Hey! Biased Western Media! Call It Quits!

First published, in a slightly edited version, in The Island on Tuesday 26th May 2009



(Note:- The informal expression ‘Call it quits’ is used in its normally accepted sense of ‘agree that an argument or dispute or financial exchange between two parties has been settled’, not in the (erroneous) sense of ‘quit’ (leave, give up); the newspaper version gives the impression that ‘Call it quits’ carries the latter meaning, which is wrong, a result of editorial error. The following is my unedited original essay, where the phrase ‘Call it quits’ is used correctly.)



We, Sri Lankans, have just emerged out of over three decades of terrorism that caused us untold suffering. You probably cannot understand the deep sense of relief and joy that we are experiencing at this victorious moment of our final liberation from that terror; and that may be why you seem to persist in your anti-Sri Lanka slant in your reportage of the momentous event that has just taken place in our country. Intentionally or unintentionally you, as media people, chose to connive at the LTTE’s brutal acts of violence against us while it was in existence. We feel that you have been well and truly duped by the massive anti-Sri Lanka misinformation movement executed mainly through some members of the large community of Tamil economic refugees in the West miscalled the Tamil Diaspora, and other LTTE sympathizers in influential positions there, ostensibly determined to promote their unjust and unrealistic separate state goal; it is also possible that the LTTE itself has been taken for a ride by you in pursuance of the barely concealed objective of sustaining the threatened western hegemony in a geopolitically sensitive region of the world.



Whatever the motive behind your zeal for slandering Sri Lanka, it is we who have been the innocent victims of thirty three long years of incessant terror, which cost us dearly in terms of thousands of mostly young men and women dead or injured, the economy of the country wrecked, and intolerable mental trauma inflicted on millions. And we, the ordinary people of Sri Lanka, feel justified in blaming you, among others, fair and square for helping the LTTE terrorists to survive and flourish (until a few days ago), thereby prolonging our agony for so long through your consistently adamant misrepresentation of the truth about Sri Lanka’s predicament in the face of the terrorist scourge.



I, the writer of this, who have been following your media channels, especially the electronic media, from the birth to the death of LTTE terrorism, can hardly remember any instance where you cared to represent Sri Lanka’s point of view regarding this matter with adequate impartiality or some minimum concern for truth; you have always been partisan towards the LTTE in spite of its irrefutable record of heinous crimes against humanity. (I hasten to exempt unbiased media organs such as the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Times from this general censure.)



We, the common citizens of this country, know at first hand that there is no ethnic, religious, or linguistic discrimination or resultant disharmony that could justify separatism or any rebel movement aimed at such a goal. There has never been any genocide against any community by Sri Lanka except the genocidal violence unleashed by the LTTE against all Sri Lankans in general. The very few communal eruptions that took place after 1958 were isolated incidents deliberately incited by certain chauvinistic or merely criminal elements from among both the Sinhalese and the Tamils without any firm popular support. Their repetition in the future is unlikely when certain outstanding issues relating to the common welfare of all the communities are addressed. However, such unfortunate aberrations as racial riots in the recent political history of our country have been repeatedly exaggerated and exploited by interested parties with political or personal axes to grind. Internationally, we have already paid a heavy price because of this. The truth is that no community has been free from horrendous Tiger terror, be it Sinhalese, Tamil, or Muslim. The extermination of the LTTE terrorists has brought great relief and hope to the vast majority of Sri Lankans. Therefore the mood of celebration that is sweeping across the country on this occasion should not be interpreted as a show of triumphalism.



We have had to suffer so much for so long mainly because of the nefarious behaviour of the West, one of whose agents you seem to be. The most recent demonstration of your usual attitude became evident in the way your TV channels such as the BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera reported the news about the crushing defeat of the LTTE at the hands of the Sri Lankan armed forces. You tried to represent the Tigers as heroes who have suffered a temporary setback; you completely blotted out the truly professional and heroic conduct of the patriotic Sri Lankan army soldiers. The chimera of LTTE invincibility that you helped conjure has now been exorcised for good; it was as false as the recent doctored tamilnet picture of an amused Prabhakaran gazing on his own corpse being shown on TV! We won’t be surprised if you too decided to flash the latter on your own channels!



Have you ever even referred to the abominable fact that the LTTE hadn’t spent a single dollar out of the billions contributed to it by the various INGOs and Tamils working abroad on any development work in the area that they illegally held for so many years? Apart from enriching themselves, and living a luxurious life in their palatial houses (albeit in the jungle), they squandered all that money on procuring massive stocks of modern weapons (apparently far in excess of what would be needed to resist the Sri Lankan army attacks), and building bunkers destroying the lush environment with its rich natural resources. They held captive their own people in abject poverty and misery. How did the government treat these innocent civilians (claimed by the LTTE to be citizens of their self-styled ‘Eelam’) while they were being thus ill used by those deadly fanatics? Through its agencies still functional in that territory the government sent them food, in fact, more food than the actual numbers needed, knowing very well that the number of residents in the area had been deliberately exaggerated by the terrorists with a view to acquiring extra supplies for maintaining buffer stocks for their own use in their intended future military campaigns against the government. Sri Lanka’s is probably the only government in the world that has been feeding a terror outfit that sought to destroy it and the country, and nearly succeeded in their attempt! Didn’t you hear George Master (a former postmaster of the Sri Lanka Postal department who later served the LTTE as its translator) telling on a TV interview that he drew his pension from his post office just before he joined the civilian trek towards the safety within the army lines, where he was identified and detained, but well treated by the soldiers?



