To Kill a Messenger

The UN prize asserts that the human spirit cannot be subdued by violence

SONALI WICKREMATUNGE

Lasantha would have been proud to know an independent and international jury chose him for the 2009 unesco World Press Freedom prize. It is a testament to the courage of journalists worldwide, who risk life and liberty to defend the freedoms we cherish. The fact that Lasantha is the second journalist to be honoured posthumously in the 12 years since this prize was created is proof of these risks.

ILLUSTRATION: Anand Naorem

The first was Anna Politkovskaya, an unapologetic critic of military and political excess, who was brutally murdered in Moscow in October 2006. The lives of Anna and Lasantha bear bizarre similarities. Courageous critics of state-sponsored violence, they were both born in 1958, spoke fearlessly for human rights, and received constant death threats. Both chose not to flee. Both knew they would pay with their lives. Both knew who their murderers would be.
 
But the story of Lasantha and Anna is not an isolated one. In Sri Lanka, it has become the norm for journalists to be killed. Sixteen have been assassinated — all of them in commando-style attacks — since President Mahinda Rajapakse took office in 2005. Media offices have been destroyed in raids, like the newspaper Lasantha and I edited. Journalists languish in prisons either without charge or on concocted ones. Like Lasantha, many have been threatened personally by the President or his brothers. Dozens, including myself, have been forced to flee Sri Lanka. I am certain if I return, my days would be numbered.
 
The free Sri Lanka in which I was born no longer exists. Our country has entered a Dark Age where the government unapologetically equates democratic dissent with treason. The sinister white van in which the state abducts its perceived enemies, including journalists, many of them never to be seen again, has become a symbol of untold dread. Yet, this violence against journalists is only the tip of the iceberg. Tens of thousands of ordinary Sri Lankan Tamil civilians have been herded into concentration camps, trapped behind barbed-wire fences, beneath the radar of a world that is, perhaps rightly, more concerned with greater tragedies unfolding in places such as Darfur. But what is their crime? They belong to an ethnic minority living in an area infested by the LTTE, one of the most murderous terrorist organisations the world has ever seen. Trapped between their terrorism on one side and state terrorism on the other. (I use that word advisedly for the Sri Lankan government is perhaps the only one on this planet that persists in bombing its own citizenry.)

That this is a racist war is not a secret. The government has plastered the countryside with enormous placards lauding the army with slogans in Sinhala -- the language of the Sinhalese majority to which I too belong -- stating: “Soldiers, our race salutes you!” Not “the people”, not “the country”, but the race. Interestingly, none of these hoardings are in Tamil, the language of the people the government claims it is seeking to liberate.


It is urgent the world realises what is happening in Sri Lanka before it is too late. It frustrates me that even those who should know better do not seem to. A few days after Lasantha’s murder, an international journal opined: “For all those who argue that there’s no military solution for terrorism, we have two words: Sri Lanka.” The journal might as well have said, “To all those who argue there’s no military solution for terrorism, we have just one word: terrorism.” For that is the solution the Sri Lanka government has chosen: terrorism against civilians, terrorism against journalists, terrorism against dissidents of all kinds.
 
It angers me, as it did Lasantha, that we have learned so little from history. I beseech everyone who will listen not to allow the Sri Lanka government, under the cover of a war against terror, to engage in acts of terror itself. Soon it will be too late, and history will not forgive us. What then, of Lasantha’s murder? Within hours of his assassination, President Rajapakse promised a full inquiry and promised to bring the perpetrators to justice. Of course, no such thing happened.

But by recognising his life and work this prize sends an important message to tyrants everywhere, that killing the messenger is not a solution. It asserts ever more strongly that the human spirit cannot be subdued by violence. And so it is that even in death Lasantha’s name draws more hits on Google than the prime minister of Sri Lanka.

To the readers of the newspaper he edited he left a final message. And I would like to leave you with my husbands’ last words.
 
“We have espoused unpopular causes, stood up for those too feeble to stand up for themselves”, he wrote. “We have made sure that whatever the propaganda of the day, you were allowed to hear a contrary view. For this I — and my family — have now paid the price that I have long known I will one day have to pay. I am — and have always been — ready for that. I have done nothing to prevent this outcome: no security, no precautions. I want my murderer to know that I am not a coward like he is, hiding behind human shields while condemning thousands of innocents to death. What am I among so many? It has long been written that my life would be taken, and by whom. All that remains to be written is when.”