ISHARA S.KODIKARA / AFP / GETTY IMAGES
Sri Lankan Muslim children attend a protest against the U.N. on March 2, 2012, in Colombo
“They didn’t believe that anyone in the international community was willing to stop them, and they were right.” That is the lucid explanation offered by John Holmes, the British diplomat and former chief of the U.N.’s humanitarian operations, as to why, in 2009, the Sri Lankan government was willing to risk international condemnation and accusations of war crimes in its all-out final push to end its 26-year-long war against the Tamil Tigers. Holmes was interviewed by Britain’s Channel 4 for a documentary that aired yesterday called
Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields: War Crimes Unpunished. It is a follow-up to a
film aired last June by Channel 4, and this one, too, is full of images of graphic violence and suffering, including what appears to be the body of a 12-year-old boy, the son of former Tamil Tiger leader Prabhakaran, shot five times in the chest at close range. International-law experts interviewed in the documentary called it “a crime and a war crime.”
