Where are the images of horror from Sri Lanka?
Pictures of the beach near Mullaitivu, the last outpost of Tamil Tiger resistance in Sri Lanka, would have been among the greatest visual images of what war does to people. They would have been, if anybody had been there to take them. Those pictures don’t exist. The Sri Lankan Government has been amazingly successful at keeping people away from this conflict and, as a result, appalling atrocities have been committed. There is always a need to be a witness to conflict. When the war in Sri Lanka started 25 years ago I went to Trincomalee to cover it. Journalists are usually good at getting into places where they are not wanted, but not on this occasion. Nor at any time since. This has been an invisible war. That beach on the Indian Ocean will be a bloodbath. Families have been sheltering without food or water in holes dug in the sand, subjected to shelling for days. A doctor in the area has spoken of thousands of bodies lying unburied and the “stench of death” hanging over the war zone.
