{"id":150025,"date":"2015-09-02T05:01:24","date_gmt":"2015-09-01T23:31:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=150025"},"modified":"2015-09-06T14:30:50","modified_gmt":"2015-09-06T09:00:50","slug":"dishonest-reportage-by-ai-aussie-journalists-remains-unmasked-a-drama-in-two-acts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/dishonest-reportage-by-ai-aussie-journalists-remains-unmasked-a-drama-in-two-acts\/","title":{"rendered":"Dishonest Reportage By AI & Aussie Journalists Remains Unmasked: A Drama In Two Acts"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Michael Roberts<\/span><\/a> –<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>

Dr. Michael Roberts<\/p><\/div>\n

A – Thoughts on My Abject Failure<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the 31st March 2011 a panel of lawyers appointed by Ban Ki-moon submitted a review of the Sri Lankan War IV without ever visiting the island. The report was composed in the manner of a prosecuting team rather than a judicial assessment<\/span><\/a>. It was as slipshod in its methodology<\/a><\/span> as flawed in several of its conclusions. Nevertheless, it is widely cited in a number of quarters, quarters hostile to the admittedly distasteful Rajapaksa regime and happy to have any cane to beat up their activities.<\/p>\n

A headmaster wielding a cane must have judiciousness on his side. Moral crusaders such as, say, Amnesty International must adhere to ethics in presentation and quotation. But, as it happens, the last four years have seen blatant dishonesty in quotation as well as interpretation.<\/p>\n

Though aware that the LTTE personnel were often fighting without wearing uniforms and that it was well-nigh impossible to differentiate between \u201ccivilians\u201d and \u201csoldiers\u201d in some situations, the UNPoE proceeded to this conclusion in one of its key segments: \u201ca number of credible sources have estimated that there could have been as many as 40,000 civilian deaths<\/strong>\u201d (para 137 on page 41).<\/p>\n

What has transpired since? Take one early instance: Amnesty International has substituted \u201ccredible allegations\u201d with \u201ccredible evidence\u201d when quoting this report.<\/p>\n

A report submitted to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on 12 April 2011 by the Panel of Experts he appointed to advise him on accountability issues in Sri Lanka \u201cfound credible evidence<\/strong>, which if proven, indicate that a wide range of serious violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law was committed by both the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE, some of which would amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity\u201d (from one of their reports as quoted by Harshula in Groundviews in 2011).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Amnesty International was not an isolated instance and Harshula\u2019s essay of mid-2011 in a web-site devoted to the liberal human rights cause<\/a><\/span> pinpointed a number of other reports which made the same alteration. Amnesty International then indicated that this was a typological error and said that they would make a correction (they had not yet done so yet in June 2011).<\/p>\n

\"Vanni<\/a>Be that as it may, Amnesty International was not alone. I have certainly heard Kerry O\u2019Brien of ABC present this \u2018fact\u2019 on air. As Harshula indicated, a whole swathe of pious individuals and organisations had indulged in the same error. This in itself is suspicious. The consternation is compounded now, some four years later, when one finds the error \u2013 an act of dishonesty in effect \u2013 inscribed in stone. Esteemed organisations as well as every Tom, Dick and Mary of a reporter believes that the UNPoE had discovered \u201ccredible evidence\u201d of 40,000 civilian deaths during the last five months of Eelam War IV — that is between 1 January and 19th<\/sup> May 2009.<\/p>\n

Amanda Hodge of The Australian<\/em> has recently joined the brigade peddling duplicity on this issue. On Thursday 20th<\/sup> August, in reporting Mahinda Rajapaksa\u2019s failure to win a parliamentary majority in the General Elections held in August, she added:<\/p>\n

Mr Rajapaksa\u2019s bid at a political comeback, by winning enough seats to become prime minister, has been widely interpreted as an attempt to protect himself, his family and allies from prosecution relating to a slew of charges arising from his 10 years in power. They potentially include war crimes charges relating to the last months of the civil war in which as many as 40,000 civilians were killed.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, here we see definitiveness once again \u2013 a distortion of some consequence, something drummed into the careless world of journalism by constant repetition that could, conceivably, be the product of orchestration and manipulation.<\/p>\n

