Balachandran Prabhakaran, the 12-year old son of a Tamil rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, alive and well in custody two hours before he was found shot to death. Photo: Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka: Son of Tamil Tigers leader 'killed in cold blood', photos show

Source: Sydney Morning Herald | Ben Doherty

THE actions of the Sri Lankan army at the end of the country's brutal civil war face new scrutiny with the release of photographs allegedly showing a child was executed in cold blood by soldiers.

The Sri Lankan government rejects the allegations.

Pictures released by Britain's Channel 4 and examined in a new documentary show 12-year-old Balachandran Prabhakaran, the son of the Tamil Tigers leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, safe and apparently in the captivity of the Sri Lankan army hours before he was killed in May 2009.

The government has maintained Prabhakaran's family were killed in fighting at the same time as the Tigers leader died in an ambush. The bodies of his wife and daughter have never been found.

In the photographs the boy is shown wearing shorts and under a blanket, sitting in a military bunker. In one picture he is eating a snack, in another he is looking out of the bunker.

Another photo shows Balachandran, in the same shorts, lying on his back, dead from five bullet wounds in his chest. Digital analysis is said to show it was taken two hours after the first two pictures, with the same camera.

Callum Macrae, the director of the documentary, No Fire Zone, said the new photos were important evidence ''because they appear to rule out any suggestion that Balachandran was killed in crossfire or during a battle. They show he was held, even given a snack, before being taken and executed in cold blood.''

The release of No Fire Zone next month will bring renewed focus on the government's human rights record. The film will be screened at the Geneva Human Rights Film Festival, running concurrently with the 22nd session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which will examine human rights in Sri Lanka.

The Sri Lankan government said the release of the pictures was designed to discredit the nation. A military spokesman, Brigadier Ruwan Wanigasooriya, said the allegations were ''lies, half-truths and numerous forms of speculation''.

''This is not the first time such unsubstantiated allegations have been levelled against the Sri Lankan forces,'' he said.

''Interestingly, these come up as we near a UNHRC meeting and die down thereafter. No substantive evidence has been presented.''

Carefully evidenced and powerfully measured, ‘No Fire Zone’ is a feature length film about the final awful months of the 26 year long Sri Lankan civil war told by the people who lived through it. It is a meticulous and chilling expose of some of the worst war crimes and crimes against humanity of recent times -  told through the extraordinary personal stories of a small group of characters and also through some of the most dramatic and disturbing video evidence ever recorded.

This footage allows us to document the day to day horror of this war in a way almost never done before: Footage recorded by both the victims and perpetrators on mobile phones and small cameras – viscerally powerful actuality from the battlefield, from inside the crudely dug civilian bunkers and over-crowded makeshift hospitals.

Footage which is nothing less than direct evidence of war crimes, summary execution, torture and sexual violence.

This was supposed to be a war conducted in secret.  The Government excluded the international press, forced the UN to leave the war zone and ruthlessly silenced the Sri Lankan media – literally dozens of media workers were killed, exiled or disappeared. While the world looked away in the first few months of 2009 around  40,000 to 70,000 civilians were massacred – mostly by Sri Lankan government shelling, though the Tamil Tigers also stand accused of war crimes.

The film starts in September 2008.  An air of deep foreboding hung over Kilinochchi– the de facto capital of the Tamil homelands of Northern Sri Lanka. The armed forces of the ultra-nationalist Sinhalese government of Sri Lanka were on the move, and the brutal secessionist army of the Tamil Tigers was on the retreat. After a twenty-six year revolt – the scene was set for the final awful endgame.

We have looked at and translated hours of raw footage which captures the day-to-day life of the people who lived and in many cases died – during the 138 days of hell which form the central narrative of our film.  This footage is an incredibly intimate account of human suffering.

But the film is also built around compelling personal stories.  There is Vany - a young British Tamil who was visiting relatives in Sri Lanka who became trapped along with hundreds of thousands of other men, women and children, desperately fleeing the government onslaught.  She had trained as a medical technician in the UK, now she found herself helping in a makeshift hospital while doctors tried to treat hundreds of desperately injured people, in some cases performing major surgery without general anaesthetic.

Other people who tell their stories include two of the last UN workers – Peter McKay and Benjamin Dix – forced to leave on the orders of the UN which, they feel, was betraying its fundamental duty to protect.

Inevitably too, this film is the personal story of some who didn’t make it.

‘No Fire Zone’ also brings the story up to date.  The Sri Lankan government still denies this all happened in what thy describe as an “humanitarian rescue”.  The repression and ethnic restructuring of the Tamil homelands in the north of Sri Lanka continues – journalists and government critics are still disappearing. The government will tolerate no opposition and have even turned on their own judiciary, impeaching the Chief Justice of the country when she found they had acted unconstitutionally.

Without truth there can be no justice in Sri Lanka.  And without justice there can be no peace.   We hope our film can be part of that truth-telling.

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