Sri Lanka’s State Press Launches Scathing Attack On Channel 4 Ahead Of CHOGM
November 8, 2013
Sri Lanka’s Government controlled daily has launched a scathing attack on Britain’s Channel 4, days before a crew from the broadcaster is scheduled to arrive in Colombo to cover the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting next week.
Rajpal
Calling Channel 4 reporting “tacky, lurid pants-on-fire journalism that’s not fact checked, not sourced or corroborated,” the Editor of the Daily News Rajpal Abeynayake wrote in his editorial this morning that it was “journalism on the far side of the moon.”
Calling Commonwealth Secretary General Kamalesh Sharma “affable” – the official has been extremely concessionary towards the Rajapaksa regime – the Daily News Editorial said Channel 4′s Jon Snow was in an ignoble hurry to trip him up during a recent interview.
“The enormity of the canard boggles the mind. These people are nothing short of criminals. John Snow if he can malign a country in this way without feeling the need to substantiate what he says with an infinitesimal jot of evidence, is obviously of a criminal mindset as the charges he makes sets him up as a direct agent for seeking to maliciously prosecute key persons in the higher echelon of the Sri Lankan Establishment,” Abeynayake writes.
Abeynayake’s newspaper which has seen an unprecedented lowering of standards since he assumed the chair said Channel 4′s journalism was “a crime against humanity”.
Abeynayake’s editorials regularly and personally vilify media personnel, rights activists and opposition members – and essentially any public persons both within and outside Sri Lanka who hold dissenting views from that of the ruling Rajapaksa regime and its media bandwagon.
UK Govt. Had A Role In Crimes Against Humanity In 71 JVP Crushing: Declassified Documents Reveal
November 8, 2013
The UK government has declassified documents which were never published before that show that the UK had a covert role in helping to suppress the JVP uprising in 1971.
JVP suspect 1971
The documents were held at the national archives in Kew show that the UK’s covert role in helping to suppress the JVP uprising in 1971.
A new research by the Corporate Watch’s Phil Miller shows that the UK government was fully aware that the Government of Ceylon was “determined completely to destroy the movement and are prepared to use brutal and violent methods”.
Evidence of crimes against humanity was reported in western media at the time. An essay by Fred Halliday in 1971, citing The New York Times and Le Monde notes that:
“During the initial government counter-attack in Kegalle, around April 17–20th, the first reports began to appear of summary executions…[A Ceylonese] officer was quoted as saying: ‘Once we are convinced prisoners are insurgents we take them to the cemetery and dispose of them.’ The government subsequently denied this, but in later weeks hundreds of bodies of young men and women were seen floating down the Kelaniya river near Colombo, where they were collected and burnt by soldiers: many were found to have been shot in the back… What is clear is that the police and armed forces launched an indiscriminate attack on the peasant population as a whole”
We publish below the research sent to Colombo Telegraph by Phil Miller in full;Read More
