Why I am not going to Sri Lanka

By Lia Leendertz | Midnight Brambling
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I have been invited on a press trip to Sri Lanka. This is by far the most glamorous offer I have had in the course of my career. The closest equivalent would be the all expenses paid week touring Bayer’s German chemical works which I attended when I worked for Horticulture Week, which was every bit as delightful as it sounds (in its favour, the delightful Martyn Cox and Leigh Hunt both trudged around the corridors and experimental greenhouses with me, but then so did Peter Seabrook).

So I’ve had this offer, a week-long ‘small, specialist trip’ paid for by the Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau, taking in botanic gardens, orchid collections, nurseries, forest reserves and more, following Sri Lanka’s success at the Chelsea Flower Show. Sounds like heaven.

But even while a part of my mind was already preparing for a child-free week of palm-fringes beaches, dense, steamy jungles, and almost unbearable amounts of lush greenery, something in the back of that same mind was nagging at me that I couldn’t go. It isn’t current news, so it’s taken a little delving around, but the picture appears to be this: the civil war that has been raging on the island for 25 years ended last year, but this hasnt ended the civil rights abuses carried out by the majority Sinhalese government against the Tamil minority. Many of the 150,000 civilians held in horrendous conditions in internment camps have recently been released, but the country has a horrendous record of disappearances, abductions and murders of those who speak out against the regime (look at the Boycott Sri Lanka website for more details, and to find out what you can do) with one political journalist going missing as recently as January of this year. It is also, according to media watchdog Reporters Without Borders one of the most dangerous countries in the world in which to be a journalist. Not a Western horticultural journalist, of course, on a lovely jolly around the botanic gardens of the island. It’s your local journalists that are living in fear.

It is obvious that the island wants to rehabilitate itself in the eyes of the world, and to get the tourists back, and it sees the promotion of its undoubtedly fabulous horticulture as a fine way of doing this, via Chelsea, and such ‘small, specialist trips’, which will no doubt result in a flurry of beautifully photographed, luscious pieces appearing in gardening magazines next year. But I massively object to horticulture being used as some sort of a pretty carpet under which to sweep such issues. Stopping the disappearances and murders, and fully investigating and prosecuting the perpetrators of the many human rights violations, as Amnesty International has called upon Sri Lanka to do, seems like – to put it mildly – a more sensible first step. Do that, THEN invite a bunch of horticultural journalists around.

I realise that this isn’t a particularly interesting post if you are here looking for horticultural information, but I reckon that when opportunities come to speak out on behalf of those living less fortunate lives, we should grab them, and this one came my way. I also realise I am not likely to get invited on any more glamorous press trips.

Lia Leendertz writes about gardening for the Guardian's Weekend magazine and its gardening blog, as well as writing a personal blog, Midnight Brambling

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