SL: POSITIVE AND HUMANE CHANGE SHOULD COME!!!

FOR WHOM DOES THE BELL TOLL?..............JEHAN PERERA

Much has been written and said about Lasantha Wickrematunge, his commitment to investigative journalism and to space to different voices in society. His colleagues and friends, leaders of political parties and even representatives of foreign governments,have given him the credit that is due. Although an individual, he was also the creator and leader of a media institution. As editor of the Sunday Leader, he was fearless in exposing political weaknesses and corruption in the government and in society in general, and the impunity that accompanies them. He also highlighted the cost of the war which the government is undertaking.
Lasantha Wickrematunge’s assassination can be construed as a death blow to media freedom to take up the issues he did. His long survival as a journalist, while breaking his stories and expressing his views without inhibition, gave rise to an illusion. This illusion was that there were indeed broad parameters of freedom within which the media could function. Now with his slaying, that illusion has been shattered. There is fear and self censorship. The impunity with which journalists have been assaulted and killed, and the absence of any progress in police investigations, has eroded the morale of journalists to write according to their conscience.

It is ironic that at the very moment that the Sri Lankan armed forces achieved their greatest feat in battle and opened the long closed highway to Jaffna, armed assassins struck in Colombo and closed the doors to media freedom. The timing of the assassination, in which masked men on four motorcycles surrounded Lasantha Wickrematunge, and killed him in a high security zone on a major road near an air force camp has been counter productive to the government. So much so that it has led President Mahinda Rajapaksa and other government spokespersons to speak of a conspiracy, even an international conspiracy, to discredit the government and divert attention away from its military triumphs.

The disclaiming of responsibility is an age old phenomenon in human society, and not only in today’s Sri Lanka. Some religions even go to the very beginnings of human existence to mark the dodging of responsibility. There is the biblical story of the first family in human creation, where the elder brother kills the younger in a fit of jealousy. When he is asked where his younger brother is, he indignantly replies, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” In that first murder, as in the last, responsibility is denied. But we must hope that change comes to Sri Lanka, so that Lasantha Wickrematunge will be the last journalist to be killed.

Central plank

Speaking in Parliament the Leader of the Opposition, Ranil Wickemesinghe is reported in the media to have said that a team within the military intelligence wing and operating independent of government control was committing these crimes. “Today it is the opposition and the media who are the targets. But a similar fate can befall the government and the Cabinet tomorrow. I am talking on behalf of the entire House now. This motor bike squad should be placed under the supervision of a Deputy Inspector General (of Police),” he said. The citizens of this country have a right to know what the response of the government is to this request by the Leader of the Opposition.

It is no secret that the central plank of the government’s programme for the country has been to militarily defeat the LTTE. The government has claimed that this would lay the foundation for peace in the country. The success that the government has been having so far in its campaign to defeat the LTTE has been due to its willingness to fight the LTTE on its own terms, with no price being considered too high to pay. The government has even adopted guerilla tactics to fight the LTTE. Small groups of deep penetration forces personnel have caused consternation within LTTE controlled territories targeting LTTE establishments and its leaders. Those suspected of being LTTE supporters or members have been abducted and killed in all parts of the country.

It has been said, and with good reason, that we become like the thing we hate. The LTTE’s early success came from its ruthless tactics. It operated as a guerilla force that launched attacks and slipped away, leaving its targets in disarray. It assassinated those from Tamil society whom it believed stood in its way or opposed its claim to be the sole representative of the Tamil people. The lost lives of public intellectuals and commentators such as Dr Neelan Tiruchelvam, Rajini Thiranagama and Ketesh Loganathan stand as mute witnesses to the decimation of the intellectual cream of Tamil society. It would be tragic and counter productive that the price of defeating the LTTE is that the Sri Lankan state begins to take that same discredited path.

Avoid fate

At this time the words of Pastor Martin Niemöller who first supported and later opposed Hitler’s nationalism in Germany needs to be remembered by those who want Sri Lanka to be free of LTTE terror and all terror. He wrote that "In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist; And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist; And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew; And then…they came for me…And by that time there was no one left to speak up."

The challenge facing Sri Lankan society today is to avoid the fate of Tamil society. When the LTTE first began to kill Tamils who dissented from it, the larger Tamil society remained quiet, both out of fear and the desire not to get involved, and also because there was a belief that the LTTE would succeed in winning. They were prepared for the price that the LTTE was exacting. Instead of opposing the LTTE’s violations of human rights, there were many people who said that they admired LTTE leader Velupillai Pirapaharan and that he made them proud to be Tamil. When Tamils who were not in favour of the LTTE were killed there were many Tamil commentators who expressed the view that a traitor had been done away with, and good riddance it was too.

Now that the Sri Lankan armed forces are winning against the LTTE, it is important that the Sinhalese learn from the terrible lessons of the past. The larger community needs to take note of the teachings that great philosophers and religious leaders have left behind, that what happens to others, also happens to ourselves. Three centuries ago, the English poet John Donne said, “No man is an island entire of itself…any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” The bells that tolled these past few days for Lasantha Wickrematunge will also toll for us, unless change that is positive and humane comes soon.
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