Last week, in an episode that could have come straight out of a magical realist novel, Lasantha Wickramatunge, a successful lawyer-turned-newspaper-editor, composed a moving retropsective of the years he had struggled to maintain an independent newspaper in the midst of Sri Lanka’s long civil war. Wickramatunge wrote his apologia convinced that he would presently be murdered, so when he was gunned down on his way to work a few days later, his final thoughts were ready to be published as a posthumous editorial in his newspaper, the Sunday Leader. His candid analysis of the venality of Sri Lanka’s politicians found a sympathetic local audience and his calm, Stoic acceptance of the death that awaited him have subsequently come to the attention of thousands of admiring readers all over the world.
Alluding to a famous poem by the German theologian Pastor Martin Niemöller, Wickramatunge called his last thoughts ‘And Then They Came For Me.’ In Niemöller’s poem a hapless narrator recounts his passivity in the face of the Nazi state’s liquidation of the usual suspects: Jews, Communists and trade unionists. When he realises that he is about to become the state’s next victim it is too late − his earlier detachment from the state’s purges has ensured that there is “no one left to speak out for me.”
In recent times, the government of Mahinda Rajapakse has reflexively condemned its critics as enemies of the state, and quietly looked the other way while loyal supporters intimidated dissenting journalists and even attacked them. Last week, masked men used automatic weapons and hand grenades to destroy equipment at a private television station whose coverage of the civil war the government had deemed “unpatriotic.” In such a context it is easy to construct a rationale for an over-tactful restraint.
Wickramatunge had no illusions that the government’s enemies, the Tamil Tigers, were any better. For him the tragedy of Sri Lanka, and of many other countries caught in the deadly embrace of irreconcilable political passions, is that: “Terror, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the state, has become the order of the day. Indeed, murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty. Today it is the journalists, tomorrow it will be the judges. For neither group have the risks ever been higher or the stakes lower.” But even beyond the drama of civil war, Wickramatunge realised that politicians everywhere tend to be sceptical of independent media. His remarks on this point could be echoed by newsrooms all over the world: “Many people suspect that [our paper] has a political agenda: it does not. If we appear more critical of the government than of the opposition it is only because we believe that… there is no point in bowling to the fielding side.” In politics everyone loves hostile fast bowling, until they have to face some.
In one of the editorial’s most rousing passages, Wickramatunge acknowledged that advocates of free speech must be prepared to lose many battles before they can win a war, but he seemed to have gone to his death with some small measure of hope that his newspaper’s principles might eventually prevail: “I did not fight this fight alone. Many more of us have to be − and will be − killed before The Leader is laid to rest. I hope my assassination will be seen not as a defeat of freedom but an inspiration for those who survive to step up their efforts … I also hope it will open the eyes of [o]ur President to the fact that however many are slaughtered in the name of patriotism, the human spirit will endure and flourish. Not all the Rajapakses combined can kill that.”
Each year, in countries as different as Iraq, Russia and Colombia, hundreds of journalists risk life and limb to tell their readers stories that governments, terrorists, narcotraffickers and other powerful people would rather keep to themselves. Wickramatunge’s defence of their foolhardiness, and his own, is for the ages: “People often ask me why I take such risks and tell me it is a matter of time before I am bumped off. Of course I know that: it is inevitable. But if we do not speak out now, there will be no one left to speak for those who cannot, whether they be ethnic minorities, the disadvantaged or the persecuted.” His final paragraph ends with these words: “Let there be no doubt that whatever sacrifices we journalists make, they are not made for our own glory or enrichment: they are made for you. Whether you deserve their sacrifice is another matter. As for me, God knows I tried.”
