LTTE's money talks again

Channel4 has come up with another disgusting piece of journalism aimed at tarnishing Sri Lanka's reputation. We deny outright the wild allegations contained therein.

The programme is yet another example of western media arrogance in dealing with or claiming to report on the emergent and developing world. Sri Lanka may be in focus at the moment, but it will be another developing world country in the not too distant future. 

The programme represents nothing more than the self-indulgent and deeply-flawed focus of self-selecting, middle-class white elite. This white, western elite is represented by British journalists, British politicians, British international bureaucrats, Canadian and American Human Rights activists - all of whom were commenting on the internal affairs of a sovereign state.

This western self-indulgence - interventionism as it were by media - clearly endangers peace and reconciliation within post-war Sri Lanka. It inevitably fans the flames of the very extremism that was defeated at the end of the civil war. This sort of external media campaigning will encourage intransigence within those political forces historically identified with LTTE extremism - intransigence which will postpone a final political settlement within Sri Lanka. 

The programme was made up in large part of essentially rehashed and repackaged allegations edited and reformatted in time for presentation at - and with the clear intention of influencing - the United Nations Human Rights Council meetings in Geneva, and any possible vote regarding Sri Lanka within those meetings. Channel 4 News' objective was self-evidently more political and partisan than objective and journalistic. It was "advocacy" in the guise of journalism. Read more...