Everyone got the message. An era of self-censorship began, underlined by the disappearance of cartoonist Prageeth Eknaligoda. It has yet to end
By Ruan Pethiyagoda
The writer was an investigative journalist who worked closely with Lasantha Wickrematunge at The Sunday Leader from 2006 until shortly after the latter’s assassination.
January 8, 2009 was, like today, a Thursday, the day by which material for the inside pages of The Sunday Leader had to be submitted.
I was at home, my caffeine fuelled fingers pounding at my keyboard when my phone vibrated with a chilling message from my father. “Lasantha shot and probably dead”.
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Just a few days before, we had discussed a secret late night meeting he had had with an extremely powerful individual, who had made it quite clear in the past that he could and would have him killed. “It’s nice that you two are finally getting along,” I remarked. “Nonsense, my boy”, grinned Lasantha. He had the semi-permanent grin of a roguish child. “He’s just softening me up for the kill.”
Probably, not certainly. I lifted the nearest telephone receiver and hammered in ten digits. “Where is he?” I demanded.
“Kalubowila Hospital – hurry!” pleaded a trembling voice in return.
I had little chance to think over the next 45 seconds, my concentration devoted to flying down a staircase, finding the keys for the nearest vehicle and racing it out onto the busy morning traffic of Park Road. The ten minute race to the hospital was more routine.
There was cause for neither surprise nor panic, I told myself. This was nothing new. Lasantha was the survivor of a multitude of attacks, from being pulled out of his vehicle on the street, to a heavy weapons assault on his family home, and the routine firebombing and commando raids on his presses.
Just the previous week he’d received a wreath delivered to his door accompanied by a note explaining that it would soon come in handy. This was nothing new album all, however this time there was a particularly chilling difference.
Just a few days before, we had discussed a secret late night meeting he had had with an extremely powerful individual, who had made it quite clear in the past that he could and would have him killed.
“It’s nice that you two are finally getting along,” I remarked.
“Nonsense, my boy”, grinned Lasantha.
He had the semi-permanent grin of a roguish child.
“He’s just softening me up for the kill.”
I arrived at the hospital as medical staff were stabilising Lasantha to get him into surgery. As we waited for him to be transferred to the operating theatre, I was certain that I knew what was really about to happen.
Lasantha, true to form, was about to barge through the door on his feet and yell at us for whimpering about at the hospital instead of investigating the attack and getting an exclusive ready for print.
My fantasy evaporated the moment a screaming medical team stormed Lasantha out on a blood-soaked gurney racing for the operating theatre, one of their number performing chest compressions, another pumping furiously at a respirator. I could not have been more wrong. I could not have been more bowed, and I have certainly never in my life been more afraid.
I had always aspired to the newspaper’s founding motto, ‘Unbowed and Unafraid’. Lasantha, my role model and mentor, was certainly both of those things.
Despite having started off as a lawyer, he had taken to journalism with more zeal than anyone else I knew. It was something he enjoyed immensely: art for art’s sake. He had an unparalleled knack for unearthing news. No politician’s dirty secrets were safe. The pages of the paper were as eagerly awaited by readers as by an anxious ruling class.
The weekly political roundup and witty tweet-like nutshells were invariably the talk of Colombo’s political, diplomatic and cocktail circuits alike. Lasantha’s circle of allies, political and official alike, was peerless.
Even as Lasantha went around gathering news and publishing secrets that those in power would much rather he didn’t, there was something impishly irrepressible about him.
He leant on his legal savvy to push the boundaries of responsible reporting while being cautious never to publish stories that could get the newspaper successfully prosecuted. He was proud never successfully to have been sued and when letters of demand would arrive on his desk he would laugh them off and beckon irate complainants to “Bring it on!”
We followed the gurney up to the anteroom of the operating theatre. As the doctors worked to save Lasantha’s life, I snapped back to the certain realisation that he’d wake up any minute. We began to conspire about how best to get him on television to make a public statement about the attack as soon as he awoke. That would be his first instinct. This would prove more challenging than usual, as just two days prior, the broadcast centre of our affiliate TV station, Sirasa/MTV had been raided by heavily armed commandos who ripped the facility to pieces with high explosive claymore mines.
Journalists at the station were striving to just stay on the air let alone set up a live broadcast in a hospital room. But they would move mountains for Lasantha. All of us owed him a debt of honour.
While he was anxious to get the scoop on rival media outlets, Lasantha was the first to stand by them when they themselves were threatened. The arrest and hateful incarceration of J. S. Tissanayagam in 2008 saw Lasantha rise immediately to his defence, spearheading so widespread a furore that even President Obama stepped in to cite the reporter by name as an emblematic example of journalists being threatened around the world.
When the Sirasa/MTV facility was bombed, Lasantha was among the first on the scene, urging the shaken journalists and the station’s owners never to quit but to fight on, in what was to be his last ever televised statement. He never did wake.
My last memory from the hospital was of walking into the operating room with Lasantha’s wife Sonali – they had been married ten days prior – to see him one last time.
I saw at close hand the deep and deliberate wounds inflicted upon his head by his assassins just hours prior. I saw his face. It was still, still warm, still unbowed, and still unafraid. I want the coward who ordered Lasantha’s death to know that even in the end, he, unlike you, was not afraid.
There is no doubt that Lasantha’s assassination was a calculated move to shake Sri Lanka’s media establishment and political opposition to its foundations. Several journalists and activists had already been killed, and this was the final straw.
Despite a prompt promise by President Rajapaksa of a swift and thorough inquiry into Lasantha’s killing, no prosecution ever resulted.
Even UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon stepped into urge the government to find and prosecute those responsible for the murder, but this too, fell on deaf ears.
In a world where one of the president’s dearest friends could be slain and no amount of international pressure could bring about an investigation into the crime, then no one was safe, journalists, politicians, judges or public servants.
Everyone got the message. An era of self-censorship began, underlined by the ‘disappearance’ just one year later of cartoonist Prageeth Eknaligoda. It has yet to end.
It is no wonder that Sri Lanka is now ranked 165 out of the world’s 180 countries in the Press Freedom Index, well below basket-cases of democracy such as Afghanistan, Libya and Uganda.
Understandably, Lasantha’s life could not be celebrated with too much fanfare in Sri Lanka itself. But in death his fame rocketed internationally. In the UK, award-winning actor Bill Nighy emotionally read the entirety of his final editorial “And then they came for me” live on BBC radio.
He was posthumously awarded UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Prize in addition to several other international awards. In Vienna a large artistic monument titled “Unbowed and Unafraid” by the Austrian sculptor Peter Sandbichler stood displayed outside the Museum of Modern Art.
There is no gainsaying that if Lasantha were alive today we would be looking at a Titanically different country. How would Lasantha want us to remember him today, however?
In life, as in death, he made no secret of his desire to be a martyr, a symbol behind whom supporters of transparent, secular, liberal democracy could rally.
His final editorial was proof positive of that fact. “Publish or perish” he would quip, secretly knowing that his destiny led from one to the next. The only way for us to truly honour his legacy is by rising up to the challenges of the day precisely as he would have: unbowed and very, very unafraid.
