While Sinhala print and electronic media, with the rare exception of the Sinhala weekly Ravaya, showing either indifference or the endorsement of the twenty year rigorous imprisonment sentence given to journalist J. S. Tissainayagam for two articles he has written and purely based on his ‘confession’, some of the Sinhala bloggers have taken a hundred and eighty degree approach by expressing their solidarity and in some cases censure.
Beyond Frame, arguably the most popular Sinhala blogger, in his own way expresses the anguish – in verse. “Tissa, why didn’t you swim downstream (like everyone else)?” asks Beyond Frame. “Why you swam upstream? Then why you had to be a Tissainayagam, not a Tissanayake?” The two are slightly different Tamils and Sinhala versions of the same name.
W3Lanka, the first Sinhala blogger to discuss the issue, obviously taking a certain amount of risk gets an interesting comment. “In 1989, Tissainayagam translated some documents on the human rights violations of then regime for (now President) Mahinda Rajapakse, a key human rights activist of the day, to be taken to Geneva. He was a hero then, but now a villain. Is this because then he was fighting for rights of the Sinhalese and now for Tamil rights?” Asks the commentator Pathum.
Two more popular Sinhala bloggers ‘Taboo Subjects’ and ‘Makabass’ innovatively use published Sinhala verses and songs in place of their comments. Taboo Subjects use a verse by poet Dayasena Gunasinghe, while Makabaas gets the best use of Nanda Malini’s popular ‘Nidahas Bailava’ – with its catchy line “This is the great country with the freedom to write, speak and reprimand” as his title. Their reluctance to comment further is understandable as not everyone is certain about the legal implications.
Ramachandra, a keen political analyst blogger goes a step ahead by questioning if Tissainayagam were to be imprisoned for twenty years what should be the punishment for Gunadasa Amarasekera, who had made worse racist remarks about the Tamils, for not voting for Rajapakse regime. Ramachandra asks why Amarasekera were not punished for equating Tamils to cows in an article to a racist Sinhala weekly.
Meanwhile some pro-Rajapakse and pro-Sinhala extremist bloggers have posted approving the judgment.
Colombo High Court yesterday sentenced J. S. Tissainayagam to 20 years’ rigorous imprisonment for publishing a magazine named North Eastern Monthly which ‘provoked racism’. Colombo High Court Judge Deepali Wijesundara sentenced him after convicting him on three counts indicted under the Prevention of Terrorism Act and Emergency Law. This is an appealable judgement, and I am certain there will be one.
The judgement per se does not surprise me. What surprises me is the local media response. There was not a single print media – in English and Sinhalese, I do not read Tamil – that did an editorial on this. Not a single editor, including Tissainayagam’s own stood for his/her own colleague. Some Sinhalese media, notably Lankadeepa of the very Wijeya Group that employed Tissainayagam for nearly a decade showed no reservations in expressing their pleasure. I thought there was something called ethics in fourth estate. I was wrong. These are the times of invertebrates.
I never knew Tissainayagam personally. I have glanced over some of his articles to Sunday Times. I never read the controversial magazine. Basically I have little idea what he stood for. But as a lawyer none of the above stops me commenting on the case.
What was the basis of conviction? Let me quote from the press release of International Press Institute.
The evidence against the journalist is based on two articles he wrote in the North Eastern Monthly, and a signed confession, which Tissainayagam later said had been written under duress. According to the written submission made by his defense counsel to the court, the confession was tampered with to suggest that the journalist had taken money from the LTTE. The document says: “The only allegation that he (the accused) did (accept money from a terrorist organization), is based on a fraudulent alteration of the Accused’s purported confession.”
In other words, the judgement was not based on any serious evidence other than a confession. The only occasion a court should take a confession seriously is when the behaviour of the accused supports such confession. One makes a voluntary confession only when one is convinced about guilt and regrets one’s actions. In this case Tissanayagam’s behaviour clearly was the opposite. Then the next factor is to whom he made his confession. Don’t we know about Sri Lanka’s police? Don’t we know how these confessions were taken?
