Vanguard Blog

The first time I visited Sri Lanka was in 2001. I was working as a correspondent for a travel show in Portugal, my home country, and had three days to tour around this small Island nation and put together a 5-minute piece about the wonderful sights and scenery.

Before traveling there, I was handed a folder with all the hotels I’d be staying at and monuments I’d be visiting. But what really caught my attention was a little footnote with an intriguing name – the Tamil Tigers. Having majored in International Relations in Lisbon, I had heard about the group and knew they’d been waging a war against the Sri Lankan government since the early 80’s to establish an independent state for the country’s Tamil minority. But that was pretty much it. So instead of leafing through travel brochures and pictures of resort pools and marble lobbies, I spent much of my research learning more about the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, better know as the Tamil Tigers. And what I found out was fascinating.

Here are some facts about the group that if you didn’t know are bound to leave you amazed too:

1. They were the only non-state organization with its own army, air force and navy.

2. They were early pioneers in the use of suicide bombings as a tactic, creating a commando unit called “the Black Tigers” just for this purpose.

3. They invented the suicide vest, and conducted more suicide attacks than Hamas and Hezbollah combined.

4. They were the first group to use women in suicide attacks.

5. They assassinated two world leaders, one of which was Rajiv Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India.

6. They were notorious for their recruitment of child soldiers.

Pretty good resume, right? So, as soon as I set foot in the country it became apparent to my cameraman and our driver that I was far more interested in hearing about the powerful Tigers than I was about the pristine beaches or the ancient temples. But since I was a travel reporter, I was steered as far away as possible from any sign of the war and instead was whisked around from tour site to tour site, asking questions such as, “Is this your idea of paradise?” to honeymooning couples who were having a relaxing day at the beach, at least until I came along.

But earlier this year I finally got to pursue the itinerary I was really interested in, when I returned to Sri Lanka to witness a historic moment: The defeat of the Tamil Tigers and with that the end of Asia’s longest-running civil war. In “Sri Lanka: Notes from a War on Terror”, which airs tonight at 10pm EST/PST we look at what led to the downfall of one of the most powerful militant groups the world has ever known, and what lessons, if any, can be learned from the Sri Lankan government’s War on Terror.

This Week on Vanguard: Sri Lanka: Notes from a War on Terror (Video)

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- Chinese Mobsters and Megacities – Joanne Shen
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There’s a lot of soul searching going on in the field of journalism these days. It’s been a tough year. And I don’t just mean for the declining newspaper industry.

It’s a little early to be doing end-of-year accounting, but it relates to Vanguard’s story this week, so bear with me.

Looking back, 2009 was a year that saw perhaps more high profile cases of journalists in jeopardy than in a long while: freelance reporter Roxana Saberi, New York Times reporters David Rohde and Stephen Farrell, Newsweek’s Maziar Bahari and of course our colleagues Laura Ling and Euna Lee, just to name a few.

Reporting, especially in conflict zones and repressive environments, has always been and will always be a risky endeavor. Our president of programming likes to quote “The Godfather” when we talk here about the risks that reporters often assume: “This is the business that we have chosen.”

And while it’s true that many of us often choose to parachute in and out of risky places in order to tell stories that we believe need to be told, there is also the understanding that we have a safe place to retreat when things get too dodgy.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case for local reporters.

While reporting this week’s episode of Vanguard, “Sri Lanka: Notes from A War on Terror”, Mariana van Zeller and I encountered one of the toughest media crackdowns we’ve ever experienced. Like all independent reporters, we were shut out of the war zone, refused entry into hospitals where the sick and wounded were being taken, and banned from refugee camps. But worst of all, in Sri Lanka’s War on Terror the government had drawn an eerily familiar line: “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.” And few people felt comfortable speaking openly or challenging the government’s prosecution of the war out of fear that they would be labeled a traitor or worse, a supporter of terrorism.

Much of the risk reporters take on is when trying to navigate around the barriers that are put up to block them from getting information, information that is often vital to drawing a true picture of events. Needless to say, Sri Lanka’s media crackdown was frustrating for us. But the struggles we faced were put into perspective when we visited the office of The Sunday Leader newspaper. There we found the empty office of Lasantha Wickramatunge, a prominent Sri Lankan journalist and editor of the Sunday Leader. Lasantha was a dogged reporter who spent his career exposing corruption and misdeeds in government. He was also a vocal critic of Sri Lanka’s War on Terror. It was a stance that would cost him his life.

