Wednesday
May132009
Sri Lanka: The Hidden Slaughter
Wednesday, May 13, 2009 at 10:19
Related Post: Sri Lanka - "Why is the World Not Helping?"
UPDATE: The closing paragraphs of this piece were significantly rewritten after attention was drawn to errors in the original entry. Please see the readers' comments for details.
The comment was fleeting, but significant. Steve Clemons, a prominent Washington journalist, posted on Twitter after an discussion with British Foreign Minister David Miliband yesterday: "Surprised AfPak [Afghanistan-Pakistan] wobbliness not the core topic in New America new media chat with UK For Minister Miliband. Steve Coll pushed Sri Lanka mess."
It is estimated that the "Sri Lanka mess", in which Government forces are fighting the insurgency of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam has killed an estimated 6500 civilians in recent weeks. Yet it has been effectively a non-story in US and British media. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times only noticed it on Monday, when a United Nations spokesman revealed a death toll of almost 400 from a weekend artillery barrage.
There are obvious reasons (excuses?) for this. Afghanistan and Pakistan are at the epicentre of US foreign policy. Sri Lanka is not. It can claim no connection with the "War on Terror", at least as it has been defined in Washington. No Osama bin Laden lurking in a border town, no nuclear weapons that can be seized by insurgents. So broadcasters and major newspapers don't expend increasingly limited resources on a bureau near Colombo.
Atttention spans may be changing, however. Whether it is because a British minister has dared put this hidden war above the visible one from Islamabad to Kabul, because the concern of the United Nations is finally have an effect, because the Tamil protests in London have unveiled the issue, or because journalists are catching up with the reality of the carnage, Sri Lanka has made the news today in Britain. The Times forcefully declares, "The world must force Colombo to halt the shelling of trapped civilians," and The Guardian has a Page 1 eyewitness account by Vany Kumar (reprinted in a separate blog) of shelling in the "no-fire zone".
Perhaps the most intriguing attention comes in an opinion piece by Andrew Buncombe in The Independent as he quotes a doctor's analysis of the conflict: ""In any military operation there is collateral damage. In Pakistan it's killing, in Sri Lanka it's slaughter."
The piece is well worth considering not only for its thoughtful attention to the relative coverage of the two conflicts but also to wider issues. Buncombe, as the Asia Correspondent of The Independent is having to make decisions on how he expends his own resources of time and energy between covering Pakistan, where he has been writing about the exodus of residents from fighting in the northwest of the country, Sri Lanka, and other countries. It also highlights the relative ease with which a journalist can file stories about and from Pakistan, even in the midst of the campaign against the insurgency, versus the difficulties in getting access to and bringing out information from Sri Lanka.
Beyond these logistical and practical considerations, however, there remains the question, at least looking out from Washington. In the midst of the politics and military posturing around "Af-Pak", will the collateral damage in eastern Sri Lanka ever merit sustained attention?
UPDATE: The closing paragraphs of this piece were significantly rewritten after attention was drawn to errors in the original entry. Please see the readers' comments for details.
The comment was fleeting, but significant. Steve Clemons, a prominent Washington journalist, posted on Twitter after an discussion with British Foreign Minister David Miliband yesterday: "Surprised AfPak [Afghanistan-Pakistan] wobbliness not the core topic in New America new media chat with UK For Minister Miliband. Steve Coll pushed Sri Lanka mess."It is estimated that the "Sri Lanka mess", in which Government forces are fighting the insurgency of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam has killed an estimated 6500 civilians in recent weeks. Yet it has been effectively a non-story in US and British media. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times only noticed it on Monday, when a United Nations spokesman revealed a death toll of almost 400 from a weekend artillery barrage.
There are obvious reasons (excuses?) for this. Afghanistan and Pakistan are at the epicentre of US foreign policy. Sri Lanka is not. It can claim no connection with the "War on Terror", at least as it has been defined in Washington. No Osama bin Laden lurking in a border town, no nuclear weapons that can be seized by insurgents. So broadcasters and major newspapers don't expend increasingly limited resources on a bureau near Colombo.
Atttention spans may be changing, however. Whether it is because a British minister has dared put this hidden war above the visible one from Islamabad to Kabul, because the concern of the United Nations is finally have an effect, because the Tamil protests in London have unveiled the issue, or because journalists are catching up with the reality of the carnage, Sri Lanka has made the news today in Britain. The Times forcefully declares, "The world must force Colombo to halt the shelling of trapped civilians," and The Guardian has a Page 1 eyewitness account by Vany Kumar (reprinted in a separate blog) of shelling in the "no-fire zone".
Perhaps the most intriguing attention comes in an opinion piece by Andrew Buncombe in The Independent as he quotes a doctor's analysis of the conflict: ""In any military operation there is collateral damage. In Pakistan it's killing, in Sri Lanka it's slaughter."
