Free Media Movement Busted
Malinda Seneviratne
IFJ’s Jacqui Park violated immigration law 19 times
Convenor Sunil Jayasekera lies about Jacqui Park
Director Asia-Pacific Region of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ),Jacqui Park, shortly after being deported from Sri Lanka, has tweeted her sentiments thus: a) ‘Thanks to Aust FM Bishop for raising issue with SL FM. Thanks to Aust High Comm in SL too for crucial support,’ b) ‘Good to be home. It was wonderful to have so much support from Australian and SL colleagues,’ and c) Just transiting in Singapore and please to be on my way home with Jane. Thanks for the support, especially our brave Sri Lankan friends’. In one of these she has hash-tagged ‘pressfreedom’. ABC News, Australia, writing thereafter, waxes eloquent about Park being queried over her ‘work’ in Sri Lanka. We shall get to that later.
What is the context? Jacqui Park arrived in Sri Lanka on a tourist visa along with a colleague Jane Worthington, but was not doing any sightseeing. She was attending a workshop titled ‘Freedom of Expression in Post-War Sri Lanka: Challenges and Way Forward’. It was jointly organized by the IFJ and the Free Media Movement. She was detained and questioned and found to have violated immigration laws of the country. A person of her age with all the traveling she has done could not have been ignorant about visa types and which types permit or forbids what. This was not a one-off misdemeanor. Park has visited Sri Lanka on 20 occasions, 19 of which were work-related, each time on a tourist visa. She is therefore a multiple and even compulsive offender.
Lankaenews claims that the two IFJ workers and the FMM were ‘betrayed’. No mention of violating immigration law. AFP claimed that an ‘international media rights activist’ was detained. The AFP report was heavily editorialized with a lot of claims and little substantiation.
APF is at pains to paint Park as some kind of media activism heroine intent on investigating alleged war crimes. AFP has quoted FMM Convenor, Sunil Jayasekera: ‘She was meeting with us at a hotel in Colombo while on holiday; she was not engaging in any work as such but was meeting with friends she had made over many years.’
It is strange that the AFP story appeared without any reference to tangible proof that compromised Jayasekera’s ‘holiday’ statement; another website, www.srilankamirror.lk accusing ‘security forces’ (it was immigration authorities) crashing the AFP-IFJ party, carried pictures of the banner announcing the collaborative nature of the exercise. It is strange that AFP didn’t see reason to ask Jayasekera the obvious question. When ‘The Nation’ asked Jayasekera, he first said ‘she was not here for the workshop’. Later, when Colombo Telegraph released the leaked emails, Jayasekra said ‘I don’t want to comment; I’ve said it all to the CID’.
