Jittery Colombo blocks Channel 4 crew from visiting North

Despicably violating the core values of the Commonwealth, CHOGM-host Sri Lankan government on Wednesday led its goons and supporters to waylay a train that carried a television crew of the Channel 4 News to the island’s north, and used its police force to escort them back to Colombo.

Reports say that the London-based television crew, closely tailed by Sri Lanka’s military intelligence operatives, left Colombo on Wednesday morning via train to Kilinochchi, from there to the Northern Jaffna peninsula by land, in the former war-zone for news gathering, as Commonwealth accredited journalists.   

As the stand off lasted for over two hours, the Channel 4 News Crew was updating the world on the development via twitter.

Unable to stop them from travelling in a public transport, the government hurriedly organised its goons and supporters to stage a protest rally in the Anuradhapura railway station, blocking the train from travelling further to the north with the five-member Channel 4 News crew, before returning them to Colombo in a police vehicle.

In a separate but similar development, relatives of thousands of disappeared people were stopped and assaulted at Vavuniya, Mannar and Madhu areas while being en route to attend the Human Rights Festivel in capital Colombo. The organisers say that the police and the military intelligence personnel “were acting high-handedly against these already victimised people, who were on their way to peacefully demonstrate their plight at a time when the Colombo in under spotlight of the international community”.

“Bus loads of people were asked to get out of their buses by the police and the military personnel threatened with death if they dared to proceed to Colombo. Some of the protesting family members of the disappeared people were even assaulted. They are only seeking justice and wanting to know the fate of their loved ones. This is a complete denial of human rights and right to exist,” a Catholic priest told JDS via phone from the spot in Madhu.

Channel 4 television has been exposing the poor human rights track record of the incumbent regime of President Mahinda Rajapaksa and released at least three chilling documentaries accusing the President, his brother Defence Secreatary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa and the country’s armed forces of committing wide-spread war crimes and crimes against humanity during the final months of the war that ended in May 2009.

A Colombo-based human rights lawyer said that the government “which has been rejecting these allegations as bias and baseless, obviously do not want to run the risk of allowing the Channel 4 News television, which included the director of those films Callum Macrae, to visit the former war-zone and talk to the war survivors and the families of thousand of people disappeared, getting itself further exposed”.

“Obviously, the jittery Rajapaksa government has plenty of things to hide from this journalist crew. The government knew it too well that these war survivors would take any risk to come forward to tell on camera the ordeal they faced before, during and after the war. The latest issue highlights the very fact that if any investigation into the allegations of war crimes in Sri Lanka were to be independent, it has to be international,” the HR lawyer said.

© JDS