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Sri Lanka: reliable accounts

By Jake Lynch - posted Friday, 4 September 2009


Flak

An eyewitness account from one of the camps was the centrepiece of an event we staging at the University of Sydney, titled, “Sri Lanka’s human rights emergency: how and why it is being hidden and what we can do about it”. That, and plans for an event at the Australian parliament in Canberra, have exposed us to another technique used in efforts to control the flow of information reaching the public, namely, flak. It’s familiar from the well-known “propaganda model” conceived by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman to explain why the content of news, in commercial media, often seems so convenient to the rich and powerful. Flak works by “conditioning the media to expect trouble” whenever they take on corporate interests, Chomsky and Herman say (in Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (2nd edition), Pantheon Books), acting as a deterrent to any such endeavour.

Meeting the well-established concerns about Sri Lanka’s egregious record on press freedom, and the difficulty of access for journalists, the event is co-sponsored by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, based at the neighbouring University of Technology, Sydney. The ACIJ is researching the coverage in Australian media and, while results of the study won’t be released for a while, it’s expected to show that statements, interpretations and claims by the Sri Lankan government have predominated.

We did not, therefore, provide explicitly for representatives or supporters of the government to have their say: the events are, essentially, a way of bringing to wider attention important narratives of and testimonies from the conflict that have been - and continue to be - subjugated and suppressed.

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In response to one of the many flak emails received, I set out the justification for this by quoting from my book, Peace Journalism (Hawthorn Press). The passage is about an imaginary conflict between two neighbours, but it captures the principle we are applying to the present issues in Sri Lanka:

  • “One neighbour may be powerful enough to circumvent any discussion by the mere hint of force.
  • There may need to be a process of empowerment for the other neighbour before any of the other outcomes can become a realistic option.

This may have to take the form of intensification of the conflict, especially if the powerful come to feel they can afford to overlook the legitimate claims and grievances of the less powerful”.

Intensification is conceived, in this context, as part of a non-violent strategy, as when, for instance, Gandhi publicly made salt in defiance of the British Raj in India, or Rosa Parks refused an instruction from a bus driver to give up her seat for a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. In order to permit any prospect of dialogue and eventual reconciliation, there must be some form of justice. So Tamils in Sri Lanka, and in diasporas in places such as Australia, now need to be empowered to articulate their claims and grievances, and realise their human rights, through non-violent means.

It is this aspect of the events that has become the focus of flak, including a letter to the University’s Vice-Chancellor about the “abuse” of the institution’s resources to “promote political agendas”. Among the speakers were two medical doctors who have worked in hospitals in the area formerly under Tiger control, Sam Pari and John Whitehall; Bruce Haigh, a former Australian Deputy High Commissioner in Colombo and John Dowd, former Attorney General of New South Wales who is also an eminent international jurist. The views of these distinguished humanitarians are dismissed, in the letter, as “ardent Tamil Tiger sympathizers”; Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International as “biased”.

The writers clearly occupy a parallel universe, but the intention of this barrage of communications is, I surmise, not to convince, but to try to deter us from our purpose, and to send a message to anyone concerned to raise these perspectives that they will have to run the gauntlet of smear and abuse, being called upon to explain themselves to their superiors and so on.

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Neo-liberalism

We persist, chiefly because there seems to be no alternative but to take international law into our own hands. Representatives of the Australasian Federation of Tamil Associations recently met David Holly, a senior official from Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, to ask the Australian government to call for the IDP camps to be shut down and for the people in them to be allowed to return to their communities. They were told, in return, that “Australia will continue to call upon the Sri Lankan Government to ensure that internally displaced people’s (IDP) camps are administered in line with international standards, and to ensure that international observers, particularly International Committee of the Red Cross and United Nations personnel, have unimpeded access to the IDP camps”.

Other aspects of the briefing, however - not officially released but reported by AFTA representatives who were in attendance - help to explain why Canberra has been so pusillanimous in pushing through on this call. Sri Lanka is seen as a fellow “island in the Indian Ocean”, with which Australia has enjoyed strong trading relations since “time immemorial”, and the priority is for these to become stronger still: nothing can be allowed to get in their way. It’s a perfect microcosm of neo-liberalism, where the functions and responsibilities of governments are subordinated to the overriding priority of helping business to make more profits.

No wonder Australia is not prepared to make any part of its relationship with Colombo conditional on these demands being met: there’s been a bit of hand-wringing now and then, but that’s it. Canberra has made no public comment on how it used its vote at the International Monetary Fund on a $2.5 billion loan package for Sri Lanka, unlike several other countries, including the US and UK, which announced they had abstained in protest at continuing concerns over human rights. Neither has Australia joined the European Union in backing Judge Pillay’s call for an independent investigation into war crimes allegations on all sides.

That’s a call that will acquire fresh urgency with the release of the Journalists for Democracy video. Sri Lanka has promised a “military investigation” but that’s clearly another form of rebuttal - hold open official “doubt” pending its results and hope the fuss dies down in the meantime. The hundreds of millions of eyes and ears provide evidence: raw, but worthy of proper follow-up by trained professional observers, from both humanitarian organisations and the media. Only then will we be able to get an account we can regard as reliable, and until that time, relations with Sri Lanka must be made conditional on proper investigation.

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First published in Transcend Media Service on August 31, 2009



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About the Author

Associate Professor Jake Lynch divides his time between Australia, where he teaches at the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies of Sydney University, and Oxford, where he writes historical mystery thrillers. His debut novel, Blood on the Stone, is published by Unbound Books. He has spent the past 20 years developing, researching, teaching and training in Peace Journalism: work for which he was honoured with the 2017 Luxembourg Peace Prize, awarded by the Schengen Peace Foundation.

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