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| Fighting has intensified as the Sri Lankan army says it is closing in on victory [AFP] |
As the Sri Lanka government says it is close to defeating Tamil Tiger rebels there has been increasing criticism of the control over both international and local media in reporting the conflict. The Listening Post's Richard Gizbert reports.
It is now a familiar storyline. As government forces move against groups they call terrorists they subsequently block local and global media out of the war zone citing so-called security reasons.
The Sri Lankan government is tightening its grip on northern strongholds long held by the Tamil Tiger rebel movement while the media is being subjected to censorship, intimidation and news blackouts.
The head of Sri Lanka’s state funded broadcaster has called on the media to "restore peace and harmony".
The stakes are high. A leading editor of an opposition paper has recently been murdered, and international news channels find themselves threatened with expulsion from the island unless they play by what they are told are the rules.
Sri Lanka has been in a near constant state of civil war since 1983. But the story is more difficult to cover now than ever.
"I started covering the Sri Lankan war in 1992 when I had tremendous access," says Al Jazeera's Tony Birtley.
"I was allowed to go into prisons and film Tamil prisoners. I interviewed the Army Chief of Staff, I was allowed to go on the Tamil Tiger side. That has changed, we are restricted."
Intimidation
Indeed the media are not just restricted, they have also been explicitly threatened.
International news networks, including Al Jazeera, BBC and CNN have all been put on notice by the Sri Lankan government.
The country's defence minister, Gotobaya Rajapaksa, warned the networks that they would be removed if their reporting gave the Tamil rebels what he referred to as "a second breath of life".
That warning was issued days after Rajapaksa, in an interview with the BBC, drew parallels with former US president George Bush by labelling the conflict as a strict dichotomy.
"Two groups," he said. "Either you are terrorists or either you are a person who is fighting the terrorists."
Rajiva Wijesinha, the minister for human rights and disaster management, reinforced this mentality.
"Now I may not want to be compared to George Bush," he says. "But the fact that America was attacked by terrorists and had to defend itself must be understood and you have to take special measures for these things."
Those measures include making it more difficult for international media to get accredited to report from Sri Lanka and those journalists that do, are banned by the Sri Lankan government from travelling into the north, where most of the fighting is, unless they are embedded with the government troops.
Censorship
"They report as they like. I mean Al Jazeera people were taken up by us, the BBC guy was taken up to Jaffna," Wijesinha says. "They don’t say only what the government wants. So it’s not that we are trying to muzzle people.
"But we have to be careful both about safety and what the LTTE will do to these people."
However the government is using censorship. BBC World Service Tamil radio which is broadcast through a Sri Lankan FM station, has had its broadcasts interfered with, in an almost comical way.
"Some parts of the programme where we are reporting on the Sri Lankan war, mostly, they normally lower our audio, and they would play some music or something else on that," Nazes Afroz, the World Service's executive editor for South Asia, says. “Then the rest of the programme would be broadcast as it is.
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| Media outlets in Sri Lanka say they are subject to intimidation [EPA] |
"On one occasion they even played the cricket commentary between Sri Lanka and India."
As a result, the BBC World Service suspended its FM broadcasts. It can still be heard, but only via shortwave.
The Sri Lankan media are intimidated to an even greater degree. MTV, a privately owned TV station, owned by a Tamil, was attacked and its equipment destroyed by armed gunmen.
The incident came after another channel funded by the state had accused private media of irresponsible reporting.
Shortly after that, Lasantha Wikramatunga, an editor of an opposition newspaper, was shot dead in his car. He was the fourteenth journalist killed in Sri Lanka in the last three years.
"So many have been killed and nobody has been brought to justice, which is another problem we have with the Sri Lankan government," Rodney Pinder of the International News Safety Institute says.
"We want them to prosecute the murder of journalists with the same enthusiasm as they would prosecute the murder of a politician or a military person or anybody else and they don't do this."
Exodus
Such impunity for those murdering members of the media has prompted journalists to leave Sri Lanka in droves. Some fearing for their independence, others fearing for their lives.
Last three years that we have been at war, nearly 50 journalists have left the country. That's mainly Tamil journalists,” says Sunanda Deshapriya, one of those who has fled and is now in the south Indian city of Chennai.
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| Deshapriya is one of many Tamil journalists to have fled Sri Lanka |
"Even the defence minister has said, that dissent in times of war is treason… So in this situation we cannot see when we will be able to go back or when we can start writing independently about the situation on what is happening there."
Deshapriya says the pressure is intense on journalists because if it is a Tamil newspaper, they come under a subtle kind of intimidation fom the LTTE or, otherwise, similar pressure from the government.
"So you have to follow one of the lines and if you try to be independent and get you know real voices from the people, you will get threats and you will get kind of pressures not to do that," he says.
After a quarter of a century of civil war on the island the fighting has intensified and the government says it is closing in on victory.
However the international coverage of the fighting has fallen off recently and in some aspects Sri Lanka is reminiscent of the recent Israeli war on Gaza.
In both cases a government says it is aiming to eradicate enemies that it calls terrorists and locking out the media in an attempt to control the story.
"It seems to be a trend in conflicts now to shut out the media," Pinder says.
"It's become almost par for the course now that whichever side you are involved with only wants their side of the story told and the intolerance exhibited when you try to tell both sides is quite palpable and quite worrying."
What has happened in Sri Lanka today according to Deshapriya is completely self-censored media, either Tamil or Sinhalese or English.
"I do not think that people really get information, independent information to make informed judgments on what’s happening in the north and east of the country," he says.
Such an outcome, the evidence would suggest, is just how the Sri Lankan government wants it.
The Listening Post can be seen at the following times GMT: Friday 1230 and 2030, Saturday 0430, Sunday 0600, Monday 0530, Tuesday 0730, Wednesday 0300 and 100
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