BackCounterproductive censor
Central Board of Film Certification's decision to prevent the screening of Callum MacRae's film, No Fire Zone, defies logic
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Regardless of the motives that drive India’s foreign policy over Sri Lanka—Prime Minister Manmohan Singh not going to Colombo at the Commonwealth Summit; India supporting resolutions at the United Nations Human Rights Council condemning the Sri Lankan army’s conduct during the final phase of the conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009, including possibly backing a UN investigation into alleged war crimes—the decision is right. Granted, many argue that the Indian decision is guided by domestic compulsions—to placate Tamil Nadu’s mercurial politicians, who would have otherwise outdone one another in demonstrating their loyalty to the Tamil cause, and undermine the government’s stand. Likewise, some might think the move is short-sighted, in that it would send Sri Lanka further towards the Chinese embrace.
But there is a deeper, moral case. The conduct of the Sri Lankan army was ghastly, as journalist Jon Lee Anderson wrote in a devastating account in the New Yorker magazine in 2011. A year later, former UN official in Sri Lanka, Gordon Weiss published The Cage, a gripping book of the last days of the war, revealing the helplessness of the international community to do much in the face of mass atrocities by a determined government. British diplomat Charles Petrie led an internal review panel for the UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, which catalogued the events, even pointing out the UN’s own failures in protecting civilians. Accounts of aid workers have since corroborated these grand narratives. Finally, Britain’s Channel 4 showed graphic images of the pitiless way the Sri Lankan army pursued, hunted, humiliated, and annihilated the last of the Tamil Tigers. The documentary was highly controversial, but it presented the prima facie case of war crimes being committed in the battlefield.
Given such overwhelming evidence, India’s vote was right. It upheld international law, indicating that even in extreme armed conflict, rules apply, and combatants must respect those rules. Given the criticism the Indian army faces from human rights groups at home and abroad over the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the Indian decision was particularly noteworthy: its domestic conduct may be questionable, and its own adherence may not be perfect, but it supported the higher ideal—that some crimes are so grave that a line must be drawn, and governments that cross the line should face censure.
Which is why the decision by the Central Board of Film Certification to prevent the screening of Callum MacRae’s film, No Fire Zone, defies logic. The film tells the story that the Channel 4 documentary has already told, and which has been shown at private screenings in India. Indeed, the violence in the film is horrific, but that is just the point: it shows how armies can act in a depraved manner; why brutality does not solve a problem but sows the seeds of future conflict; and why the international community must act, if it cares for justice, if it cares for protecting the lives of civilians caught in the crossfire. The film carries a powerful message, and it is now available to viewers in India through the Internet. True, nothing prevents the government to ask Internet-based companies that provide content to stop streaming the film to Indian Internet users. But such a move is counterproductive. The ingenuous will find different ways to access the film, and the message of the film, in fact, reinforces the soundness of the Indian votes at the Human Rights Council.
Anyone who thinks that India voted the way it did at the UN to placate Tamil Nadu politicians needs to see the film, regardless of the justified anger within India over the painful military intervention in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s and Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991. The LTTE was in no way a pacifist freedom-fighting movement, and an independent Eelam may not even have been in India’s interests. But the treatment the Sri Lankan army meted out to Tamil civilians in camps during the last phase of the war was appalling, violating international norms. And the film, like the accounts of Anderson, Weiss, and Petrie establishes just that.
By letting the film be screened in a more accessible manner, India could have convinced sceptics at home about why it voted the way it did in Geneva. Instead, the censor board has banned its screening, as if that would satisfy the Sri Lankan government.
The Indian position is morally sound, legally just, even if politically challenging.
The ban on the film is morally weak, legally susceptible to challenge, and politically meaningless. Screening the film in the country would expose the people to the horrors of what happens in a battlefield, perhaps even building an opinion against the instinct to use force. That would be a fine outcome—a war might be diplomacy by other means, but its rationale must be debated, its logic questioned, and its true cost revealed. The film does exactly that—why prevent Indians from seeing it?
Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London. Your comments are welcome at salil@livemint.com.
To read Salil Tripathi’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/saliltripathi
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