It was irresistible television and that was the point.
There are many misconceptions and mischaracterisations of the ‘Head to Head’ interview of former President Ranil Wickremesinghe by internationally acclaimed journalist Mehdi Hasan for Al Jazeera.
For all intents and purposes, for better or for worse, Al Jazeera is a cable television channel and there seems to be little appreciation for the nuances of cable TV programming, the distinctions between news, documentaries, editorials, and interviews.
Al Jazeera was never meant to be ‘different’ to CNN, in fact it was meant to mimic that specific style of 24-hour news television, but offer a different perspective and cover stories that do not receive adequate coverage on western networks like CNN and BBC, hence its motto ‘The Opinion and the Other Opinion’.
In this context, interview programmes on cable-news television are as much about entertainment value as they are about journalism and the issues themselves. Al Jazeera’s ‘Head to Head’ is part of that ecosystem; it hosts important figures in expensive locations with no small amount of production value and so must necessarily be entertaining and engaging.
Whether or not we agree with the narratives on that programme is beside the point; Hasan’s ‘Head to Head’ is about confrontational verbal jousting and debate. If a well-rounded conversation emerges, that is almost a bonus and usually one that results from an excellent interviewee and panel.
If the panel appears biased in one direction, it is only imbalanced if there is nobody available to offer an alternative view, but this was not the case. Al Jazeera had Nirj Deva Aditya, a former British and European Member of Parliament, alongside Wickremesinghe, a six-time Prime Minister, former President, and cabinet minister.
The former President’s performance has been criticised overall, especially the manner in which he attempted to defend himself, appearing ‘childish’ as Hasan put it. Wickremesinghe’s claims of being interrupted must be considered with the context – on many occasions his responses began without directly addressing the question. In such a dynamic, the interviewer, pressed for time, is required to interrupt the response in order to extract an answer to the actual question at hand.
The media landscape
Despite a 45-year career, it seems Wickremesinghe has received very little media training. The dynamics of a television interview are different to a debate, with only the audience in the room to navigate.
A global television audience was an opportunity for Wickremesinghe to utilise the energy against him in the live audience to his advantage. Given the optics of an aggressive interviewer constantly interrupting and badgering him, with a partisan panel, former President Wickremesinghe might have considered utilising such a dynamic to make a forceful defence, either of his own record or that of the Sri Lankan State.
The importance of this interview, beyond the intended branding exercise for Wickremesinghe, is worth acknowledging. Cable news brings views to the subject. Al Jazeera has gained significant respect as a media entity for its coverage of the conflict in Gaza – coverage that has seen severe imbalances on other channels such as MSNBC, CNN, or BBC.
This is not conjecture. Mainstream cable news channels have been accused of serious failures in reporting standards, repeating Israeli propaganda without verification, such as the story of the beheaded babies in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on 7 October 2023. The New York Times’ expose of mass sexual violence and rape was criticised for its lack of evidence but nevertheless earned NYT a Pulitzer Prize.
Various studies by organisations such as Media Tenor International (2023), investigative media company the Intercept, think-tank Middle East Eye, and many more have published reports revealing clear instances of questionable reporting standards by Western outlets.
Furthermore, CNN announced lay-offs of some 6% of its total workforce; in 2023 the channel had 69 million viewers, down from 80 million in 2021, while there were funding cuts at the BBC World Service resulting from a loss of some 40 million listeners globally. All while Al Jazeera’s international channel, Al Jazeera English, has reached a high watermark of sorts at the exact moment previously powerful media companies like CNN and BBC are seeing their global viewership and ratings tumble.
Our own reflections
Coming to the substance of the interview, the early exchanges centred around (1) President Wickremesinghe’s actions against protestors and protest sites, and (2) The postponement of Local Government Elections with the claim that there were no funds available.
Both (1) and (2) are well established; the attacks on GotaGoGama (GGG), first by the supporters of the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) on 9 May 2022 and the illegal and violent destruction of the GGG protest site in the early hours of 22 July 2022, remain unanswered to this day. The Supreme Court has also confirmed that the people’s fundamental rights were violated and that funds were in fact available for the election.
There were many substantive points missed by Mehdi Hasan, specifically the issues of reconciliation and devolution, which many might say Wickremesinghe had championed in the past, or the 2016 Central Bank ‘Bond Scam’ – a subject that was reportedly off-limits.
