Over this last week I’ve been going to some of the events at the Beyond Borders festival in Edinburgh.  Last night there was a short film about the Romanian Revolution in 1989, Mark Muller Stuart’s video diary from a trip to Libya earlier this year, and a discussion about similarities and differences between these ‘revolutions’ with the producers and narrators.

The second session saw an airing of a film about the final weeks and months of the civil war in Sri Lanka.  This is harrowing but necessary viewing indeed.  Although the film cannot be taken as fact it does seem to offer lots of evidence of war crimes committed against civilians by both sides – the LTT and the Sri Lankan government soldiers.  It leaves us with serious questions to answer – how can this happen in this day an age.  Somehow the government were able to implement a media blackout, perhaps not dissimilar to  what’s currently happening in Syria.  I remember suspecting a something was going on in Sri Lanka at the time [around early 2009] and looking about for information I found a website that was a list of people that had been abducted or killed – that’s all it was a rolling list of names.  So it obviously wasn’t that difficult to get an idea what might be going on over there.  It seemed almost unreported in the West however.  It raises some questions: how did the media miss it?  was it just because the blackout was so effective?  were the media impassive because it’s difficult to make people take notice of a war that’s been going on for decades?  Surely, you’d think someone would make it through to report it.  Gordon Weiss, head of the UN in Sri lanka at the time and present at yesterday evening’s Q&A has recently written a book to help provide information on what we can learn from the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war.  Watch the film – this is something everyone should know about.

Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields by Channel 4 [Full video] from judy123 on Vimeo.