On Being “targeted”
Emil van der Poorten
I make no apologies for the fact that this piece is less concerned about “rural perspectives” than it is about being on someone’s “hit list!”
It is now a considerable time since I was first accosted on the streets ofKandy and threatened for “writing against the President.” While it was not the first occasion that a shot was “fired across my bows,” it was the first overt threat. Prior to that incident, I had had frantic messages from Colombo friends “close to the seats of power” warning me against criticising certain Cabinet members in print because they had a track record of (let’s not indulge in euphemisms here!) killing those who had crossed their paths. I must admit, that considering the source of these warnings, they did have something akin to a chilling effect on me, particularly since I was relatively naïve in the ways of the Sri Lankan political establishment, having been brainwashed, I suppose, by being very politically active in another part of the world where the biggest threat to one’s person would have been a dog who objected to a political canvasser knocking on his master’s door!
Some of the stuff that has gone on around us belongs in the category of the crass and unsophisticated. However, I must admit that a couple of the initiatives have been slicker and more difficult to deal with in the absence of money to burn, the difficulty attendant on organizing publicity campaigns, or seeking recourse to a legal system that exists only in name and is regularly subverted by those with the appropriate “connections.”