These were less important than the failures of Wickremesinghe to defend the country’s overall image and the dignity and integrity of the armed forces more generally. Why was the former President unable or unwilling to make the positive case for Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the war, examples of which include the rapid resettlement of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), the rehabilitation and reintegration of thousands of LTTE cadres, the reconstruction of infrastructure in the north and east, and the holding of elections in areas previously held by the LTTE?
While it is difficult to quibble with some of the points made by the panelists, there were some gross mischaracterisations that went completely unanswered by both Wickremesinghe and Deva Aditya.
Broadly, City University London Senior Politics Lecturer Madura Rasaratnam and former Correspondent of the BBC Frances Harrison were accurate in their claims: Rasaratnam stating that Wickremesinghe was an establishment figure who became President with the explicit support of the Rajapaksas and their majority in Parliament; that he did not take the country’s calls for system change seriously and that he was responsible for protecting and perpetuating the status-quo at the time.
Harrison suggested that Wickremesinghe had provided safe passage and a soft-landing for Gotabaya Rajapaksa; a little simplistic but broadly accurate. However, thereafter, in claiming a systematic obstruction of justice for the victims, Rasaratnam claimed that the Sri Lankan State has “committed grave crimes, amounting to genocide”.
This conversation regarding genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and war crimes, and claims of mass civilian casualties totalling over 40,000 in the final months will not disappear and Sri Lanka has not succeeded in facing up to public scrutiny in a manner that is not detrimental to the country’s image internationally.
Genocide is an emotive and severe claim to make against a democratic state; such a claim necessarily reflects on the people who voted for a government alleged to have sought to systematically and deliberately destroy an ethnic group. This should not have been allowed to pass without response.
Many scholars consider genocide and ethnic cleansing as part of a spectrum of violence, but there are no serious claims in the scholarship that the Sri Lankan military or Government pursued a campaign of genocide or ethnic cleansing. Scholarship such as Damien Kingsbury’s work on Sri Lanka and the UN mandated ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) notes many of the alleged atrocities and war crimes but stops short of an explicit assertion of either ethnic cleansing or genocide.
To defend the country’s military from the very specific and serious charges of genocide and ethnic cleansing is not to diminish the seriousness of the war crimes alleged. In considering allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity, it is important to distinguish between explicitly state-sponsored, systematic policies of violence and crimes emanating from operational, and command decisions made by unit commanders during on-going live operations and battles.
For example, the Srebrenica massacre, also known as the Srebrenica genocide, was the July 1995 killing of some 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys in and around the town of Srebrenica during the Bosnian War. Evidence presented at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) substantiated orders from Serbian political and military leaders to carry out such atrocities.
Blood on the leaves
In other instances, war crimes have occurred without overarching orders from political or military leadership or an explicit campaign to commit such atrocities, but instead emanated from responses to battleground situations.
The ‘My Lai Massacre’ during the Vietnam War was perpetrated by a US military infantry regiment in a South Eastern village – My Lai – during a so-called search and destroy mission targeting the Viet Cong. Despite no fire exchanged, nearly 500 unarmed civilians were killed; over a dozen members of the division were charged and only one lieutenant was convicted; his life sentence was commuted after three-and-a-half years.
The 2005 Haditha Massacre in Iraq occurred when a US Marine was killed when an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) detonated; a subsequent unauthorised retaliatory mission undertaken by a US battalion of Marines left 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including women and children, dead in their homes. These atrocities are examples of decisions and operations arising from the so-called ‘fog or war’ and the pressure or trauma of a theatre of combat.
The Sri Lankan military, its chain of command, the defence establishment, and the Head of State have been broadly implicated in or accused of the disproportionate use of force, extrajudicial killings, and the deliberate targeting of civilians.
There is little if any contestation regarding the significance of the numbers of lives lost in these final stages; whether these alleged atrocities were part of a systematic, official policy generated by either political or military leadership is the vital question and in that regard, there is no evidence of direct, explicit authorisation of operations that resulted in significant civilian casualties emanating from the highest echelons of leadership.
The UN Panel of Experts report of 2011 and the OHCHR Investigation on Sri Lanka of 2015 have accused the Sri Lankan military of deliberately targeting areas demarcated as No-Fire Zones (NFZs), shelling hospitals, and executing LTTE cadres who were surrendering.
