For a week I have been following this protest closely. All the Tamils who I have met have impressed me with their warmth and friendliness. Then out of the blue come the Kommisars. "Have you got a press card" Well " no i don't, but I have been here all week" Kommisars"sorry you can't film here." And they assign a young man to follow me around so I can't take any more photos.
It is a shame as some of my pics through my agent have been making the rounds of pic editors around the world. It is a shame some of the Tamils who I have been talking with weren't around to vouch for me.
It is interesting in the last week I have met a few Free lance photographers and journalists like me. We do make a difference because we are sometimes there when the press card journalists are away in their beds. A freelancer who has the same agent as me just last week had a front cover pic in the Guardian.
Yesterday I met with a member of the tamil forums group and he showed me an explanation of Tamil history and the way his community have been persecuted in Sri Lanka. So much I didn't know. The bhuddism of the Sri Lankan government seeming to fit into the fundamentalist family of religions. When texts get read literally and an other is defined as alien. Where is the reporting on this. The commercialist ethos of the mainstream media has led to a focus on the Tamil Tigers and very little on the policies and actions of the Sri Lankan government. As usual there is no context. Context is not sensational.
Geopolitics is not sensational. Why is there minimal reporting on the Chinese connection in Sri Lanka. The billion dollar seaport project, the oil well developments. It seems the accepted narrative for western liberals is that only American 'imperialism' is bad imperialism. China is actively investing in many war torn parts of Africa. How do the Chinese defend their interests in the United Nations?
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