Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
By C. A. Chandraprema
-December 17, 2015
a part time writer but he was no media person. He was a public servant the Divisional Secretary of Kattankudy at the time he was killed. The other
Muslim mentioned is Rashmi Mohamed of Sirasa TV, who was killed in the
same bomb blast that killed Maj Gen Janaka Perera. Neither of these two
deaths can be connected to governments.
The rest of the 38 media persons killed are Tamils. It is important for the
government to be aware as to who these Tamil media persons are. There
is a vibrant if small Tamil mass media in this country. The Virakesari,
Thinakural, the Jaffna edition of the latter known as the Yarl Thinakural,
the Uthayan and its sister paper the Sudaroli, the Valampuri and even the
Thinamurusu run by the EPDP can be considered the legitimate Tamil
media. In addition to these newspapers, there were propaganda organs of
the LTTE like the Elamurusu in the 1980s and 1990s and its latter day
offshoots the Eelanadu and Namathu Eelanadu. Those working for the
Elanadu and Namathu Elanadu and electronic media belonging to the LTTE
like the Voice of Tigers are members of the LTTE. About 20 of the 38 Tamil
media persons listed above were members of the LTTE. In practical terms,
there may be only a marginal difference in the ideological trajectory of a
legitimate Tamil newspaper like the Uthayan and the Eelandu which
belonged to the LTTE. But, one newspaper is run as a part of the private
media industry whereas the other is a part of a terrorist organisation.
There is a difference. When the prime minister says that the government is
going to pay compensation to the families of 44 journalists killed by the
previous regime they include these 20 LTTE cadres. The government has
obviously not done a study to find out who these murdered journalists
are. The prime minister comes from a family with deep roots in the media
industry. He, of all people, should be aware that if 44 real journalists had
been killed by the government, the media industry would have ceased to
exist. Nobody would have joined a mediorganisation and even those
already working in the industry would have been looking for other jobs.
Only about 10 of the names mentioned above, Lasantha Wickremetunga,
D. Sivaram, Kandasamay Balanadaraja, Lanka Jayasundera, Relangi
Selvarasa, Subramanium Sugitharajan, Lakmal de Silva, W. Gunasinha, P.
Devakumar and Rashmi Mohamed can be considered journalists in the
proper sense of the term. Of these, half were killed by the LTTE. State
related actors can be suspected only in the case of Lasantha
Wickrematunga, Lakmal de Silva and S. Sugitharajan. D. Sivaram and
Lanka Jayasundera were killed by non-LTTE, non-state actors. In the case
of Sivaram, it was proved to be the doing of a rival Tamil group.
If you eliminate the LTTE cadres from the list of Tamil media persons killed,
there still are a fair number of Tamil persons left on the list. If one looks at
the profiles of the murdered Tamil media persons who were not directly
working for the LTTE, it can be seen that it was far more dangerous to
work in the circulation or administrative department of a Tamil newspaper
than to be a journalist. It can be the case that when one needs to stop a
newspaper from circulating, one way to do that is to terrorise those
distributing it. The JVP also tried similar tactics in the late 1980s. So, even
though many of those killed were not journalists in the proper sense of the
term, they, too, should be taken into account in talking of the suppression
of the media.
In any event, the government should be very careful as to who it pays
compensation to on the basis that they were journalists. As a journalist
myself, I wish to register my protest at lumping Lasantha Wickrematunga
with LTTE cadres involved in running the Tiger newspaper. Sivaram was an
LTTE supporter, but he had an identity as a journalist independent of his
connection to the LTTE. The prime minister should be aware that these
figures of journalists supposedly killed by the Rajapaksa government were
compiled by media NGOs who have a vested interest in inflating data
relating to media suppression. Such tainted figures and data should not
form the basis for governmental decision making.
The much longer list of murdered media personnel compiled by the Free
Media Movement has actually listed the editor of Wedihanda the
newsletter of the JVPs death squad in the late 1980s as a murdered
newspaper editor! According to the MMD list reproduced above those who
served in the LTTE propaganda arm have also been considered journalists.
Is it too much to ask that journalists in legitimate private media
organisations be distinguished from terrorists? It is one thing for a media
NGO to compile lists lumping real journalists and terrorists together but it
will be another thing altogether for a government to pay compensation to
dead terrorists on the grounds that they were media persons. If the
government wants to pay compensation for real journalists killed, they
should perhaps get the relevant list from a body like the Editors Guild
which has real newspaper editors as members.
Posted by Thavam