SORRY ! I Beg To Defer Madam Pillai !!
Kusal Perara
“This type of surveillance and harassment appears to be getting worse in Sri Lanka, which is a country where critical voices are quite often attacked or even permanently silenced. Utterly
unacceptable at any time……….I urge the Government of Sri Lanka to issue immediate orders to halt this treatment of human rights defenders and journalists who face this kind of harassment and intimidation on a regular basis. More than 30 journalists are believed to have been killed since 2005, and several more – including the cartoonist Prageeth Ekneligoda – have disappeared. Many others have fled the country. Newspaper and TV offices have been vandalized or subjected to arson attacks – some, such as the Jaffna-based paper Uthayan, on multiple occasions. With self-censorship fuelled by fear, journalists report that there are articles that they dare not write, and others their editors dare not print. Freedom of expression is under a sustained assault in Sri Lanka. I have called for the right to Information Act to be adopted like many of its neighbours in SAARC.” - Ms. Navenethem Pillai, High Commissioner, UN Human Rights Commission, issuing a media statement on 31 August, 2013 at the media briefing held at the Colombo UN office, before her departure from Colombo.
This condemnation, this appeal to the government to halt attacks and threats on media even in a stronger voice, would have been very appropriate in early 2009, especially during the pre and post Lasantha Wickrematunge murder period and till the end of the 2010 elections. That early period was an extremely bad and uncertain period and it is true, very true, many journalists in mainstream media and a few who were media activists had to flee the country for life. All were not S. Rajan in Trincomalee or Wickramatunge in Attidiya, though. Nor were all Kieth Noyshrs or Poddala Jayanthas. All who fled were not possible victims either. That 2009 period was similar to the post ’83 July and post 88-90 period when every one who fled was not a Tamil Tiger under life threat and every one who fled was no JVPer being hounded after. That tensed period perhaps saw the last, with the still unsolved disappearance of Ekneligoda. Some of the recent exits thereafter were mere hyped cases with half told stories. Some who should have actually fled for what they wrote and still write, remained here as journalists, only to be blocked out by these editors and their owner/publishers.
