Suppression of Media

1#

Journalists from other countries, including India, were virtually being held incommunicados. Their reports were lacerated with the blood red pencil of the censor who cut out all that she found was “objectionable”. Many journalists stopped writing reports altogether since what remained after the censor went through them was a few lines. More enterprising of the scribes, however, smuggled out their reports through persons leaving the country.

All hotels in Colombo were under ordered from the Government not to allow the journalists use their telex and making a telephone call to India was an impossibility during the last week of July.

2#

The censor was highly capricious and slashed out news without any sense of reason. Photography had been banned and one photographer had his camera smashed.

Journalists were no longer issued curfew passes. They were given passes to go only from their hotels to the office of the censor.

3#

Somehow he [William Claiborne, Delhi-based South Asia correspondent of the Washington Post] managed to get some information and reported that shops and restaurants of Sri Lanka nationals of Tamil origin were selectively burnt and Sinhalese shops and establishments had been left intact –even their name boards were not touched by the hooligans and looters!

4#

Barely hours after I touched down in Colombo, I was kept under strict surveillance. My phone was tapped, my notes confiscated. Getting a curfew pass proved to be a Herculean task. The inspector in charge of issuing a pass refused to give me one, saying with genuine concern that if I stepped into the street during curfew it would be suicide….

5#

The suppression of information critical of the government extends to foreign journalists and agencies. Jayewardene expelled journalist David Selbourne in June 1983, smearing him as a marxist troublemaker, and a month later a UPI journalist was expelled for exposing Jayewardene’s call for foreign arms. Amnesty International and the British Guardian, which have both published damning reports on the violence against the Tamils, have been discredited in the Sri Lankan parliament and press.

6#

The killing of the 13 soldiers was reported immediately by the media and the names of the soldiers were published, but the killing of the civilians by the soldiers on the following day was not reported. Had the deaths of civilians in Jaffna on July 24th been reported events might have turned out very differently. Two weeks later the President in answer to a question asked at a press conference is reported to have said that he had heard that some 20 civilians in Jaffna had been killed by troops on a rampage, and indicated at the time that he had then only just been informed of the killings. Even then that information was not made public in Sri Lanka. It was, however, published in the British newspaper, The Guardian, and in other foreign newspapers, and several people whom we met had learned of it from those sources.