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.
To see the front line in April and May – the final, grizzly end of the war, in which tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were trapped in a tiny sliver of beach which was repeatedly hit by shellfire, misleadingly called the no-fire zone – you had to travel with the government.
On the other side, you had to rely on the sophisticated means of internet video distribution run by the LTTE – the Tamil Tigers. Daily, remarkably, new chilling images emerged; though of course these were almost impossible to verify, they would have been near impossible to fake as well.
But just like the LTTE, and army provided their own version of events, filming and releasing scenes from the battlefield. Again, almost impossible to verify, but also almost impossible to fake. We ran both sides’ pictures heavily labelled.
Everyone tried every other means. We arrived and I presumed arrogantly that people simply hadn’t been trying hard enough. But they had. It was genuinely impossible to get near the no-fire zone.
Through a lot of patience and skill one of our team secured some rare, independent access to the huge sprawling camps where the displaced from the country’s war torn north were herded.
But even they had to rely on people frustrated enough at the situation in the camps to speak out to help us obtain the footage. Then we were deported for broadcasting the allegations of poor conditions and sexual abuse the testimony contained.
It was simply an impossible task simply to make sense of what the state’s position was at times: the government will tell you that they are not shelling the area, then the next moment say they have been. And when you are at the no-fire zone, listening to what sounds a lot like shelling, they will tell you it’s a mine-clearing operation.
The other side, the LTTE, are a registered terrorist organisation. Not an ideal source. Information from Tamils caught on the other side of the front line sadly always risks being tarred with their brush. And it’s a bad brush to be tarred with.
The United Nations had the best access. They had an invulnerability that other, smaller NGOs working in the field lacked. Without them, the Sri Lankan government would simply have lacked the resources to handle the huge displacement the end of the war caused.
This fact was, sadly, lost on some UN officials, it appeared. Many aid workers were infuriated with the lack of criticism the UN’s senior officials dispensed at the time of the no-fire zone’s shelling. Ban Ki-moon’s office, that of the UN secretary general, were singled out.
Eventually the scale of the tragedy became too obvious for further silence, but many aid workers had for a while looked to the top levels of the UN hoping for a voice of condemnation that never came.
The feeling endured that for some time, the most powerful international agency in the country mistakenly felt they could be shut out of giving aid to the needy, when surely they must have realised they were the only solution the Sri Lankan government had.
But it’s not as though the lack of independent access has helped the government’s cause. The government were incapable of copper-bottoming their claims the LTTE were using civilians as human shields.
You might argue they prevented access as they had something to hide: western journalists, for example, never allowed into the no-fire zone, or even flown over it. We did ask. Repeatedly. The job of reporting became quite methodical in the end: get information from one side, and if it’s not too preposterous or does not conflict with everything else you know about that situation, present it to your viewer together with the other side’s comment on it.
That to me seems like a quite balanced way to report matters. But there was a lack of logic to the Sri Lankan government’s behaviour.
I once questioned the government’s reaction to our report ahead of deportation. I said that we had gone out of our way to get on-camera comment from the defence ministry’s spokesman, haranguing officials for access, and driving across town to make the interview, risking missing our deadline. But, one of the criticisms aired in the Sri Lankan media of the report we were deported for was that it did not carry the government’s reaction.
The official looked at me, almost surprised, but partially amused, perhaps by the absurdity of the situation – the world of non-truth we were both wallowing in. “But this is Sri Lanka” he said, as if that, the 26 years of savage war, meant all bets were off. It’s hard to win in that situation, however balanced you are.
And in the end, the Sri Lankan government managed a remarkable feat: they ended a 26 year war against an internationally condemned terrorist group, but in such a way that their “victory” was mired in accusations of massacres, and demands for war crimes investigations.
You would have thought they’d have been keen to show us the claims made against them were otherwise. And you have to wonder why they did not, and continue to prevent us from doing so.