This reminds me the old joke about KGB. Having left no other way of determining the time, Soviet archaeologists handed over a mummy to KGB. They didn’t have to wait for long. Pat came the answer. Apparently, the mummy has ‘confessed’.
As a lawyer, I have appeared for hundreds of ‘JVP suspects’ during the 1988-9 era who had made similar ‘confessions’. So I know how confessions are made. I know who makes them. Thanks to Inspector K. P. Newton, former-OIC of Angulana Police station and Vass Gunawardena, Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), I do not have to mince words explaining. The entire island knows.
Neither does International Press Institute (IPI) mince words. This is what it says:
No less than twelve journalists have been killed in Sri Lanka since 2006, according to its Death Watch list, with many more harassed, threatened, and arrested.
In January 2009, Lasantha Wickrematunga, editor-in-chief of the Sunday Leader, was shot at close range in the head and chest by two men on a motorcycle as he drove to work in a suburb of Colombo. He was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he received emergency surgery, but died a few hours later. Known for his critical reporting on the government, Wickrematunga was a frequent victim of harassment and intimidation, and predicted his own murder in the pages of his newspaper. The initial results of the investigation of his death have not been released.
Obviously the Sinhalese racists are jubilant. Seeing a Tamil in mess always makes them happy. To them, we have the best police and the leagal system in the whole world.
Sadly, on the other hand, this furthers us from civilised world. Sri Lanka was hardly known for its Media Freedom, but this takes us even lower. No better confirmation of the fact than the following brief story on from Chinese Xinhua:
JOURNALIST SENTENCED TO 20 YEARS FOR AIDING TERRORISM IN SRI LANKA
COLOMBO, Aug. 31 (Xinhua) — The High Court on Monday sentenced journalist to 20 years at hard labor for aiding terrorism. J. S. Tissainayagam was arrested by the police’s Terrorism Investigation Division in March 2008 for alleged aiding and abetting terrorism through a magazine he edited.
Thanks guys, for your warm welcome to the club. We owe you one.
Winston Churchill wrote in his history of the Second World War that the first trait required of victors was “magnanimity.” The Sri Lankan government would do well to remember that lesson in its treatment of its Tamil minority, whose insurgents it mercilessly crushed this past spring to end a 26-year civil war.
So far, the government in Colombo has shown little if any magnanimity toward the vanquished Tamils. More than a quarter of a million of them remain in refugee camps from which foreign aid workers and international journalists are barred. Conditions in some of these camps are “desperate,” according to the United Nation’s High Commission on Refugees.
Then on Monday, a Tamil journalist — the quiet, slight J. S. Tissainayagam — was sentenced to 20 years hard labour for alleged violations of Sri Lanka’s Prevention of Terrorism Act.
While he is accused of having taken money from the outlawed (and brutal) Tamil Tigers to operate a website providing the Tamil version of facts about the civil war, Mr. Tissainayagam’s main crime seems to have been writing two articles in the now-defunct Northeastern Monthly magazine in 2006 and 2007 criticizing the Sri Lankan persecution of the Tamils, who were seeking an independent homeland in the north-east corner of the island nation.
Mr. Tissainayagam criticized wartime tactics employed by Sri Lankan leaders, including the alleged withholding of food, medicine and other essential items from Tamil areas as a way to strike back at the Tigers. He also complained that the Sri Lankan army was conducting extrajudicial executions — murdering civilian Tamils as a warning to the Tigers that Colombo was not to be messed with and a caution to ordinary Tamils not to abet the Tigers.
For this, the Sri Lankans — who are mostly ethnic Sinhalese, not Tamil– charged Mr. Tissainayagam with “causing communal disharmony,” a serious offence under anti-terrorism laws there. His supporters, along with Amnesty International and the Asian Human Rights Commission, claim the evidence that he purportedly co-operated with the Tamil Tigers was fabricated.
They claim he is a political prisoner and that the criminal charges against him were trumped up in order to silence his anti-government views.
