Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, Channel 4, review

Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields went out at 11.00pm but was a flagship news programme for Channel 4, presented by the great Jon Snow and pitched as a clarion call for the world to wake up to the war crimes that allegedly took place during the final months of Sri Lanka’s 25-year-long civil war, in 2009.
The UN’s own report on the subject, published earlier this year, has already described what it terms “credible reports” of war crimes perpetrated by the Sri Lankan government’s army against the country’s Tamil civilians. Channel 4 here provided what it introduced as corroborative visual evidence in the form of eyewitness accounts, amateur film footage, photographs and mobile phone videos.

The reason the programme went out so late was that much of this footage was horrendous to behold. The first two sections consisted mainly of amateur film of civilians, shot by the victims themselves, during or in the immediate aftermath of being shelled. It was graphic and deeply disturbing but not unlike the snippets of such imagery found in regular news bulletins. The final third of the programme – and Jon Snow warned us it would be vile – focused on mobile phone films of a series of live executions of prisoners, and the disposal and abuse of raped and mutilated bodies (most naked), filmed by the murderers themselves as trophy footage. Other soldiers could be seen filming the scenes with their phones at the same time. One video Channel 4 had shown before, most it hadn’t.