A ferocious series of air raids against LTTE targets throughout the North and East greeted the New Year, together with continuous small attacks by the LTTE on the armed forces, and provided an indication that 2007 will exact a heavy death toll on all sides.

Unhappily, the very first air raid of the year erupted in controversy, with charges by both the LTTE and independent observers that the target at Padahuthurai in the Mannar district was an ordinary village, and not an LTTE base.

With the government not allowing journalists to enter any LTTE-held area in the North or East, there is no way for independent media to travel to the area in order to inspect the scene of the attack, and interview witnesses and survivors and those who were wounded.

This column will today refrain from reporting what our own sources have told us. Journalists today are working under grave threat of imprisonment under the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act. The PTA has already been used to detain and question media persons, with the objective of forcing journalists to reveal their sources. Every journalist in the world will agree that the identities of our sources are sacred. Therefore, we will not use our sources today. But instead we will give the different versions of the incident.

The blast killed at least 13 people. The armed forces say that those killed were LTTE cadres. The LTTE says they were civilians, including several children.

Bishop of Mannar

The Bishop of Mannar, Dr. Rayappu Joseph, who knows the area very well since he often travels throughout the region which is dotted with Catholic communities, says that he arrived at the scene of the bombing less than 3 hours after the incident. In a letter to President Mahinda Rajapakse, he says that he saw no evidence of LTTE positions there, and that the dead were clearly civilians, including children. He has described the scene in graphic detail. He was accompanied by several priests and others of the Catholic Church, including the parish priest of the area.

The LTTE disseminated grisly pictures of those killed, including children, and this has caused an uproar around the world. The country’s image has been irreparably harmed. The LTTE of course has been known to frequently make false claims. But even if the LTTE’s version is somehow a complete falsehood, the government has utterly failed to quash the Tiger charges.

The Air Force says it is convinced that the bombs fell on an LTTE base. Yet, there is no way that the SLAF can be 100% certain of this, simply because it does not have any ground information from the bomb site. Instead, it is relying on photos and video footage of the blast area taken from aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles, and on intercepts of LTTE radio conversations.

Unfortunately, the SLAF has not made public any such photos or video footage. So it is impossible for independent persons to judge the view from the air. In fact, the absence of such footage does not help the case of the SLAF.

As for listening in on LTTE radio chatter, this is again an imprecise method of gathering evidence. While radio chatter can yield a few clues about what happened, the vast amount of disinformation also put on the air by the Tigers intentionally to fool the forces, makes it very difficult to accurately judge what is true and what is not. In addition, the LTTE uses code words just as the armed forces do when talking by radio, so it is very difficult to find the truth. In the end, radio listening is largely guesswork, although an experienced intelligence professional can have some degree of success.

This is why, despite the thousands of air raids which have rained more than 10,000 bombs from the sky on the North and East in the last 10 months, the SLAF rarely provides detailed information about the impact of the bombings. More often than not, the government’s media communiquÈs say only that the SLAF ‘successfully attacked identified LTTE targets".

hearsay and guesswork

Therefore, the very nature of such intelligence information is hearsay and guesswork. In contrast, the evidence of an eye witness such as the Bishop of Mannar is very serious indeed.

Officials from the ICRC and SLMM who visited the area of the attack, did not support the SLAF’s view of the incident.

What the top brass of the SLAF needs to understand and accept is that accidental bombing of civilian areas (whether this week’s incident affected civilians or not) are part and parcel of a savage war such as ours. It is useless to pretend that they do not. In an area where there is little intelligence from ground information, errors can take place. It happens to far more advanced air forces, with recent examples being the US in Iraq and Bosnia, and the Israelis in Lebanon.

This is not the first time that the SLAF has been accused of causing civilian casualties, and it probably won’t be the last. The history of our civil war has been dotted with civilian casualties from air raids, beginning with the crude ‘barrel bombs’ going astray while being dropped manually from turboprop aircraft in the late eighties and Pucara ground attack aircraft in the mid nineties, to the high-tech bombings of today’s jets.

What the government needs to work out is a proper mechanism to deal with such situations. There is little use burying one’s head in the sand and repeatedly saying that we attacked ‘identified LTTE targets’. This only serves to enrage the survivors and families of those killed and wounded. Instead, it would make far more sense to say that the SLAF is investigating the possibility that some civilian casualties were caused, and that if found to be so, the SLAF would seek ways and means to try and prevent it from happening in the future.

In previous incidents of wayward air raids too, going back many years, the SLAF has used the wrong strategy of flatly denying that civilians were killed. This only serves to destroy its own credibility when the evidence mounts up against the SLAF’s version.

If on the other hand, the SLAF builds a reputation of honestly investigating such charges, then it would have far more credibility on the occasions when it does deny that civilians were affected.

highly unusual event

Meanwhile, a highly unusual event took place last Sunday when the Cabinet Appointed Procurement Committee published an advertisement in the Sunday Observer calling for tenders for the supply of six Fast Attack Craft for the Sri Lanka Navy. In the past, such advertisements were usually sent through less public means to reputed manufacturers and agents worldwide, ensuring that the LTTE did not get to know of what is being bought and when.

But last week’s advertisement gives clear information to the LTTE. This is the sort of information that would undoubtedly get journalists locked up if we were to publish it ourselves. Any journalist who writes a story headlined ‘Navy to buy six fast attack craft’ can expect to be taken in by the CID. When the Sunday Leader published a story about a Presidential Bunker to be built, the Ministry of Defence went into a frenzy of activity trying to have its editor arrested.

There is also simply no need to publish such an advertisement in the local media. For example, we doubt that Israeli shipbuilders who have been supplying FACs since the mid eighties, would be subscribing to the Sunday Observer! Of course, local shipbuilders such as Colombo Dockyard would subscribe, but surely they can be asked directly to submit bids. Why voluntarily provide the LTTE with information?