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Image courtesy Channel 4
Channel 4’s Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields is anything but understated. It is designed to shock, even if you are the most hardened of viewers. Images of blood-soaked bodies assail you from every angle. As a cellphone camera jerks around, you see the bulging eyes of a man-turned-killing machine. He appears to be enjoying himself. You feel disoriented. When you think you cannot take it anymore, there it is: Another body eviscerated, another child screaming for her mother, another man’s eyes tied shut, another gunshot through the head, and still another naked body piled atop a truck laden with violated human flesh.
And then you are left with nothing but darkness. And silence.
That silence lingered as the lights went up on the UN Church Center, where NGO workers and UN staffers, reporters and diplomats attended a subdued screening of Channel 4’s controversial (and at times sensationalist) documentary, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields. Though the screening was punctuated by two short breaks, few viewers dared to get up for a glass of water or a refill of their morning coffee during the screening.
The panel that followed was moderated by Jose Luis Diaz, Amnesty International’s Representative to the United Nations (who has since written an account of the event here, and featured speakers from Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, Amnesty, and the director of the film, Callum McCrae.
McCrae said that he had very little to add to what the audience had just seen.
“As filmmakers, our job is to gather the evidence, to put together the film… it’s not our job to define what should happen next. In some sense, that’s your job,” he said. Continue reading »
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War crimes and uncertain justice
Wednesday, June 29, 2011When Ratko Mladic was nabbed in Serbia recently and flown to The Hague to face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, it was one more sign of justice drawing a little closer for the families of those he and his forces murdered in the mid 1990s. There is always that sense of satisfaction when criminality, localised or global, is hunted down and those who have destroyed the lives of innocent men, women and children eventually have their comeuppance.
It is just too bad that Slobodan Milosevic died before judgement could be delivered on his role in the Balkan wars. But that Mladic and Radovan Karadzic are in the net reinforces the argument somewhat that men who cause misery to other men have in the end really nowhere to hide, that civilised men always have a way of bringing them to justice. Full Story>>>