There is no definitive proof of official policy ordering or condoning any of the aforementioned allegations or that atrocities involving a significant loss of civilian life were the result of systematic policy. The various investigations into the war such as 2011 Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC, 2011) and Paranagama Commission (2014) have not uncovered any documentary proof of such systematic policy, a so-called smoking gun.
If former President Wickremesinghe had been able to maintain some level of composure, there is no reason why he would not have been able to sift through some of the above facts to provide more substantive responses. He might even have acknowledged that successive Sri Lankan governments have failed to keep to their own commitments to the UN; this inability to state well-established facts on the subject was a failure on Wickremesinghe’s part.
How many is too many?
Another controversial aspect of the interview was the by-now familiar claim of some 40,000 civilian casualties during the final stages of the war – a number that successive Sri Lankan governments have rejected.
Reports compiled by the United Nations country team in March 2009 suggest between 7,000 and 8,000 civilians killed up to that period since around October 2008. However by May 2009, this number was revised upwards to 40,000 as fighting intensified; the figure was based on satellite imagery, hospital records, and some witness testimony; the figures were not published at the time.
The 2011 report by a UN Panel of Experts stated that the figure of 40,000 was a credible estimate. The 2012 UN Secretary General’s Review did state that while this figure was plausible, there was no way to verify the claim.
Another estimate by the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) (UTHR-J) stated that the figure could reliably be around the 20,000 mark but that it was possible for the 40,000 number to be credible as well. It is worth noting that this report by the UTHR-J also confirmed that the LTTE’s use of human shields as well as forcibly keeping civilians from crossing over to Government controlled areas significantly contributed to the high civilian death toll.
Crucial to the defence of the Sri Lankan State and its military is this fact of over 100,000 civilians crossing over from LTTE controlled areas and being provided safety under the supervision of the Sri Lankan military and confirmation that the LTTE was in fact guilty of using human shields and coercing civilians into remaining in areas under bombardment.
Similarly, a series of declassified confidential reports by Lieutenant Colonel Anton Gash, the UK Defence Attache in Colombo provided detailed assessments of the conflict in real-time. The ‘Gash Dispatches’ have suggested the number of civilians killed to be significantly lower, numbering 8,000 at the most.
More crucial than this number is the fact that the dispatches shed light on the challenging circumstances faced by the Sri Lankan military and even commends it for making efforts to minimise casualties.
Another question that came up during the debate was presented to Rasaratnam by Hasan, suggesting that the Rajapaksas, specifically former President Mahinda Rajapaksa and former Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, should be tried in an international tribunal for war crimes during the final stages of the war. This was perhaps the weakest question of the night, as Hasan should be aware, there is little precedent for a head of state or a defence minister being tried for war crimes in a tribunal.
Some high profile cases do exist; Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was the first sitting Head of State to be charged with war crimes; Sudan’s former Head of State Omar Al Bashir was also charged with war crimes in Darfur. Jean Pierre Bamba, former Defence Minister of the Republic of Congo was convicted for ordering war crimes.
Just a few days ago, former President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte was arrested in Manila on the orders of the International Criminal Court (ICC) for his role in approving extra-judicial killings in his country’s war on drugs.
If heads of state were to be tried for war crimes, there is certainly a long list of leaders from around the world, even from some advanced democracies, that might have to face charges if a clear precedent is established – the precise reason why there is no clear precedent.
It would also be quite the vindication of the infamous Western ‘double standards’ of the international system that allows Benjamin Netanyahu or the Government of Saudi Arabia significantly more margin for indiscretions than leaders from countries that are not explicit allies of the West.
One example of that double standard might be the almost exclusive focus of both Al Jazeera’s ‘Head to Head’ as well as the wider liberal media apparatus, on the ‘final stages of the war’ in Sri Lanka. This is strikingly similar to the Western media’s obsession with the attacks of 7 October 2023, which completely ignores and disregards the complex history of the conflict.
(The writer has 15 years of experience in the financial and corporate sectors after completing a degree in Accounting and Finance at the University of Kent, UK and also holds a Master’s in International Relations from the University of Colombo. He is a media presenter, resource person, political commentator, and foreign affairs analyst. He is also a member of the Working Committee of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya [SJB]. He can be contacted via email: kusumw@gmail.com and X: @kusumw)