A Sri Lankan Aussie\u2019s Failure <\/strong><\/p>\n

Facing this inaccuracy (and likely duplicity), I decided to bring this error to the attention of the Australian news-reading world, even though I was not optimistic about the likelihood of success. As both a tactic and a pertinent strategy in the year marking the 100th<\/sup> Anniversary<\/a><\/span> of the disastrous, yet meaningfully momentous<\/a><\/span>, battles at Gallipoli in the Dardanelles in 1915, I highlighted the proportion of wounded Australian soldiers (19,441) to the number who were killed (8,709).[1]<\/a> In military parlance this meant that WIA was 2.28 in relation to KIA. This has been a common feature in most recent wars. In this manner I was marking a gaping hole in the thinking and capacities of the bourgeois office-room personnel who composed the UNPoE document. This was a serious contention about a serious issue.<\/p>\n

Deploying a contact within The Australian<\/em>\u2019s staff, on the 24th<\/sup> August I sent an essay of some 1091 words to Alister McMillan, its \u201cWorld News Editor.\u201d Guided by a friendly journalist in Perth and an Aussie pal in Queensland, I also composed a short 320 word \u201cLetter to the Editor\u201d and sent that to the appropriate slot in that newspaper\u2019s base on the 26th<\/sup> August. I then coined another version of intermediate length, some 736 words in length, and sent it to the web-journal South Asian Masala<\/em> because it is associated with academics[2]<\/a> and I had succeeded in entering its portals way back in 2009 or so when Sandy Gordon was its editor.<\/p>\n

I have rarely succeeded in breaching the portals of the Australian newspaper world so my endeavours were not oiled by expectations of success. Sure enough I have failed in all three efforts (the second intermediate length essay is included below as an example)<\/em>. Or, rather, one could say that The Australian <\/em>did not pass my test. They are (A) not interested in correcting factual inaccuracies; (B) not interested in addressing specious reasoning and (C) and not interested in taking to task such sacred cows as Amnesty International. And, last but not least, issues relating to a little island such as Lanka are of limited consequence. So be it. An iniquitous world is it not?<\/p>\n

*** ***<\/p>\n

B- Medium-Size Essay entitled \u201c<\/strong>Home-Truths from Gallipoli: Those in Office Attics cannot read Death Tolls Anywhere\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

One hundred year after Gallipoli the carnage in that confined theatre of battle provides lessons for those addressing the last phase of the Sri Lankan War in 2009. At Gallipoli the number of wounded was greater than those killed: 8,709 Australians died and 19,441 were wounded (WIA). The ratio of WIA to KIA was 2.23<\/a><\/span> and for the Allied forces taken together the ratio was 2.18.<\/p>\n

In the last phase of the Sri Lankan war pitting the state against the de facto LTTE state during the period 1 January to 19 May 2009, the Tamil Tigers and their people were confined to the Vanni Pocket in the north-east. Some civilians slipped through the battle lines by foot or boat, while roughly 13,000 were evacuated by ships organized by the ICRC with SL Navy assistance between early February and 9th<\/sup> May. By early March the remaining body of Tamils was pressed into even less space; and by mid-April the remaining body of civilians and Tiger fighters, amounting to an estimated 200,000 individuals, was hemmed in within what can be termed the \u201cLast Redoubt\u201d of 24 square kilometres of coastline.<\/p>\n

The Tamil people were so placed because the LTTE had persuaded and\/or dragooned them into this corral as a defensive formation<\/a><\/span> of so many (vulnerable) sandbags that would constitute a spectre of \u201chumanitarian disaster\u201d \u2013 a spectre which would, the LTTE hoped, induce a UN\/Western intervention<\/a><\/span> to save their bacon. As the Tiger political chief Pulidevan told European friends, \u201cjust as in Kosovo if enough civilians died in Sri Lanka the world would be forced to step in\u201d (Frances Harrison, Counting the Dead<\/em><\/a><\/span>, 2012: 63).<\/p>\n

The danger to \u201ccivilians\u201d was all the greater because (1) many Tiger fighters did not wear fatigues; (2) able-bodied civilians were utilized for the building of berms and logistical operations<\/span><\/a> and thus made into \u201cbelligerents\u201d in war terminology; and (3) the SL Army\u2019s infantry attacks were mostly at night. In a remarkable operation on the night of the 19\/20th<\/sup> May, commando troops penetrated the Last Redoubt and some 103,000 Tamils, including Tiger personnel who had discarded their weapons, streamed out.<\/p>\n

