Channel 4 News Wins

CHANNEL 4 NEWS WINS

THE 2011 BRYCE MEMORIALPRIZE FOR ITS

COVERAGEOF SRI LANKA’S CIVIL WAR

Citation

Channel 4 News has been awarded the inaugural 2011 Bryce Memorial Prize for the sustained and inventive way in which it has reproduced war atrocity propaganda in keeping with the spirit and letter of the 1915 Bryce Report. It has been said of the Bryce Report that no distortion was too bizarre. Channel 4 News’ coverage of the last few weeks of the Sri Lankan civil war, including claims of head-hunting, breast-amputating soldier vampires has more than lived up to that standard. In short Channel 4 News has taken war atrocity propaganda to another level.

In awarding Channel 4 News the inaugural Bryce Memorial Prize for war atrocity propaganda, specifically for its claims in 2011 regarding events at the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, it is important to outline the inspiration for the award itself. The Bryce Report, more fully known as the Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages Appointed by His Britannic Majesty’s Government and Presided Over by the Right Hon. Viscount Bryce, O.M. &c., &c., Formerly British Ambassador at Washington, was published in 1915, one year into the First World War.[1]

The 360-page report, said to have been based on 1,200 witness depositions, was published in 1915 by the British government and translated into thirty languages for world-wide distribution. It claimed to document the systematic murder and violation of Belgians by German soldiers during their invasion of Belgium. It alleged, amongst other things, mass rapes, the bayoneting of babies, and the cutting off of children’s hands and women’s breasts. The report claimed that there were “cases of conspicuous hospitals being shelled, in the witnesses’ opinion, purposely”; that civilians “including women and children” were used “as a shield for advancing forces exposed to fire”; that there were “deliberate and systematically organised massacres of the civil population”; that there was “looting, house burning, and the wanton destruction of property”; and that the rules of war regarding the use of the white flag were broken and abused with loss of life.

American war historian Thomas Fleming has pointed out that Bryce “was one of the best known historians of the era…It would have been hard to find a more admired scholar”. Fleming stated with regard to the report that “[t]he impact was stupendous”, as these headlines and sub-headlines in the New York Times, for example, make clear: “German Atrocities are Proved, Finds Bryce Committee. Not Only Individual Crimes, but Premeditated Slaughter in Belgium”; “Young and Old Mutilated. Women Attacked, Children Brutally Slain, Arson and Pillage Systematic”; “Countenanced by Officers. Wanton Firing on Red Cross and White Flag: Prisoners and Wounded Shot” and “Civilians Used as Shields”. “Testimony that shows murder and mutilation of men, women and children evidence that Germans had set plan of slaughter and pillage.”[2]

On 27 May 1915, British propaganda officials in America reported to London: “Even in papers hostile to the Allies, there is not the slightest attempt to impugn the correctness of the facts alleged.” Charles Masterman, the head of Britain’s central propaganda agency, informed Lord Bryce that his report “has swept America”.[3]

While there is no doubt that German forces were party to unacceptable behaviour, it is now evident that there were many questions about the tone and accuracy of the Bryce Report. Fleming, for example, has noted:

Lord Bryce the scholar should have known -- and almost certainly did know --that tales of spearing babies and cutting off the breasts of murdered women were standard “hate-this-enemy” fables hundreds of years old, So were mass rapes in fields and public squares. He should have rejected such fabrications out of hand. Instead, he lumped them all into a general condemnation of the German army and people.

One of the few critics of the Bryce Report at the time of its release was Bryce’s old colleague, Sir Roger Casement. In a withering essay, “The Far Extended Baleful Power of the Lie”, Casement spoke of “Lord Bryce, the partisan”. Clarence Darrow, the famous American lawyer, was another critic. He travelled to France later in 1915 to test the claims made in the report: he “searched in vain for a single eyewitness who could confirm even one of the Bryce stories”.[4] Darrow announced he would pay $1,000, a huge amount of money then, to anyone who could produce a Belgian or French boy whose hands had been amputated by a German soldier. Nobody came forward. The Pope, the Italian government and David Lloyd George also conducted fruitless investigations to confirm these claims.