Sri Lanka has an abysmal record of press freedom. Not only is it keeping international reporters from its 30, soldier-guarded refugee camps for Tamil civilians, but over the course of the quarter-century-long civil war, at least 20 journalists critical of Colombo disappeared in a practice that became known as “white vanning.” A white van would pull up next to a target as he walked down the street. Masked men would jump out, throw the journalist inside and he would never be seen again. The International Committee to Protect Journalists ranks only Iran, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Colombia as worse in their mistreatment of reporters.
Throughout the final years of Sri Lanka’s civil war, this newspaper was broadly sympathetic to the Sri Lankan government’s goal of confronting and subduing the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), also known as the Tamil Tigers. While the Tamil people had legitimate gripes against the Sinhalese majority government, nothing could justify the Tigers’ tactics.
The LTTE murdered civilians, including Tamils, to strike terror into the hearts of the Sinhalese and compel obedience from ordinary Tamils. They perfected the use of suicide bombers long before Palestinians employed the tactic against Israel. Tigers threatened the lives of Tamil families effectively held hostage within Tiger-held areas in Sri Lanka in order to extract war funds from expatriates worldwide.
Still, it is clear the Tamils have been persecuted since Sri Lanka was granted its independence in 1948. The ruling caste when Britain ruled the island, the Tamils have since been legally denied government jobs and places in business merely because of their ethnicity. In 1983, hundreds of innocent Tamils were murdered by roving Sinhalese mobs in what became known as Bloody July.
The U. S. State Department has urged Colombo to release Mr. Tissainayagam. U. S. President Barack Obama even singled him out for mention in his Press Freedom Day speech in May.
Now that it is at peace again, Sri Lanka has an obligation to honour freedom of the press and of speech.
Source: National Post: http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=1948907&p=1
This is how the officers of the President talk to the media, taking the powers of their masters. (Of course, it is not too different from the master using the same language to Lasantha Waickramatunga!)
We do not mind Kumarasiri Hettige using language of this nature to address his wife, children or parents. Still as a public officer whose salary is paid by the general public he is expected to respect them. The public of this country is not as cheap as his wife or mother.
May be it is time for the public of this country to use the same language to Hettige’s wife, returning the compliment!
(I am sorry to reproduce the filth here, but the damage so done is far smaller to the damage caused by retaining such rotten individuals in public service.)
A Sri Lankan journalist is in hospital after being abducted and beaten by unidentified attackers.
Poddala Jayantha received head and leg injuries in the attack near his home in the Colombo suburb of Nugegoda.
Mr Jayantha campaigns for media freedom and is seen by government supporters as an opponent of the authorities.
Critics in Sri Lanka’s local media have come under extreme pressure in the past few years. Several independent journalists have been killed.
Mr Jayantha, the general secretary of the Sri Lanka Working Journalists Association, was kidnapped on Monday while he was walking near his home on the outskirts of the capital.
His colleagues say a group of men bundled him into a white van and severely beat him up.
They also cut his beard and hair before leaving the injured journalist in a suburban area, the BBC’s Anbarasan Ethirajan reports.
Doctors at Colombo National Hospital said his injuries were not life threatening.
Police say no arrests have been made so far.
BBC correspondents say Poddala Jayantha was named by government politicians as an anti-government campaigner who had been instrumental in tarnishing the name of the government.
As a result of earlier threats and intimidation – which included an armed group trying to kidnap him from his residence – Mr Jayantha spent a brief period abroad, returning to Sri Lanka only a few weeks ago.
The government is facing mounting criticism from press freedom groups for what they say is a failure to protect journalists from attacks and for the lack of prosecutions against those who do so, our correspondent says.
Earlier this year, the government told parliament that nine journalists had been killed and more than 25 assaulted since the beginning of 2006.
Amnesty International says at least 20 journalists have fled the country because of death threats.
Media rights groups say Sri Lanka is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists.
(Report from BBC and the photo from Daily Mirror.)
Journalist and Sri Lanka Working Journalist Association (SLWJA) secretary Poddala Jayantha was admitted to hospital with leg injuries after being abducted and assaulted by an unknown group before being dumped on the road.
In recent weeks there has been a convergence of ideas within and outside Sri Lanka that the most important obstacle to the achievement of human rights is the failure to investigate and prosecute crime.