The Western media has simply failed \u2013 and one could say \u201crefused\u201d \u2013 to comprehend these circumstances. Their office room nourishment assists this process of miscomprehension. Political orientations ill-disposed towards the Rajapaksa government \u2013 for good reasons I might add \u2013 have encouraged this leaning. Amanda Hodge is a fine illustration. In commenting upon the recent parliamentary elections, she speaks of the Rajapaksa party\u2019s failure to secure a majority as a blow to his hopes of meeting \u201cwar crimes charges relating to the last months of the war in which as many as 40,000 civilians were killed\u201d<\/strong> (The Australian<\/em><\/a><\/span>, 20 August 2015, p. 8).<\/p>\n

This is an act of duplicity. The UN Panel of Experts Report dated 31 March 2011<\/a><\/span> actually said this: \u201ca number of credible sources have estimated that there could have been as many as 40,000 civilian deaths<\/strong>\u201d (para 137 on page 41). The fact that an imposing array of reporters has reiterated this allegation as definite fact does not render her \u2018crime\u2019 any less a \u2018crime\u2019.<\/p>\n

But that is not my main argument. The emphasis here is on the lessons that Australians can draw from the ratio of wounded to dead at Gallipoli (and for that matter all wars). To any person asserting that \u201cpossibly 40,000 Tamil civilians died,\u201d the simple question is: \u201chow many wounded were there among the survivors assembled between, say, March and May\/June 2009?\u201d<\/p>\n

As it happens, the UN personnel in Colombo had computed figures for the wounded in hospitals and detention centres. This computation is referred to in passing by the UNPoE: \u201c<\/em>The United Nations Country Team is one source of information; in a document that was never released publicly, it estimated a total figure of 7,721 killed and 18,479 injured from August 2008 up to 13 May 2009<\/u>, after which it became too difficult to count.\u201d [para 134].<\/p>\n

The implication of this assessment is (conveniently?) passed over in the UNPoE conclusion two paragraphs later, viz. paragraph 137 quoted above. Reporters such as Hodge, of course, have not read the whole document or evaluated the physical context of the war and its extraordinary facets. They have simply not transcended their cloistered office-room perspective. Even the home-truths from Gallipoli have not been brought into their readings.<\/p>\n

*Michael Roberts<\/em><\/strong>,<\/em> Dept of Anthropology, Adelaide University<\/em><\/p>\n

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY servicing ALL Four pieces<\/strong><\/p>\n

De Silva-Ranasinghe, Sergei<\/strong>\u00a02009b \u201cThe Battle for the Vanni Pocket,\u201d\u00a0Asia-Pacific Defence Reporter<\/em>, March 2009, Vol. 35\/2, pp. 17-19. \u2026 and http:\/\/www.dtic.mil\/dtic\/aulimp\/citations\/gsa\/ 2009157395\/156554.html<\/p>\n

De Silva-Ranasinghe, Sergei<\/strong>\u00a02010b \u201cInformation Warfare and the Endgame of the Civil War,\u201d\u00a0Asia-Pacific Defence Reporter<\/em>, May 2010 30\/4: 35-37. \u2026. and http:\/\/www.asiapacificdefencereporter.com\/ articles\/40\/Sri-Lanka.<\/p>\n

Harshula<\/strong>\u00a02011a \u201cWhen allegations becomes evidence,\u201d 6 June 2011, http:\/\/groundviews.org\/2011\/06\/06\/when-allegations-become-evidence\/<\/p>\n

Harrison, Frances<\/strong>\u00a02012\u00a0Still Counting the Dead<\/em>, London: Portobello.<\/p>\n

Hodge, Amanda <\/strong>2015 \u201cSri Lankan poll loser Rajapaksa may quit to dodge prosecution,\u201d The Australian<\/em>, 20 August 2015, http:\/\/m.theaustralian.com.au\/news\/world\/sri-lankan-poll-loser-rajapaksa-may-quit-to-dodge-prosecution\/story-e6frg6so-1227490467880<\/p>\n

