By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Jan 4 2000 (IPS)

Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga, re-elected to office last month, has accused both the private media of biased reporting and the opposition of hatching a secret pact with Tamil rebels, 18 months ago.

Kumaratunga, in a combative mood on state television, Monday night, said the independent media was partisan in its coverage of the presidential election, and threatened her government would take action.

She claimed there was a conspiracy between the opposition United National Party (UNP), the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and a section of the army, to oust her from power.

“Tamils in the north and the east except in the northern Jaffna peninsula voted for the UNP out of fear for the LTTE who had warned them not to vote for me. If not for these threats, I would have got around 56 percent,” she said.

Kumaratunga, who survived a Tamil rebel assassination attempt three days before the Dec. 21 presidential poll, secured 51.14 percent of the vote against 42.71 percent obtained by her nearest rival, opposition leader Ranil Wickremasinghe of the UNP.

Her television appearance, Monday, was supposed to be an interview with two journalists but turned into a non-stop tirade against the media, her political opponents, the rebels and corrupt businessmen.

“The conciliatory approaches she made towards the UNP and the rebels, to join hands in solving the ethnic conflict, in a post- election speech, have been nullified by Monday’s unwarranted attack on political opponents and the media,” said a political analyst.

The editor of a state-owned daily said the speech appeared to be directed at a rural audience and not Colombo’s intelligentsia, and it could be setting the stage for early parliamentary polls.

“It looks like a campaign speech and would serve the political purpose of the president. On the international front, the speech would probably be viewed with dismay lacking diplomatic niceties like the choice of words, etc.,” he told IPS.

In an emotional speech — soon after being sworn in on Dec. 22 — Kumaratunga urged her defeated rival Wickremasinghe to join hands in solving the ethnic conflict that has cost the lives of up to 75,000 people since 1983.

She vowed to crack down on the rebels but also appealed to them to return to the negotiating table. That offer was widely perceived as a conciliatory gesture towards the UNP, triggering fresh hopes of peace in the new millennium.

Two weeks later, the optimism has already vanished with analysts saying the UNP is unlikely to support her peace call while the private media is most likely to gang up against her again, like they did before and during the presidential campaign.

“Her address may negate business confidence, stump diplomats and ruin hopes of peace but if votes is what she was trying to get, then she may succeed,” one analyst noted.

Parliamentary polls are not due until August this year but there is speculation that Kumaratunga, confident after her presidential win, may call elections in March or April.

Pro-government journalists Lucian Rajakarunanayake and Janadasa Peiris could ask only a few questions during the marathon three-hour interview, in which ‘The Island’ daily Tuesday headlined “President Kumaratunga hits all around”.

She warned the private electronic and print media of legal action for defamatory stories during the polls; she accused five mainstream newspaper and television media groups of partisan behaviour and named at least two newspaper editors of corruption and being UNP supporters.

Kumaratunga said she would not, like previous regimes, murder journalists who published stories against her but would bring them before the law through legal action.

“I will not allow the media in coalition with the UNP or not to sling mud against me or my children in the future. People should have the right to know the truth after paying a price for the newspaper. Our government is obliged to protect this right of the reader,” she said.

The private media which grew in the early years of Kumaratunga’s first term, she won elections in 1994, has been disenchanted with the government accusing it of corruption, mismanagement, inefficient and poor military strategy.

Domestic media are not allowed to report news from the war

front under censorship laws enforced more than 18 months ago. That and a brutal police assault on journalists, Jul. 15, 1999 have further distanced the media from the president.

Victor Ivan, editor of the Sinhala-language ‘Ravaya’ daily, said in a Sep. 19, 1999 interview with IPS that “There is widespread anger over the government’s attempts to browbeat the media.” Ivan at the forefront of the ‘Free Media Movement’, set up in the 1980s to campaign for media freedom, was among journalists singled out for attack by Kumaratunga on Monday.

Last week, Sri Lanka’s one-time censor and now Minister of Special Assignments Dr Sarath Amunugama, suggested that the mainly family-owned private media companies should be quoted on the stock exchange.

“There should not be a single person or family controlling the majority stake in such a company. Nobody should own more than 5 percent of the shares,” he was quoted as saying by the ‘Daily Mirror’ newspaper. The battle lines are drawn.

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