GENEVA, March 2, (Agencies): A documentary purporting to show the execution of civilians and other war crimes committed by the Sri Lankan army had its first public screening on Friday but was swiftly rejected by the government as part of an “orchestrated campaign” against it.

The documentary “No Fire Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka” is the third by British journalist and director Callum Macrae about the final stages of the nearly 30-year civil war.

“We see it as a film of record, but also a call to action,” Macrae told a news briefing. “All of it is genuine. It is evidence of war crimes and I have to warn you it is pretty horrific.”

Tens of thousands of civilians were killed in 2009 in the final months the war, a UN panel has said, as government troops advanced on the ever-shrinking northern tip of the island controlled by Tamil rebels fighting for an independent homeland.

The film depicts terrifying scenes from the territory held by the Tamil Tiger rebels just before their defeat in May 2009. In the so-called “No Fire Zone” declared by the army, rights groups say soldiers killed thousands of Tamil civilians by heavy shelling and massacres yet perpetrators have gone unpunished.

Guilty
“The Tigers are guilty of war crimes, guilty of using child soldiers and preventing civilians from leaving, so they are complicit in some ways in what happened,” Macrae told reporters.

Sri Lanka’s government this week formally protested against the film’s screening on UN premises on the sidelines of the Human Rights Council. The event, organised by activist groups seeking an international inquiry into atrocities by both sides, was allowed to proceed.

“By providing a platform for the screening of this film which includes footage of dubious origin, content that is distorted and without proper sourcing and making unsubstantiated allegations, the sponsors of this event seek to tarnish the image of Sri Lanka,” Ravinatha Aryasinha, Sri Lanka’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, told the audience on Friday.

Aryasinha — who did not attend the viewing but entered just after the 90-minute film ended — said: “It will take a few days, possibly weeks, before experts in the field would be able to ascertain the true facts about the contents of this film.”

Colombo considered the film as “part of a cynical, concerted and orchestrated campaign that is strategically driven and aimed at influencing debate in the council on Sri Lanka,” he said.

Some footage of troops executing naked and blindfolded prisoners are from “trophy videos” taken by government soldiers on mobile phones, according to Macrae, whose two previous films on Sri Lanka’s civil war were broadcast by Britain’s Channel 4.

Probe
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which hosted the screening, are calling for the council to order an international probe.

They charge that Sri Lanka’s domestic Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) has glossed over the military’s role.

The film for instance alleges that a “no fire zone” set up by the government in January, 2009, basically functioned as a trap for the hundreds of thousands of civilians who flooded into it in the hope of finding safety.

The area was heavily shelled, and in the film maimed and bloodied bodies, of men, women and children, lay strewn.

The UN has estimated that some 40,000 people were killed in the final months of the war, most of them due to indiscriminate shelling by the Sri Lankan military.

Peter Mackay, a UN worker who was trapped inside the zone for two weeks, questioned in the film why the government would set up the “no fire zone” within range of all of their artillery.

“Either you don’t care if you kill the people in that safe zone or you are actively targeting them,” he said, adding that he believed the latter was true.

He and others describe how aid-centres and make-shift hospitals were shelled soon after UN or Red Cross workers informed the government of their coordinates, which is ironically standard practice to ensure that such places are spared in bombing campaigns.

Footage
The footage provided by the retreating Tamil Tigers and civilians is devastating, showing parents wailing over their dying and dead children, but the images provided by the government forces are perhaps even more shocking.

Video of a Tamil commander first being interrogated, and then a picture of his mutilated body in the dirt; naked and bound prisoners coldly executed; dead, naked women, who have clearly been sexually abused filmed amid degrading comments by onlooking soldiers.

And then there is footage of the 12-year-old son of Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, Balachandran, whose body is seen with five bullet holes in his chest.

He was not caught in cross-fire: a separate video shot two hours earlier, shows him sitting in military custody in a bunker eating a biscuit.