MEDIA-SRI LANKA: Censorship Not Helping War Effort – Critics

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Jun 12 2000 (IPS) - Encouraged by a partial easing of censorship, Sri Lankan media has stepped up its campaign for freedom to report the Jaffna conflict, warning the government it would otherwise lose out in the propaganda war to Tamil Tiger rebels.

The country’s highest court Tuesday hears a challenge to the censorship imposed early May by President Chandrika Kumaratunga to check ‘irresponsible’ media coverage of the ongoing battle between government troops and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) for the control of the northern Jaffna peninsula.

The Tigers are fighting for a separate home for the minority Tamil people in the Indian Ocean island nation, alleging discrimination by the majority Sinhala community.

Petitions against the news censorship, which journalists claim is carelessly applied and often used to prevent criticism of the government, have been filed by a group of newspaper editors, a cartoonist and a former police official who has objected to the censure of his newspaper column.

The Colombo-based research body, the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), has filed a separate petition in court against the censorship and some aspects of new emergency regulations that came into force on May 3.

A team from the New York-based Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) was also due in Colombo. Led by famed Gulf War journalist Peter Arnett, the CPJ panel was to discuss the censorship with Sri Lankan media, government and opposition leaders.

“It is utterly stupid to enforce censorship during the Internet revolution. People have a right to know what is happening on the warfront and they only have to look at the Internet for it,” says Harry Gunatillake, former airforce commander who writes a column for a local newspaper on military affairs.

According to Gunatillake, the censorship may only keep news of the Jaffna conflict from Sri Lanka’s villagers who do not have access to the Internet.

Sri Lanka’s opposition parties have slammed the censorship as an attempt to stifle voices critical of the government. The media curbs are accompanied by a ban on public political meetings and even trade union union activity.

Rivals of the ruling People’s Alliance (PA) complain these will make it difficult for them to campaign for the national parliament polls due in a few months. They also fear that the government will use the Jaffna crisis to put off the election.

However, in an early May interview to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Kumaratunga asserted the elections would be held on schedule and reassured that “all obstacles” to a democratic exercise would be removed. She also promised to lift the censorship as soon as possible.

Keeping part of her promise, the government has relaxed censorship on the foreign media. Political and media observers credit this to U.S. pressure. During his May visit to Colombo, U.S. Under Secretary of State, Thomas Pickering told reporters that he had expressed deep concern over the censorship when he met Kumaratunga.

” I believe the lifting of the censorship on the foreign media was as a result of US pressure,” says political analyst Rohan Edrisinghe. The ban on the foreign media was not effective as international news agencies used New Delhi, Singapore or London datelines to put out stories on the Jaffna conflict that were based on information gathered from Colombo.

But few think the government will follow this up by lifting curbs on the Sri Lankan press. “I think the censorship will continue for a long time, at least for the local media,” says senior defence columnist Iqbal Athas who writes for the independent Sunday Times newspaper.

According to Athas, the censorship is actually helping the Tamil Tigers. The rebels are regularly feeding the foreign media with their version of the conflict, he points out. “In such a situation, the rumour mill takes over and works against the government,” he explains.

A weekend statement by the Newspaper Society representing publishers of national newspapers says: “Continued censorship will not only fuel deleterious rumours and speculation which will, by their own nature, be counter-productive, but also push media personnel into a further position of antagonism.”

A ban on war reporting has been in force since June 1998, but newspapers could get off with a warning under this. Authorities can now ban a newspaper and even seize its printing presses. Three national newspapers have been closed down so far. Government sleuths have questioned the editor of a television station about a news story.

Journalists complain that censor officials discriminate between state and other media, allowing the former to report what the latter cannot. ‘Sometimes they (censor) allow military information in one copy and then the next day, delete the same information from other stories. Where is the consistency? What kind of censorship is this?” asks a senior journalist.

The critics cite the case of defence writer Athas’ June 11 column that carried vital details of the fighting in the north. But journalists who gave out this information in their reports, quoting from Athas’ column, found this deleted by the censor.

The petition challenging the censorship before the Supreme Court argues that while certain curbs on freedom of information are permissible in an emergency, these cannot be selectively implemented. It lists specific cases of arbitrary and discriminatory censorship.

The petition complains that the media reports are vetted by “unnamed and unidentified persons who are not authorised under emergency regulations to exercise powers of censorship.”