Fleming also notes that “After the war, historians who sought to examine the documentation for Bryce’s stories were told that the files had mysteriously disappeared.”[5] The original Belgian witness depositions could not be located by the British government, which had been tasked with protecting and preserving them. This prevented others from questioning and investigating the depositions to prove if the Bryce Report was true.[6]

Fleming has pointed out that even the few commentators who have re-examined Bryce’s credibility “admit Bryce’s report was seriously ‘contaminated’ by the rapes, amputations and speared babies.” It is clear that there were serious doubts at the time amongst commission members themselves regarding the tales of mutilation and rape. Fleming records that:

One of the committee’s secretaries admitted that he had been given numerous English addresses of Belgian women supposedly made pregnant by German rapes but could not locate a single case. Even the story of a member of Parliament sheltering two pregnant women turned out to be fraudulent. Bryce apparently brushed aside this negative evidence.[7]

Phillip Knightley in his classic study of war reporting, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth Maker from the Crimea to Iraq, noted that “A Belgian commission of enquiry in 1922, when passions had cooled, failed markedly to corroborate a single major allegation in the Bryce report.”[8]

The Bryce Report has subsequently been described as “largely a tissue of invention, unsubstantiated observations by unnamed witnesses, and second-hand eyewitness reports, depending far more on imagination than any other factor.”[9] The respected American historian,Horace Cornelius Peterson, said in his seminal study Propaganda for War: The Campaign Against American Neutrality, 1914-1917 that the Bryce report, while claiming to document atrocities, was “in itself one of the worst atrocities of the war.” [10]The propaganda historian Gary S. Messinger, author of British Propaganda and the State in the First World War and The Battle For The Mind,stated that Bryce was guilty of “an irresponsible misuse of judicial procedure that disseminated...huge untruths.”[11] Knightley described the Bryce report as “one of the most successful propaganda pieces of the war.”[12]

The Report is considered by contemporary historians to be a “prime example of untruthful war propaganda.”[13]James Hayward, in his book Myths and Legends of the First World War, noted thatfor Bryce, “no lie was too great and no distortion too bizarre.”[14]

The claims made by Channel 4 with regard to the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka have self-evidently echoed the sorts of “atrocity” propaganda seen in most wars. They have been jarringly reminiscent of the sorts of claims made in the Bryce Report during the First World War.

In the spirit of Bryce: Channel 4 News “reporting” of the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war

Channel 4 News has seen fit to go out of its way to focus upon and reproduce allegations made about events in the last months and weeks of the Sri Lankan civil war. The civil war was fought between democratically-elected Sri Lankan governments and the “Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam” (LTTE, also known as the “Tamil Tigers”), from 1983 until the defeat of the LTTE in May 2009.[15]

The LTTE was internationally recognised to be a particularly vicious terrorist group and was listed as a terrorist organisation by 31 countries. The Economist noted that “The Tigers were as vicious and totalitarian a bunch of thugs as ever adopted terrorism as a national-liberation strategy.”[16] After several failed rounds of peace talks and an internationally-mediated ceasefire agreement which failed – the government claimed the LTTE had violated the agreement over 10,000 times – the war recommenced in 2008.[17] Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his government decided that it would bring the LTTE’s hold on parts of Sri Lanka to an end and to do that the government had to reoccupy the territory controlled by the organisation. Government action drove the LTTE out of the entire Eastern Province of Sri Lanka with remarkably few civilian casualties, and in 2007 the government launched an offensive in the north of the country. Government forces gradually re-established control of the rest of LTTE-controlled areas, including their de-facto capital Kilinochi and the main LTTE military base at Mullaitivu, in the Vanni region.[18] From late 2008 onwards, as their area of control shrank, the LTTE illegally forced 300,000 Tamil civilians to accompany their fighters as human shields.[19] By 25 April 2009, the area held by the LTTE, a shrinking pocket of land on the north-east coastline, was reduced to some 10 square kilometres in size. The government declared several “no-fire zones” to protect civilians. These were nevertheless caught up in the relentless fighting between government forces and the LTTE. The LTTE admitted defeat on 17 May.

In several news reports and in a 50 minute-long specially-commissioned documentary in 2011, Channel 4 News repeated a series of claims about events at the end of the war.[20] As in the Bryce Report, Channel 4 News relied on unnamed, unidentified and disguised witnesses. In the one instance where it identified a Sri Lankan witness, one Vany Kumar, while she was presented as a British woman civilian of Tamil descent innocently caught up in the last months of the civil war while visiting relatives, it was subsequently revealed that she was a fully-trained “Tamil Tiger” terrorist assigned to the LTTE propaganda division. This witness was known by five names.[21]

As in the Bryce Report, Channel 4 News claimed government forces had forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians, used human shields and had deliberately shelled hospitals and civilians in the final months of the war.[22]

As in the Bryce Report, Channel 4 News claimed government forces had deliberately killed men, women and children. On 27 July 2011, for example, Channel 4 News screened a programme in which they claimed to have testimony from an eyewitness, “Fernando”, who stated that “men, women, and children were actively targeted with small arms by government forces”:

I saw a lot of small children, who were so innocent, getting killed in large numbers. A large number of elders were also killed. They were shooting when a large number of civilians were crossing through a lagoon, including women and children. The soldiers were shooting at them.[23]

As in the Bryce Report, Channel 4 News alleged that government forces had mutilated civilians. Channel 4’s unidentified witness “Fernando” claimed of the Sri Lankan forces:

When I look at it as an outsider I think they’re simply brutal beasts. Their hearts are like that of animals, with no sense of humanity. They shoot people at random, stab people, rape them, cut their tongues out, cut women’s breasts off. I have witnessed all this with my own eyes. [24]

“Fernando” claimed that these inhumane acts extended to further acts of mutilation: “I saw the naked dead bodies of women without heads and other parts of their bodies. I saw a mother and child dead and the child’s body was without its head.”

