MEDIA-SRI LANKA: No News From the Warfront

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Jun 8 1998 (IPS) - Sri Lanka’s President Chandrika Kumaratunga swept to power in elections in 1994 promising an early end to the bitter ethnic conflict that has divided the island.

Four years later the 15-year war shows no signs of ending. Neither have the government’s peace efforts been able to force the separatist guerrillas of the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to the negotiating table.

The government last week decided to blank out all news from the battlefront by muzzling the media, including the foreign press. But observers wonder how effective the ban will be in the age of the Internet, the world’s freest information highway.

“Why impose restrictions when all such information can be obtained on the Internet?” asks a local communication specialist, who did not want to be identified.

But the government has chosen to put controls on the press. Since Jun. 5, the censors started slashing stories written by foreign correspondents and Sri Lankan newspapers to just a few paragraphs stamped with the “approved censor copy” stamp.

For the first time, a military official was appointed as the chief censor, unlike on previous occasions when the government’s Department of Information was entrusted with this job.

President Kumaratunga, who issued the directive on press control, appointed Major-General Jaliya Nammuni, the army’s deputy chief of staff, as the competent authority to whet news stories on the war, including on military operations and deployment of troops.

The regulation warned that violators shall be guilty of an offence, but did not specify the penalty. The last time censorship was imposed was in June 1996, during the military operation to recapture the strategic northern town of Jaffna. But restrictions on foreign correspondents were lifted a few days later, after the government realised the move was ineffective, while curbs on the domestic press were lifted six months later.

Independent media analysts point out that censorship has always had a negative impact and is “counter-productive”.

“If it is information that the government wants to hide, then it is a totally impossible task because news on the warfront travels fast through word of mouth. It could be counter- productive when rumours are spread,” one analyst said.

‘The Sunday Times’ on Jun. 7 warned of the likely spread of “dangerous rumours” because of military censorship that will also enable the LTTE to mislead the international media which has no way of verifying its claims.

The government, the newspaper commented, does not seem to “care about its image overseas as long as the bad news is not told to the ordinary people of this country on the eve of the provincial council elections?”

Polls to provincial councils are due in August and the government is gearing up for a tough battle against the main opposition United National Party (UNP) which has decided to fight on the platform of corruption and mismanagement of the economy.

The UNP’s media spokesman Karunasena Kodituwakku has said that censorship was unacceptable and faulted the government for doing what the UNP did several years back, when in power. The UNP realised — too late — the futility of censorship, he said.

“Those days were different when the war was new to us. But the war is nothing new to us,” he was quoted as saying in the ‘Sunday Leader’ newspaper. Even the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) — a partner of Kumaratunga’s coalition government — has criticised the ban.

SLMC general secretary, Rauf Hakeem said that his party would never support censorship which was an unhealthy exercise in a democracy. “What is the point of blindfolding the public and making them guess what is happening? It (censorship) is bound to be interpreted by opposition forces in their parochial ways to mean that this is imposed for political reasons especially with the elections around the corner.”

“I think we may have to live with the censorship for a while unless the government has some good news from the battlefront,” said Harry Gunatillake, a retired air force commander and now defence commentator.

However, a senior editor working for a state-run newspaper said he believed the censorship would be lifted in a few days as it was intended to serve “a specific purpose”, he cryptically said.

‘The Sunday Times’, which argued for the people’s right to know — there was a need for military setbacks to be discussed, it said — also hoped that the ban was not the first step towards martial law, “though the trend seems to be fearfully similar to how such situations develop in other countries”.

From Jun. 10, the Sri Lankan Parliament is due to debate the “state of emergency”, extended monthly in the country, and the issue of censorship is bound to be raised by the opposition.

Though the new curbs on press freedom do not cover parliamentary proceedings, the Speaker is likely to gag reporters.