The email sent will contain a link to this article, the article title, and an article excerpt (if available). For security reasons, your IP address will also be included in the sent email.
Graphic footage showing summary executions during campaign against Tamil rebels to be shown next week
Ian Burrell
June 10, 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/tv-radio/c4-tests-boundaries-of-broadcasting-with-sri-lanka-expos233-2295499.html
Channel 4 has sanctioned the broadcast of the most graphic and disturbing images that the network has ever screened, showing summary executions and the corpses of women who appear to have been sexually abused, to highlight evidence of alleged war crimes by Sri Lankan soldiers.
The footage, much of it taken by the troops themselves on their mobile phones as war trophies at the end of the 2009 conflict with Tamil rebels, has been identified by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Christof Heyns, as evidence of "definitive war crimes".
That will put pressure on the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, to order an investigation into war crimes by Sri Lankan armed forces and Tamil Tiger fighters, which he has so far resisted.
The documentary, Sri Lanka's Killing Fields, shows the undressed bodies of bound Tamil women who appear to have been sexually abused being thrown on to trucks by laughing Sri Lankan soldiers. At one point in the film, one soldier tells his comrade: "Pose with the bodies!" The programme also contains footage shot by Tamil civilians on personal cameras and mobile phones showing systematic shelling of hospitals.
Return to Article