When the LTTE exploded human bombs among the escaping Tamil civilians, using women and children for the purpose, in order to cause mayhem among the soldiers and the civilians to discourage the latter from trying to flee LTTE captivity and reach the safety of the area liberated by the Sri Lankan army, the soldiers offered their own lunch packets to the hungry escapees, though they themselves had to starve by doing so. Often the soldiers were seen supporting, even carrying, the sick and the wounded and the infirm among the escaping hostages (for the Tigers shot at , and injured or killed, these civilians for refusing to obey their orders to stay back as human shields); they provided emergency medical succour for them. Many such acts of human kindness were seen in the operational area, which earned the soldiers the respect and gratitude of those people. That is also why they were bold enough to rebuke the foreigners for criticizing the temporary welfare camp arrangements put in place by the army.



Do you know that the overwhelming majority (about 90%) of these young soldiers are from rural villages? They are heir to a rich culture steeped in the most humane Buddhist values. We feel that the very phrase ‘Sinhala Buddhist’ could be anathema to you. Yet it is principally the Sinhalese Buddhists of the South who have been sending donations for relieving the sufferings of the Tamil IDPs in the North from the day they began to escape from the Tiger clutches in their thousands when the army breached the LTTE defences. Buddhist monks in Colombo went on their ‘alms rounds’ to collect provisions and other needs to be sent to the North. I heard a government minister who represents the Hambantota district saying during a TV programme that nine lorry loads of things were collected and dispatched for the use of their displaced compatriots of the North by the poor folk of that district. Something that you will find it hard to believe is that very recently a number of massacres of innocent civilians by shooting and by bus-bombing were carried out by the LTTE in the same area, and that the threat of further such attacks was still lurking.



Have you ever talked about such things in your ‘news’ broadcasts? You have always relied on the lies that the Tiger propagandists fed to you. As ‘free, but responsible’ media, did you ever think of verifying, at least for the sake of some semblance of journalistic decency, what you heard from Tiger sources against the claims of the Sri Lankan national media (not all of them state-sponsored) reporting live from the battlefront? You can’t have missed regular video footage broadcast by the national TV channels showing Tamil civilians being corralled by the LTTE at gun point, and even shot at to prevent them breaking up the human shield that protected the terror leaders from the besieging Sri Lankan army. Didn’t you see the camouflaged heavy guns mounted in the very midst of civilian huts in the no-fire zone declared by the government from where the Tigers fired at the army, trying to provoke retaliatory fire from them in order that the LTTE could then claim that the army was massacring civilians? But the Tigers were actually putting to test their own conviction that the highly disciplined Sri Lanka army would not retaliate for fear of injuring civilians, strictly obeying the government’s explicit instructions to protect the civilians at all costs.



You failed to talk about these things, but falsely claimed that the army shelled the no-fire zone. One woman ‘journalist’ (a Canadian) was mean enough to refer to the temporary welfare camps hastily put up by the army to house the escaping thousands as ‘detention’ camps! (We strongly suspect that many of these ‘journalists’ were in the pay of the LTTE.)



All such fabrications that you tried to lend credence to were, we feel, meant to invite some sort of foreign intervention under the pretext of protecting civilians from alleged human rights violations by their own government, the real motive of this ploy being to throw a lifeline to the sinking Tigers, thereby prolonging our suffering indefinitely.



However, we still believe that the journalists, who represent those impersonal media organizations of the West with such names as the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and so on, are also human beings like us with a common sense of justice and fair play. We, as civilized human beings, expect them as similarly civilized human beings to desist from disseminating biased news about our beloved Sri Lanka. We expect them to be fair minded in their reporting. We know that justice is on our side. Actually, we wouldn’t care what individuals or organizations chose to say about our country if not for the fact that it could help perpetuate the undeserved shabby treatment that our country is being subjected to at the hands of the powers that be in the current unjust exploitative global power structure, and that it could obstruct the essential and inevitable demolition of the separatist ideology that had formed the basis of the terror movement. If you can’t comply with this innocent expectation of ours, please avoid talking about our country. Online opinion polls such as the ongoing CNN International Desk poll on Sri Lanka are also meaningless because of the mismatch between the Sinhalese and the Tamils in terms of their numerical strength (about 15 and over 80 million respectively), which will leave little room for a fair result to emerge.


(Image stolen from blueroof.wordpress.com)


You have already done enough and more damage to our international standing as a sovereign nation. This is in addition to the (im)moral support you extended to the bloodthirsty terrorists by whitewashing them, terrorists who wreaked havoc in our beloved land drenching it in innocent blood for thirty three years. If you had any grudge against us before, you have paid it off with interest. Now we are quits. So, please leave us alone. Thank you!





Rohana R. Wasala