to Weiss. But study the same image reproduced by Rajiva Wijesinha after he received it from ABC when he challenged them about their reportage on the war in May 2011. This is presumably a replication extracted from the Channel Four documentary; and was displayed to Wijesinha in a triumphant style by a female ABC reporter whose confidence evaporated when Wijesinha clarified the problem posed by the surrounding figures. That was not all: ABC “suppressed everything about the pictures after I pointed out the slippers” (email, Wijesinha to Roberts, 6 January 2012).

Take careful note: here we see at least one soldier with slippers, an indication, albeit not definitively, that the torturers and killers were probably Tiger personnel – an indication that is consolidated by Nadesan’s sources. Thus, someone has cropped the tell-tale giveaway out of viewing vision when circulating the still image as single frame for the benefit of those waiting in the wings to accept charges of governmental war crimes. Weiss appears to have been an “innocent” taken in by this particular footage [though one should also attend to the ‘minor’ narrowing of frame in his book version of the image in comparison with that on his web-page].

Weiss has a reputation of being an idealist and his moral passion may suggest that he is not the type of person who would crop a photograph. However, his campaign against human rights abuses directed at both parties in the conflict has not been even-handed. There are several moments where his representations let the LTTE off the hook. A separate essay is called for if one is to evaluate the degree of partiality and integrity displayed in recent years by Gordon Weiss (see Sri Lanka Media Watch 2012 which appeared after the first draft of this article).

Tekwani (2011) has already indicated that “Weiss’ studied conclusion” in The Cage to the effect that the war was justified “is at variance with his narrative style and choice of words, which draw heavily on his moral repugnance of the Rajapaksa victory.” From my location in Australia what demands emphasis is the cumulative impact of developments arising from the composition and publication of The Cage by Picador for Macmillan Australia. Note that in a deliberate move the book was launched in Sydney on 19^th May 2011, a day of grieving in the Tamil nationalist firmament.

In participating actively in the marketing of this book, it would seem that, from late 2010 if not earlier, Gordon Weiss has been drawn increasingly closer to the networks of the Tamil Australian lobby associated with the LTTE in the past and with the politics of the Global Tamil Forum’s radical arms today. The importance which Weiss himself has attached to the photograph under scrutiny indicates that he accepts the presentation of this visual evidence as a case of government soldiers’ torturing Tamils. Even if his hand has not carried out the excision of tell-tale evidence undermining such a verdict, his ability to evaluate data is called into question. At the very least he has been sucked into distortion by others in his circuit, others working mala fide.

ADDENDUM

I have had two long conversations with Siri Hewavitharana in Sydney early in January. As far as I could judge from these chats, Hewavitharana is not a Sinhala ultra of the type associated with SPUR in Australia. Quite incidentally, his reference to visits to Adelaide to buy wine from one particular shop indicated a background of affluence – a comforting thought in the sense that he does not require big bucks from any state agency. However, the most central impression that I gathered was that this is a man with phenomenal technical knowledge.

I insisted on receiving his c. v. and this document supports what was self-evident in the course of our conversation. Siri Hewavitharana is a professional engineer in broadcast and satellite display, cable design and operations, content platforms DRM and STB’s, video broadcasting and IPTV. He seems to be at the cutting edge in this field and since September 2008 has held the post of Executive Director, IPTV Systems, after a career history of senior positions with Huawei Technology, IPTV, Cisco, Optus Vision et cetera. He founded the company Applied Video System in 1984 in UK, but his millionaire status burst with the financial bubble of 1987 and he was eventually enticed to Australia by Kerry Packer as Head of Visual Communication for OTC Researach & Development in 1989.

His professional status was such that in 2009 the US Defence Department sent him a copy of the first video deployed by Channel 4 that year. By an act of the gods this original video footage contained metadata which gave the game away and indicated, for one, that it was not generated by a mobile phone — it is for this reason that Channel 4 has never made its video footage public. Hewavitharana immediately approached Prabath Sahabandu, Editor of The Island, with his conclusions. That is how his report eventually ended up as a semi-official rebuttal of Channel 4 in the public realm.

He warned the government representatives that the defects in this video version would be covered up once his report was out. It so transpired. New improved versions of the open-air execution segment appeared in 2011, one reaching the UN via Journalists for Democracy and the other, with additional footage, being incorporated within Killing Fields. These versions too have been analysed to reveal defects. The availability of the original video with meta-data has been of critical importance in these acts of revelation. Killing Fields also contains other frames that are still-images stitched together in clever fashion, inclusive of one segment that is “totally fake” in Hewavitharana’s words.

His “Technical Analysis of Channel 4 killing fields documentary” is now included in power-point presentations that are within the public realm (Lankaweb 2011 and Technical Analysis 2011) and should be essential viewing for everyone who is reviewing this topic. These reports are indirectly supported in a separate study by Professor Yfantis, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nevada, who was commissioned by the LLRC. His “mathematical analysis” of blood in the 3GPvideos pertaining to the open-air execution scenes revealed that “it was not real blood,” but either “water with red dye” or “digitally constructed … video blood.” This directed Yfantis to the overall verdict that Killing Fields is “a very deliberate and orchestrated video” (LLRC, 2011, chap. 4: 372).

What these findings say of the morality guiding Channel Four and Jon Snow is beyond words. There is even some suggestion that elements of the British Foreign Office had a role in this ‘handiwork’ because Channel 4 had sought governmental aid in a situation of financial crisis in 2008/09; but this must be treated as unverified gossip unless wikileaks or other material provides evidence in this direction.

If people wish to dismiss the opinions expressed by Hewavitharana and Yfantis  simply because they have been expressed through agencies associated with the Sri Lankan government, they should attend to Shyam Tekwani’s depiction (2011) of Killing Fields as “an effort to sensationalise and shock with carefully selected and edited footage,” and his further observations to the effect that, (a) for this reason, “the documentary weakens its case and invites an investigation into its own credibility and accountability to journalistic norms”; and that (b) “the volume of testimony it uses as evidence is not enormous and most of it is derived from leading questions.”

END

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