ICEP<\/strong> 2014 Island of Impunity?<\/em> Investigation into International Crimes committed during the Final Stage ages of the Sri Lankan Civil War<\/em>, Sydney: Public Interest Advocacy Centre Ltd, http:\/\/www.piac.asn.au\/sites\/default\/files\/publications\/extras\/island_of_impunity.pdf<\/p>\n

IDAG [i.e. Citizen Silva]<\/strong>\u00a02013 \u201cThe Numbers Game: Politics of Retributive Justice,\u201d http:\/\/www.scribd.com\/doc\/132499266\/The-Numbers-Game-Politics-of-Retributive-Justice\u00a0OR <\/strong>http:\/\/www.satp.org\/satporgtp\/countries\/shrilanka\/document\/TheNG.pdf<\/p>\n

Jeyaraj, DBS<\/strong>\u00a02009 \u201cWretched of the Wanni Earth break Free of Bondage,\u201d Daily Mirror<\/em>, 25 April 2009.<\/p>\n

Mango<\/strong>\u00a02014 \u201cSri Lanka\u2019s War In Its Last Phase: Where WIA Figures Defeat The Gross KIA Estimates,\u201d 14 February 2014, https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/sri-lankas-war-in-its-last-phase-where-wia-figures-defeat-the-gross-kia-estimates\/<\/p>\n

Marga<\/strong>\u00a02011\u00a0An Analysis and Evaluation of The Report of the Advisory Panel to the UNSG nn the Final Stages of the War in Sri Lanka, <\/em>https:\/\/www.dropbox.com\/s\/0eybj1ynej6spaa\/The%20Darusman%20Report-%20Final%20doc-2.doc<\/p>\n

Marga<\/strong>\u00a02014\u00a0Issues of Truth and Accountability. The Last Stages of the War in Sri Lanka<\/em>, https:\/\/www.dropbox.com\/s\/tdxwntf7wu5andq\/The%20Last%20Stages%20of%20the%20war%20in%20Sri%20Lanka.pdf?n=66191473.<\/p>\n

Minnick, Wendell<\/strong> 2015 \u201cChina\u2019s One Belt One Road Policy,\u201d 12 April 2015, http:\/\/www.defensenews.com\/story\/defense\/2015\/04\/11\/taiwan-china-one-belt-one-road-strategy\/25353561\/.<\/u><\/p>\n

Roberts, M.<\/strong>\u00a02013 \u201cBBC-Blind: Misreading the Tamil Tiger Strategy of International Blackmail, 2008-13,\u201d https:\/\/thuppahi.wordpress.com\/2013\/12\/08\/bbc-blind-misreading-the-tamil-tiger-strategy-of-international-blackmail-2008-13\/#more-11221<\/p>\n

Roberts, M.<\/strong>\u00a02013 \u201cCongestion in the \u201cVanni Pocket\u201d January-May 2009: Appendix IV for \u201cBBC Blind,\u201d https:\/\/thuppahi.wordpress.com\/2013\/12\/09\/congestion-in-the-vanni-pocket-january-may-2009- appendix-iv-for-bbc-blind\/<\/p>\n

Narendran, Rajasingham<\/strong>\u00a02014\u00a0\u201c<\/strong>Harsh Ground Realities in War: Decomposing Bodies and Missing Persons and Soldiers,\u201d 28 January 2014, https:\/\/thuppahi.wordpress.com\/2014\/01\/28\/11702\/<\/p>\n

Noble, Kath<\/strong>\u00a02013b \u201cNumbers Game reviewed by Kath Noble: The Full Monty,\u201d 14 July 2013,\u00a0https:\/\/thuppahi.wordpress.com\/2013\/07\/14\/numbers-game-reviewed-by-kath-noble-the-full-monty\/<\/p>\n

UN PoE<\/strong>\u00a02011\u00a0Report of the Secretary General\u2019s Panel of Experts report on Accountability in Sri Lanka,\u00a0<\/em>March 2011\u2026.http:\/\/www.un.org\/News\/dh\/infocus\/Sri_Lanka\/ POE_Report_Full.pdf.<\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> This point was first highlighted by one Mango (2014) who is British educated and works in UK (and must keep his identity secret for employment reasons).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Its present editors are Barbara Nelson, Nishank Motwani and Jesse Buck. Visit http:\/\/asiapacific.anu.edu.au\/blogs\/southasiamasala\/about\/.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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