In January, just months before the war officially came to an end, Lasantha was shot in the head and killed by unknown gunmen while on his way to work. But knowing that he was a target, just days before he was killed, Lasantha wrote an editorial that on his instructions was only to be published upon his death.

“When finally I am killed,” he wrote. “It will be the government that kills me.“

Lasantha’s letter from the grave received worldwide attention. But he was not alone. According to Amnesty International, at least 14 Sri Lankan journalists and media workers have been killed since 2006. And many others have been assaulted, arrested or fled the country. Unfortunately, Sri Lanka is also not alone. All over the world, there are journalists who daily suffer repression and intimidation, risk imprisonment and sometimes their lives in pursuit of truth.

This is the business we have chosen.

***

Within the journalism community there is a healthy debate now taking place about how we can better look after ourselves and members of our community, and still cover important stories. A few weeks ago, Mariana van Zeller and I were invited to New York by PBS’s FRONTLINE/World to participate in a small gathering of journalists and media representatives to discuss the challenges of covering conflicts and working in repressive environments.

The participants ranged from New York Times reporters to freelancers, established media organizations to fairly new upstarts like ourselves.

The idea is to eventually create a resource for journalists of all stripes when it comes to covering difficult stories. For more info go here.

Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
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- Doctors Wanted: no experience necessary! – Cerissa Tanner
- All you ever needed to know about Vanguard, and then some. – Mariana van Zeller
- Kentucky Targets “The OxyContin Express” – Mariana van Zeller
- A Shout-Out to Interns Everywhere – Tracey Chang

Just as we’re getting ready to put the finishing touches on our Sri Lanka story for the upcoming season of Vanguard (premieres Sept. 30) comes video footage of what appears to be Sri Lankan troops summarily executing Tamils.  The video was apparently shot on a cellphone camera by a Sri Lankan soldier; obtained by “Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka”, a group Sri Lankan journalists, writers and human rights advocates in exile; and passed along to Channel 4 News in the UK.

JDS says the video was shot in January during the height of the war between government forces and the Tamil Tigers.   And it has just surfaced now, 3 months after the government of Sri Lanka claimed victory in their 30 year conflict with the militant separatists.  During the last months of the war, independent journalists were banned from reporting in the conflict zone and there were many rumors and leaked videos of atrocities.  But this footage would seem to be the worst evidence of war crimes to have emerged thus far.

The Sri Lankan government has challenged the veracity of the footage, alleging that it’s “doctored”.

We’ll be exploring this latest development and much more in our piece for the new Vanguard season.  In the meantime, for more on the video, check out Channel 4 correspondent Jonathan Miller’s blog.

Click here for the raw video ***Warning: it’s graffic***

The body identified as Tamil Tiger leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, being carried through Sri Lankan troops.

When Vanguard correspondent Mariana van Zeller and I set out a few weeks ago to cover what appeared to be the waning days of the 25-year conflict in Sri Lanka, we knew that the fighting could come to an end before we ever got our piece to air.

And so it did. On Tuesday, Sri Lanka’s president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, declared victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or the LTTE, a militant group that has been fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka’s ethnic Tamil minority for nearly three decades.

Over the years, the war in Sri Lanka has received little attention in the US. It was a local conflict, and the US never really had a dog in the fight. That’s how it appears on the surface anyway. But dig a little deeper and you see that the war in Sri Lanka has had repercussions that extend far beyond the small island nation’s shores.

The LTTE are in many ways the original gangsters of modern day terror. They have been one of the most cutting-edge insurgencies the world has ever seen, and their tactics have served as a model and inspiration for terrorist organizations around the globe. Today, the Tiger’s influence can be seen from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to the streets of an increasingly fragile Pakistan.

Inventors of the suicide vest, the LTTE conducted more suicide operations than Hamas and Hezbollah combined. Innovators in international fund raising, they proudly boasted that they were the only militant group to have formed a navy and an air force.

But after Sept. 11, the mighty Tigers, who once controlled up to a quarter of Sri Lankan territory, quickly found themselves on the wrong side of history. And the once feeble government of Sri Lanka was emboldened by the Global War On Terror launched by the US and its allies.

We’ll examining this and much, much more in our piece, including if the conflict is truly over. We’ve seen at least one premature declaration of “Mission Accomplished” since the war on terror began. Major combat operations in Sri Lanka may have ended, but there’s a lot of hard feelings and the long road of reconciliation still lies ahead.