Not all Sri Lankan media is dancing to the tune the government wants them to. Obviously someone is irritated. Level of irritation is seen from the content of Defence.lk. – Yes, this is the same site has won an international reputation for its unbiased and truthful reporting (“Heavy fighting in Muhamalai. 157 tigers killed and one Sri Lankan army soldier suffers minor injuries in his left thumb”)
Before I get into the topic – brief description about this site. As said in its front page it is run by the Ministry of Defence, Public Security, Law and Order. So whoever behind is paid by the public money collected from tax payers. They have to work for public – not for a political party or political figures. Unfortunately this is not what we see from this web site. The Gobilas behind it are ready to run errands for any petty politician that supports Rajapakse government. How Defence.lk ran errands for Pillayan during the Eastern provincial council elections was a good example.
Humiliating and insulting media personnel to the level of putting their lives to danger is nothing new to the Gobilas of Defence.lk. One instance of doing this was depicting Mr. Ranjith Wijewardene, Chairman, Wijeya Newspapers, Mr. Siri Ranasinghe, Editor, Lankadeepa and Ms. Champika Liyanaarachchi Editor, Daily Mirror (both newspapers published by Wijeya Newspapers) as dogs manhandled by Prabhakaran. The message is clear. These are the traitors and you know what to do with them. It is just the luck of these media personnel that inborn Sinhala chauvinists of Champika Ranawaka and Wimal Weerawansa type did not take it seriously. Otherwise their fate would have been not too different from that of Keith Noyahr.
The latest was to combine Sirasa and LTTE logo together. This appears on top of what looks like a long explanation to the dubious role some high ranking officers played recently. Written in impeccable English, this article unsuccessfully tries to portray the war reporting to a conflict of media and soldiers.
This is what Defence.lk says (two paragraphs reported verbatim, emphasis mine):
We have serious concerns over this “defence analyst” issue. We do not mind any person trying to make his living by writing whatever crap to the newspapers. It is the freedom of expression that we have vowed safeguard even at the risk of our lives. Yet, we too have our right to lay bare the truth of those cowboy defence analysts, for the good of the public. War is handled by officers with 35-40 years of service, who had spend most of their lives in the battlefront, we seriously do not believe that people like Mr. Iqbal Athas have any capability to question about military tactics, service promotion schemes or even about the military procurement.
For instance, some of the so called “defence analysts” in Sri Lanka have a great tendency to give misleading picture on military PROCUREMENTS. They always quote numbers and try to speculate something fishy about the deals. Nevertheless, they rarely inform the public about the needs of the soldiers and the urgency of meeting such requirements. Those speculations are much often aimed at character assassinations of the service commanders than informing the public. What these “analysts “hide form the public is that all these PROCUREMENTS are being made after a thorough analysis of expert technical evaluation boards and on their recommendations. Also, what public is unaware about these mean spirited people is that they are being highly paid by the weapon dealers for acting as the opinion makers for them.
I think the cat jumps out of the bag here. So the who issue is about ‘PROCUREMENTS’, nothing to do with war. Ha Ha Ha. How funny. It is the PROCUREMENT information they are so worried about – NOT the security details.
Anyway the threat is clear. Media have been named. It is not difficult to understand the underlying threat behind statements of this nature:
“Any discernible person who sees Sirasa TV, or reads the Sunday Leader, the Morning Leader, Iru Dina, the Daily Mirror, and the Sunday Times, Lanka Dissent, Lanka E news, etc can understand the way that the soldiers are being humiliated, scorned and blamed.”
Can we have any clearer indication where media freedom stands today?
(GOBILA is a Sinhalisation of the surname of Paul Joseph Goebbels, Minister for Public Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, and not meant as an insult)