The piece is well worth considering not only for its thoughtful attention to the relative coverage of the two conflicts but also to wider issues. Buncombe, as the Asia Correspondent of The Independent is having to make decisions on how he expends his own resources of time and energy between covering Pakistan, where he has been writing about the exodus of residents from fighting in the northwest of the country, Sri Lanka, and other countries. It also highlights the relative ease with which a journalist can file stories about and from Pakistan, even in the midst of the campaign against the insurgency, versus the difficulties in getting access to and bringing out information from Sri Lanka.
Beyond these logistical and practical considerations, however, there remains the question, at least looking out from Washington. In the midst of the politics and military posturing around "Af-Pak", will the collateral damage in eastern Sri Lanka ever merit sustained attention?
Reader Comments (3)
That is very unfair on Andy Buncombe. He has written extensively and coherently on Sri Lanka.
You might also like to look at the Guardian newspaper's website - www.guardian.co.uk - where you will see that there have been a large number of reports on Sri Lanka. The Vany Kumar interview published today, which I conducted, is the latest in a series of stories I have written on the situation there. You can have a look at www.newseditor.co.uk/international-sri_lanka.htm to see a selection of stories from the last couple of months.
You might also bear in mind that the government in Sri Lanka has made reporting from the country extraordinarily difficult. Those of us who have been there recently - and that includes Mr Buncombe - have come up against a level of official obstructiveness on a par with Zimbabwe, a point demonstrated by the government's decision to deport three Channel 4 journalists at the weekend as a result of their critical reporting.
Gethin Chamberlain
Dear Scott:
I offer this in the spirit of an additional perspective, rather than an "alternative/critical view".
Yes, the Tamil situation is definitely an example of tragic un(der) reporting.
But--
I wonder if the implied connection to the AfPak monofocus is the major variable warranting criticism. I will mention a few other insurgencies and wars: Indonesia and Timor, Indonesia and Papua, Vietnam and China, Mexico, Sino-Soviet border "clashes" of the 60s, Turkish Kurds, almost every insurgency and border fracas in Africa. All under-reported. All with shockingly high body counts, by American standards.
Was the underreporting politically motivated? If not, was it racism? Maybe that's a good part of it ("no Americans, and more broadly, no Westerners, are dying, so stick it on the back page--and bump it if we get a good ad for stomach remedies").
But there is a sociological dynamic at work here at well: any society's discourse is largely shaped by perceptions of pertinence, with a direct (and slavish) correlation between perceived personal/cultural impact and amount/detail of coverage.
Is there a purposeful burying of the Tamil tragedy? Maybe--but there certainly doesn't *have* to be. The dynamics of all societies (including those of Sri Lanka, and Timor and all the others) privilege personally significant discourse over that which, though motivated by high ethical and moral standards, is more substantively distant in its perceived impacts.
I raise this additional variable only to suggest and remind that it is often easy to discern the appearance of intention where, in fact, blind social artifacts are the primary drivers. As someone who has worked in advertising, I can only say this: intention always goes awry. Immutable social forces ALWAYS have influence, and it is difficult to mediate, redirect, or diminish those impacts.
The risk: over-implicating the former variable (intentionality by self-aware actors) creates both illusory causal entities, and the implication that those entities (or even these social forces) are amenable to some kind of control or accountability. I think the effects MUST be called out (just as you have done; bravo!). however, I also think the task of delineating the real causes is fraught with perils, and it is here where our (truly righteous) moral outrage can tempt us into slaking a hunger to find accountable agencies of intentionality, where in fact, few may exist.
It is, in some ways, more horrifying and horrible to assert/suggest that tragedies go unreported because "it doesn't really impact our readership"--and it is a great deal less politically satisfying to aver that this so--but if that *is* a major factor, then it warrants frank (and proportionally correct) acknowledgement.
The fact that it leaves us near-helpless before immense social forces that are as ingrained as all other reflexes where we mistake subjective preferences for objective truths ("my culture is the best because it feels best to me") is disturbing. It is hard to know how to stay proactively motivated in the face of such powerful yet de-centered forces. Yet, if that's the challenge, better to name it and admit it directly.
Thanks for a great post, Scott. I intend this, as I said, more in the form of an addition, than a critical commentary.
Best as ever,
Chuck
My apologies to readers and, above all, to Andrew Buncombe for my sloppiness in preparing the original entry. While The Independent's most recent pieces have come via The Associated Press, Mr Buncombe wrote on Sunday about the weekend violence (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/day-of-slaughter-in-sri-lanka-blamed-on-government-guns-1682408.html) and on the Government's claim that it had found an underground Tamil hideout (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/underwater-tamil-hideout-discovered-1681830.html). He also published several other articles, including one posted from Colombo, in the last month.
If anything, I should have praised Mr Buncombe for offering some focus on Sri Lanka, particularly as he is having to balance that reporting with other duties as The Independent's Asia Correspondent.
My thanks to Mr Chamberlain for bringing this up, as well as his attention to The Guardian's coverage and the difficulties in reporting from Sri Lanka.
I fear my error points to my own recent attention to Pakistan, where I had been reading Mr Buncombe's reports closely, and to the relatively light consideration of Sri Lanka (until this weekend) in much of the US media. In this, my judgement on coverage by British journalists was hasty, ill-considered, and flat-out wrong.