Black January and renewed hope

In Sri Lanka, it is the dawn of another Black January, so called because it is the month which has recorded the highest number of extra judicial acts against journalists and the media in the country.  Alongside it is also the disconcerting reality of the dismissive approach to accountability and the accompanying veil of impunity guarding these cases which have scuppered police investigations over the years and failed to deliver answers and justice to their families.  

This month Sri Lanka will remember Subramaniyam Sugirdharajan, a journalist for the Sudar Oli.  He famously published photographs of the Trinco 5, a group of five students who were allegedly killed by the security forces, which were in contradiction to the military testimony that they were killed in a grenade explosion. Subramaniyam was shot dead in Trincomalee on 24 January 2006.  Prageeth Ekneligoda, a cartoonist and political analyst at the pro-opposition Lanka-E- News website, and a critic of Government corruption and abuse of power, disappeared two days before the 2010 Presidential election which returned Mahinda Rajapakse for a second term as President. Ekneligoda is presumed dead legally. His body was never found.  Two near consecutive attacks on the Colombo headquarters and Depanama transmission studio of Sirasa TV in January 2009 because of its controversial reporting of the capture of Kilinochchi by Government forces decimated its broadcasting equipment and burnt the facility.  On 31 January 2011 an arson attack on the  Lanka-E-News office in Malabe destroyed its office, library and computers. Meanwhile, Lal Hemantha Mawalage, a Rupavahini news producer who was attacked and stabbed on 23 January 2007 and Upali Tennekoon, the Editor of the Rivira, who was brutally assaulted by four men on motorcycles on 23 January 2009 survived the attacks.  A closer scrutiny of these attacks shows they took place between 2006-2011 under the watch of Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Last Thursday, on 8 January, a motley group of family, friends, journalists and others from the media gathered at the grave of Lasantha Wickrematunge, for a remembrance. Wickrematunge was Editor-in-Chief of The Sunday Leader and a crusader against Government corruption, when he was killed by assailants while on his way to work. At the cemetery, someone in the crowd commented that the numbers coming for the annual commemoration have been dwindling over the years.  Juxtapose this with the hundreds who came for Wickrematunge’s funeral and the rousing pledges, political and otherwise, to get to the bottom of his killing. But it has been 17 years since his murder, which has become an emblematic case, and still counting. Painfully, it has also been 17 years of waiting for Lasantha’s family, especially for his wife and three children, who have had their wounds re-opened by successive governments-in-waiting which have leveraged his killing on their political stages.   The current Government committed to re-open the stalled investigation in Lasantha’s case.  

High profile killings which remain unresolved have a political hand behind them.  It does not need an Einstein to deduce this, just a connecting of dots. In fact, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake was of the same sentiment when he was president-to-be.  

A new year brings with it the proverbial hope for new beginnings.  In the case of the families of these journalists it will be a year of renewed expectations to know what happened to their loved ones and a year of hope for closure.  The Government must now walk its talk.