Army.lk caught using fake photographs

By Badrinath Mahalingam

For the last one week the Army.lk website has severely restricted its use of photos, and has almost exclusively published only "file photos" unrelated to the articles. We have heard from reliable sources working in the government that this is due to a direct order from above to stop publishing photos that are not personally approved by a high ranking official. This order came about after the defence.lk website was caught several times using fake photographs, sometimes even showing dead bodies of Sinhala soldiers while claiming they were LTTE fighters.

Out of the 20 articles currently published on the army.lk front page, only two articles have had photographs "approved" to be published. These two articles are titled "Troops Collect Fifteen Dead Tigers & Twenty Weapons" (located at http://www.army.lk/morenews.php?id=20926) and "Besieged Civilians in their Hundreds Reach Cleared Areas" (located at http://www.army.lk/morenews.php?id=20924). Unfortunately both of these articles contain fake photographs, evident from the date the pictures were taken.

In the first article, the following photographs are shown:

The article states:

"Tigers during Sunday (29) unsuccessfully tried to assault advancing troops but the troops took an upper hand and reacted hard against them. Tigers went on running amok leaving behind their arms and ammunition and also their own cadres."

"ARMY troops engaged in extensive search and clear operations in captured areas, north of PALAMATTALAN, PUTHUKUDIYIRIPPU this morning (30) collected dead bodies of fifteen more Tigers along with twenty T-56 weapons and one Multi Purpose Machine Gun (MPMG)."

As you can see in the photographs, there are 20 T-56 weapons and one multi purpose machine gun, so the story must be true, right? There is only one small problem. Even though the story seems to match the photograph (with the exception of the 15 dead LTTE fighters they claimed to have recovered), the photograph itself was taken in February of 2008!

So rather than write articles based on actual events, and then adding related photographs to the article, the Army.lk writers start out with fake photographs, and then "create" a story based on the photograph. How else could the fake photograph have the exact number of T-56 rifles as the story, and exact number of multi purpose machine guns. It is clear that the story originated from the photograph, and the photograph itself was a fake from more than a year ago.

Please note once again the amount of detail this creative writer adds to a non-existant story based off a photograph taken a year before:

"Tigers during Sunday (29) unsuccessfully tried to assault advancing troops but the troops took an upper hand and reacted hard against them. Tigers went on running amok leaving behind their arms and ammunition and also their own cadres."

First the tigers "unsuccessfully tried to attack", then the Sri Lankan army soldiers "reacted hard against them" resulting in the tigers "running amok" in panic. In that state of panic the tigers "started abandoning their weapons and ammunitions and even their own cadres". Just see the extent of fantasy writing the Army.lk website goes to. The photograph is a year old, yet these creative writers have imagined a whole series of events on how that photograph came to be. And the scariest part is that the government of Sri Lanka then presents these fantasy movie scripts to the world as factual "news".

The only other article on their website to contain a photograph is "Besieged Civilians in their Hundreds Reach Cleared Areas" which has the following photograph:

Though the article was published on March 30th, the photograph they show, which was supposedly taken the same day, was actually taken on March 13th. So once again we see that the army.lk and defence.lk websites both manufacture stories and extensively use fake photographs to mislead the public. Add to this the fact that the daily reported number of LTTE fighters killed never matches between the Army.lk website and the Defence.lk website, both of whom are official government websites. When one government website says 40 LTTE fighters were killed, and the other website says only 2 fighters were killed, it becomes obvious someone is making up stories. What is so surprising is that the government officials are so stupid that they do not even compare the stories they publish to make sure there are no contradictions.

In summary, out of the 20 articles currently being displayed on the Army.lk front page, there is not a single authentic photograph included. 18 of the articles contain no photographs at all, or sample pictures labeled as "file photos". The remaining two articles that do contain photographs actually have fake photographs, as well as creatively manufactured storylines based on those fake photographs.

Another example of imaginative stories created from a photograph was the following, reported last week both on Army.lk and Defence.lk:

Defence.lk stated about this photograph: "LTTE built statue of the megalomaniac terror chief Prabakaran is located in the centre of Iranapalai junction." Unfortunately the fiction writers at Defence.lk didn't even take the trouble to read the name writen on the statue's plaque before writing their story line:

When the official government defence department can't make out the difference between a Prabhakaran and a Senthuran, it is no wonder that they have been unable to capture him for 30 years. Even though Tamil is supposedly an official language in Sri Lanka, it is obvious that even high ranking officers in the defence department do not know how to read it. How else can you explain not a single person in the defence department realizing who the statue was in the photograph? But truth is not important for the government of Sri Lanka. More important is to create catchy fantasy stories, like the one of the LTTE fighters who "ran amok", "dropping their weapons", which happened to be photographed by the defence department a year before.