Adithya Alles - The string of events involving the Sri Lankan press over the past week has once again brought the embattled Fourth Estate into the limelight. This comes into sharp focus as the country eagerly awaits the upcoming presidential elections.
On Jan. 8, the media community held vigils to commemorate the first death anniversary of pioneering editor Lasantha Wickremathunge, killed by still unidentified assassins in 2009.
Four days later, on Tuesday, Dayaseelle Liynagee, a senior reporter at the Lankadeepa, one of the country’s widely circulated, privately owned vernacular newspapers, resigned, reportedly under pressure from some political forces over a controversial report she wrote.
Then on Jan. 13, two journalists at ‘The Sunday Leader’ reported getting mailed death threats, after which the weekly newspaper’s premises were searched by police. On this day, too, albeit on a positive note, Jayaprakash Tissainayagam, a Tamil journalist, incarcerated since March 2008, was released on bail. He had been found guilty of endangering national security and sentenced to 20 years in jail in August 2009.
If the Tissainayagam bailout was cause to celebrate, the other incidents were not.
"Justice has been served, after so long," Sunil Jayasekera of the Free Media Movement, a national media rights body, told IPS. The Tissainayagam case had gained international attention, as he was the first journalist to be tried under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA).
The PTA provides wide powers to law enforcements officers to detain and question suspects without charges. It was enacted to curb activities by Tamil separatists, but rights groups have continuously charged that its draconian provisions are prone to abuse.
"It was the first time that the PTA had been used to try someone on what he had expressed," Jayasekera said. "It was a really dangerous precedent." Amnesty International (AI), which has been agitating against the conviction, also welcomed the release.
"We are thrilled that Tissa is finally free to rejoin his family, but he should have never been jailed in the first place," Yolanda Foster, the human rights lobby group’s Sri Lanka researcher, said in a statement. "His sentence was a gross miscarriage of justice and a violation of his human rights."
AI has urged the Sri Lankan government to squash the conviction all together.
Tissainayagam’s lawyer expressed confidence that a pending appeal against his conviction would be decided in his client’s favour. "He left prison with his moral strengthened. And as we have good grounds for the appeal, I am fairly optimistic," counsel Mathiyabaranam Sumanthiran told the media rights group ‘Reporters Without Borders’ soon after Tissainayagam’s release.
Investigation into the murder of Wickremathunge, the editor of The ‘Sunday Leader’ who was shot while on his way to work, has not progressed beyond the recovery of his mobile phone and the arrest of the man who had it. It had gone missing after the editor was brought to a hospital with fatal head injuries.
"After a 10-month investigation, the case was transferred to the criminal investigation department, but since then they have not taken any serious statements," Lal Wickremathunge, the brother of the slain editor who assumed the leadership of the newspaper, said on the murder anniversary.
"They called me once, but not again. The examination of the case before the courts has been postponed 24 times. Each time, the police said they did not have enough evidence. And the only eye witness has been missing for months," he recounted.
‘The Sunday Leader’, on the other hand, generated controversy following publication last Dec. 13 of an interview with the opposition presidential candidate Sarath Fonseka, alleging that he heard reports of top government officials giving orders to shoot senior members of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam trying to surrender during the last phase of the war.
The Tigers were defeated in May last year. Fonseka, as commander of the Army, was credited with leading it to victory along with the President in his capacity as commander in chief of the armed forces.
The opposition presidential candidate, who had since fallen out with President Mahinda Rajapaksa, denied the newspaper report, which created a political furore in the run-up to what is dubbed the closest presidential contest in Sri Lanka’s history.
Following police search of ‘The Sunday Leader’ premises on Wednesday, police officials said that they had received information that political posters were being printed at the press. None were found during the search. Liyangee’s resignation was widely believed to have been triggered by a story she wrote on the rumoured agreement between Fonseka and the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the largest Tamil party in parliament.
The article, which sparked a political fireball, claimed that Fonseka had agreed to several controversial and politically sensitive demands by the TNA. The Fonseka camp promptly denied the story.
Opposition Leader Ranil Wickremasinghe, a key backer of the Fonseka campaign, complained to the Lankadeepa management over the article. After the conduct of an internal inquiry, the reporter tendered her resignation. Now the government is accusing the opposition of high-handed intimidation tactics against the media. The reporter said she also received threats over the phone.
Amid heightened political tensions, on the same day, a local reporter for the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Sinhala service, Sandeshaya, Thakshila Dilrukshi Jayasena suffered head injuries when she was attacked by a mob in the north central town of Polonaruwa, about 215 kilometres from the capital, Colombo, as opposition and government supporters clashed. The incident left five others injured and four vehicles damaged.
As the country gears up for the crucial election on Jan. 26, the media landscape appears to be lurching toward uncertainties.
Media activists and observers had initially felt that the reporting climate in Sri Lanka had improved. Reporters, after all, had begun travelling to some areas that used to be restricted during the war, and filing stories. But recent events have cast a pall of gloom over the fate of the media.
"The reporting climate has improved in the past few months, but there is still a lot of tension," Lakshman Gunesekera, the president of the Sri Lanka chapter of the South Asia Free Media Association, told IPS.
Tissainayagam, free after almost two years behind bars, declined to comment on anything else but his relief. "I want to thank the media colleagues and others who helped me," he said as he left the court.
Only time will tell whether the sense of calm that appeared to have descended on the media was a mere façade or the tide has turned for the newshounds after a temporary relief.
© Inter Press Service
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