Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Is AP a Propaganda Machine for the Tamil Tigers?

Krishan Francis is the AP correspondent in Sri Lanka, and had been tagging every dispatch with the following lines:
The Tamil Tiger rebels have fought since 1983 to create an independent homeland for the country's ethnic minority Tamils.

More than 70,000 people have been killed in the violence.
Mos recently, Francis has switched to a new coda:
Authorities have vowed to crush the rebels and end their 25-year campaign for an independent state for ethnic minority Tamils.

More than 70,000 people have been killed in the violence.
Now there’s a very good case to be made that the political and social excesses of Sinhalese nationalists gave rise to Tamil dissent that has since mutated into the murderous insurgency that is the Tamil Tigers. But I wonder if Francis believes that the Tamil Tigers have the support of the Tamil public in Sri Lanka. Specifically, does Francis believe that the Tamil Tigers would win a fair in Tamil-majority regions in Sri Lanka? And if Francis believes that, can Francis explain why the Tamil Tigers don’t want a democratic resolution to the decades-long war of attrition? And if Francis can’t, why is AP allowing the use of Francis’s place of employment as a propaganda tool?

2 comments:

Ashley said...

Interesting, do you know anything about Krishan Francis? In trying to determine his background I stumbled on your page....

Jun Okumura said...

Whoa! A blast from the past. I have no idea, Ashley. I know just enough about the region to notice that a report of his looked odd, so I looked around. That's when I saw the pattern. I thought that a wire service shouldn't be doing that, so I decided to flag it.