Many journalists have fled the country, realizing that justice and protection are impossible. The Bar Association of Sri Lanka has come forward more strongly than ever to demand protection for its members so they may practice their profession without reprisals. Many civil society groups have got together to defend freedom of expression and the right to life. In all discussions within the country, the absence of the rule of law has been identified as the cause of the people’s insecurity.
Ten U.N. experts have strongly expressed their concern about the shrinking space for critical voices and the fear of reprisals against victims and witnesses. This, along with a lack of effective investigation and prosecution procedures, has led to impunity for human rights violators. Six former U.S. ambassadors have also spoken in the same vein and asked the president of Sri Lanka to provide clear leadership in dealing with this situation.
This convergence has been thrust forward by the assassination of journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge. Wickrematunge walked into a death trap he knew was waiting for him and was killed on Jan. 8. His deliberate action exposed the traps that await citizens who dare to express themselves.
Whatever one’s views of Wickrematunge’s writings, it cannot be denied he made a bold decision that will not be easily forgotten. In enormous political and social crises individuals sometimes make decisions to save the lives of others, heedless of the peril they bring upon themselves.
Sri Lanka’s public institutions are collapsing, particularly its criminal justice system. This has finally come to widespread attention both locally and internationally. In fact, the Sri Lankan Parliament drew attention to this as early as 2001 when, in a rare demonstration of unanimity, it adopted the 17th Amendment to the Constitution to deal with the problem.
The Parliament identified politicization as the cause of the collapse of public institutions – direct interference by the government and politicians into the workings of public institutions, depriving them of independence and the capacity to uphold proper norms and standards. The failure of the police and justice system to investigate and to prosecute crimes is a result of this politicization.
It is an enormous advance that the demise of the criminal justice system has been widely recognized in Sri Lanka. However, the problem remains as to how to resolve the situation.
The six former U.S. ambassadors told the president, “We urge you to take steps to reestablish accountability and the rule of law in Sri Lanka. Investigations have been promised before but have been futile.” They further stated, “Only you can provide the leadership and clear direction that will make this happen.”
Wickrematunge also addressed the president in a statement published posthumously: “In the wake of my death I know you will make all the usual sanctimonious noises and call upon the police to hold a swift and thorough inquiry. But like all the inquiries you have ordered in the past, nothing will come of this one, too.”
These two positions, one expressed by the six ambassadors and the other by Wickrematunge, express the complexity of the problem of justice in Sri Lanka.
On one hand, power rests entirely with the president. Only he is legally authorized to take steps to reform the present situation. On the other hand, in actual experience presidential interventions have meant nothing more than public statements. They are not backed up by a clear strategy or action to revitalize the administration of justice.
The absolute power of the president and the independence needed for the functioning of public institutions are at loggerheads. The result is that almost all functions come under the direct control of the president. As a former minister of the present regime pointed out, no minister has any real power.
In a well-functioning state it is not the duty of the head of the state to decide who is to be investigated or prosecuted. It is not for the head of state to decide on the details of contracts, tenders, appointments, transfers, promotions, the disciplinary control of civil servants and similar details of the administration. These are done by independent institutions, which are regulated by law.
Each institution performs its functions with relative independence within the parameters of professionally acceptable standards. The abandonment of institutional independence in favor of the executive president as the sole controller of everything has created the institutional confusion and collapse that exist today.
Now that there is consensus that the criminal justice system in Sri Lanka is a failed system, the cause of this situation must be addressed. Only a thorough and well-researched analysis of the problem can provide positive practical action for change.
Some research has been done into the crises facing the criminal investigation system and the prosecution system under the Attorney General’s Department. More work is needed in these areas to help shape public opinion locally and internationally in order to achieve the required change.
Basil Fernando is director of the Asian Human Rights Commission based in Hong Kong. He is a Sri Lankan lawyer who has also been a senior U.N. human rights officer in Cambodia. He has published several books and written extensively on human rights issues in Asia. His blog can be read at http://srilanka-lawlessness.com.
