Mick Hartley

The latest news from Sri Lanka suggests that the Tamil struggle is finally over:

The leader of the Tamil Tiger rebels, Velupillai Prabhakaran, is dead, Sri Lankan state television has said.

The announcement came shortly after the military said it had surrounded Prabhakaran and about 200 rebels in a tiny patch of jungle in the north-east.

The claim cannot be verified as reporters are barred from the war zone.

For those wondering why the plight of the Tamils has attracted so little protest on the Left compared, say, to the plight of the Palestinians, that last sentence might provide at least one clue. Renowned war photographer Don McCullin writes in the Times:

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. For the victorious soldiers there is always the temptation to take revenge for friends killed earlier in the conflict.

Some of our most powerful images of war are from beaches. Think of the photography of Eugene Smith, war correspondent for Lifemagazine, who witnessed the American offensive against Japan during the Second World War. Or Robert Capa’s images of battle from the Normandy beaches.

We have nothing like this to tell us what has happened in Sri Lanka — a Buddhist country, a place that teaches us to live in peace. It is a tragedy to see war tear apart its people like this.

Governments around the world are getting more savvy about excluding journalists from war zones. The US Government partly blamed its failure in Vietnam on the freedom of the press rather than on its military strategy. That led to me being banned from reporting the Falklands war. I had dinner recently with some senior military men from that time who said “we missed you”. There are no images to remind them — and us — of what happened.

One place where there's never a shortage of coverage, of course, is Palestine.