Channel 4 News actually trumped the Bryce Report in the atrocity propaganda stakes when their witness “Fernando” claimed that Sri Lankan soldiers had turned into “vampires”:

For the soldiers at the battlefront, their hearts had turned to stone. Having seen blood, killings and death for so long, they had lost their sense of humanity. I would say they had turned into vampires.

Unsurprisingly all these allegations were rejected by the government.[25] But unlike the allegations contained in the Bryce Report, which needed several years to be proved to be deeply questionable where not simply false, the questionable nature of Channel 4 News’ claims was also immediately apparent.

A very different picture of the Sri Lankan army and its behaviour on the ground in the last few weeks and days of the war is provided by Gordon Weiss, a former UN spokesman in Sri Lanka, and author of The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers, a controversial, anti-government, view of the last few months of the war.[26] Weiss is clearly no friend of the government. Weiss has been presented by Channel 4 News as a credible commentator on Sri Lanka, and especially the final phase of the war. [27]By chance, Weiss provides a snapshot of the behaviour of the very unit of which “Fernando” claimed to have been a member:

58th Division troops overran 20,000 civilians crouching in bunkers inside the No Fire Zone. Using loudspeakers as they inched forward through the jungles and across the rice paddy fields, troops summoned people towards their lines, despite the ferocious fighting and shelling all around...On the whole...the vast majority of people who escaped seem to have been received with relative restraint and care by the front-line SLA troops, who quickly passed them up the line for tea, rice and first aid.[28]

Weiss records that “the army probed the Tiger defences, and calculated how to separate civilians from cadres.” That is to say to differentiate who, as LTTE fighters, were legitimate targets, and who as civilians were not. And he notes further that in the last few days “[c]ommandos were fighting their way through a tent city, hurling grenades, trying to distinguish Tiger fighters from civilians...Thousands of people streamed across the lagoon to the safety of army lines as soldiers urged them on. Tiger cadres fired at both soldiers and civilians.”[29]

The contrast with the grotesque claims made by Channel 4’s unidentified witness “Fernando”, and the reality provided by Weiss – could not have been starker:

It remains a credit to many of the front-line SLA soldiers that, despite odd cruel exceptions, they so often seem to have made the effort to draw civilians out from the morass of fighting ahead of them in an attempt to save lives. Soldiers yelled out to civilians, left gaps in their lines while they waved white flags to attract people forward and bodily plucked the wounded from foxholes and bunkers. Troops bravely waded into the lagoon under fire to rescue wounded people threading their way out of the battlefield or to help parents with their children, and gave their rations to civilians as they lay in fields, exhausted in their first moments of safety after years of living under the roar and threat of gunfire.[30]

Weiss, therefore, quite clearly contradicts the Channel 4 News’ atrocity propaganda which claimed that exactly the same unit were “simply brutal beasts”, that “[t]heir hearts are like that of animals” and that they had “no sense of humanity”. Rather than going out of their way to save civilians – as repeatedly reported by Weiss – Channel 4 News claims that they instead shot, stabbed and raped them – and if that was not enough they also found time during the intense combat to “cut their tongues out” and “cut women’s breasts off”. Lord Bryce would have been proud of Channel 4 News.

There was an additional observer of events towards the end of the conflict, the University Teachers for Human Rights (UTHR). Weiss describes the University Teachers for Human Rights as a “highly regarded” and “independent” human rights organisation.[31] Like Weiss, UTHR has historically been very critical of the government. Nonetheless, UTHR stated:

In the context of the present war which took a heavy toll on the lives of soldiers, these ordinary men have shown remarkable restraint towards civilians when they come to contact with them. The civilians are uniformly scathing about the LTTE, and frequently found the Army helpful and considerate...It is hard to identify any other Army that would have endured the provocations of the LTTE, which was angling for genocide, and caused proportionately little harm.[32]

The University Teachers for Human Rights also described the behaviour of the very Sri Lankan army unit referred to by “Fernando”:

Soldiers who entered the No Fire Zone on 19th April 2009 and again on the 9th and 15th May acted with considerable credit when they reached the proximity of civilians. They took risks to protect civilians and helped across the elderly who could not walk. Those who escaped have readily acknowledged this.[33]