After Gaza earlier this year, Sri Lanka is going down the same road: constructing its own reality about what is going on in the war zone in the country’s north by attempting to insist that there is no possibility of independent verification of claims that its army is continuing to shell areas full of refugees, despite having given assurances to the international community to halt heavy weapons use.
Human Rights Watch and the The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) have released new witness statements and satellite imagery analysis that strongly suggests that heavy shelling has been continuing. The high-resolution images show what appear to be a large number of new impact craters and the removal of structures that had been built by refugees.
The Human Rights Watch intervention – an organisation that did so much to demonstrate how Israel, despite official denials, had used white phosporous in Gaza – comes hard on the heels of the expulsion of Channel Four’s Nick Paton Walsh for reporting allegations of serious human rights abuses. After the terse and angry reception given to the visiting British and French foreign ministers earlier this month by senior ministers, none of this suggests that Sri Lanka has much interest in keeping to its commitments.
Although there is not much new in human rights abusing governments blocking access to journalists and other independent observers, what seems to be pernicious in both Gaza and Sri Lanka is the way governments now appear to be using a tactic of short term denial of access in the hope that in the long term no one will be able to quickly challenge their version of events. And that the world will have stopped caring. So denial of access to information in a conflict becomes another PR tool on the international stage, and perhaps the most cynical, in trying to erase history.
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