By Feizal Samath
IRANAWILA, Sri Lanka, Dec 23 1998 (IPS)

Every morning, before he sets out to sea, Henry Arthur Fernando prays for the removal of the U.S. radio station being set up in this small fishing hamlet on the northwest Sri Lankan coast.

The local fisherman who has taken part in the over decade-long protests against the Voice of America (VOA) radio station, fears that his days of fishing in a nearby lagoon may be coming to an end.

“Only God can help us now,” he says. The once fiery agitation against the project has since simmered down and staunch protesters like Fernando can only hope for divine intervention.

The VOA station has been in the eye of a national political storm all these years and was opposed by Sri Lanka’s ruling People’s Alliance (PA) coalition when it was out of office.

The radio station is finally being built near this village some 80 km north of Colombo and is expected to be ready by the summer of 1999. The station’s planned broadcast arc includes East Africa, West Asia, Central Asia, Pakistan, India, and most of China and Southeast Asia.

The protests turned violent in the early 1990’s when a local was killed and many injured in police firing on agitators. The village of about 1,700 families had then turned into a virtual war zone with protest placards and posters nailed and pasted to the coconut trees.

Villagers barricaded the approach roads to the site of the radio station with tree trunks and stoned approaching vehicles.

“Some of us were prepared to torch ourselves alive inside our homes the project,” says Fernando, recalling those days.

Although the villagers failed to block the project, they have forced authorities to concede other major long-standing demands.

The popular campaign, backed by political parties, has led to a reduction in the size of the VOA station to avoid displacement of people from the area. The people have also been given ownership of the lands which they have tilled for generations as leaseholders.

“They have won some demands at least though they may have not succeeded in stopping the station,” says Ivan Peter Fernando, a Christian priest who heads a church-backed group that supported the protests against VOA in the mid-1980s.

The United States had first expressed interest in setting up a VOA relay transmitter along Sri Lanka’s western shore in the 1970s. The Iranawila site, part of a government-owned coconut plantation bordering a predominantly Roman Catholic fishing village, was identified by the government as a possible location.

In 1982, the government set aside a 625 hectare plot for the VOA station and a holiday resort complex to be built by an Australian consortium. The two projects would have involved displacement of about 600 families living in the area.

The trouble began soon after the foundation stone for the VOA station was laid in 1985. Locals staged a series of protest rallies which were backed by local church authorities.

Opponents of the radio station argued that it would not only make hundreds of families homeless, but that, together with the holiday resort, it would bring in ‘harmful’ Western culture.

“We were concerned that our children would get spoilt,” says Fernando.

Protesters also claimed that the VOA station would be a security threat. They got support from an unexpected quarter when, in 1986, the Indian government too said the same thing.

Work on the project slowed down in 1994 in the face of mounting popular protests. The PA, which was then in opposition, in its election statements during the 1994 national poll, threatened that if it formed a government, it would “tear apart” the deal with VOA.

However, soon after taking office, the PA changed its stand, arguing that it had to honour the agreement between VOA and the former Sri Lankan government.

But the land area of the project was trimmed down from the planned 416 to 172 hectares. Moreover, many locals were given ownership deeds to properties they had lived in for generations but never owned.

According to the U.S. Information Service (USIS) spokesman in Colombo, the VOA project was scaled down as early as 1987 due to

“broad reductions in the planned scale of the Iranawila transmitter operation.”

The anti-VOA campaign also inspired similar popular movements in other parts of Sri Lanka against development schemes which were seen as anti-people.

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