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It began with the assault on the news editor of the state-owned television station Rupavahini, T. M. G. Chandrasekara, on Dec. 27 by Deputy Minister Mervyn Silva, who was accompanied by a gang of known criminals. The fact that such a violent act could take place was itself a revelation of how absurd a country Sri Lanka has become. However, what was to transpire in the following days was even more bizarre than the most outlandish theater of the absurd.
After receiving death threats, Chandrasekara requested to be released from his position as news director, subsequently accepting a research post. The state and the Rupavahini Corp. for which he worked provided him no protection after he reported receiving these threats. He has been left to fend for himself. Naturally, as a private citizen, he cannot protect himself against death squads, particularly when they have the direct or indirect patronage of the state.
Another Rupavahini employee who participated in a protest against the minister's assault of the news editor, Lal Hemantha Mawalage, was brutally stabbed last week, allegedly by two people who have not yet been identified or arrested.
Now 21 employees of the Rupavahini Corp. have been called by the Criminal Investigation Division for questioning and, according to reports, have been given dates on which they should appear on the notorious fourth floor of the CID. Locally, the fourth floor has a reputation as a place where people are subjected to rather unusual forms of interrogation, and there has been more than one instance in which a person has allegedly jumped from a window on this floor to their death.
Meanwhile, the defense secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapakse, has been reported in several newspapers as making the following comments:
"I think that there is no need to report anything on the military. People do not want to know how many and what kind of arms we acquired. That is not media freedom. I say without fear that if I have the power I will not allow any of these things to be written. I told the president that we need to exercise press censorship from the beginning. I have been telling him that we need to bring in laws that stipulate harsh punishments for such reporting.
". . . We need a criminal defamation law . . . This is not media freedom, although very few are doing this."
Many other reporters have complained of death threats from Sri Lanka's underworld. Journalists in the North have also been exposed to assassinations. The situation is so fraught with violence that two journalists of the Jaffna-based Tamil daily Uthayan have literally been living inside their offices since May 2006; they are afraid to move out for fear of being killed.
None of these people receive the protection that the state is expected to provide to all its citizens. Instead, the state itself is behind these incidents, directly or indirectly. The state itself has become the tormenter of the people.
To an outsider, all of these events may sound tragically comic. However, to a Sri Lankan citizen, they spell despair -- despair of their leaders, despair of the police, prosecutors and judges and despair about one-time intellectuals who have opted to play a role in this theater of the absurd as spokespeople of the tormenting state.
The citizens' despair arises from the perception of the ineptitude of the leaders who rule and the leaders in the opposition. There is no escape from this ineptitude and the resulting neglect. There is nowhere that citizens can turn to find redress or to find an escape route from this violent insanity.
Even the judiciary is caught up in this despair. Last week the Supreme Court, during the course of adjudication, stated that the police section that monitors the speed of vehicles should be closed as it is being used to harass people and obtain bribes. Even such a simple task as scrutinizing speeding vehicles cannot be entrusted to the police.
Everything ends in bribery and an abuse of power. How can such a police force deal with the levels of violence now present in Sri Lankan society? When the police cannot be trusted, even to this extent, where can the people turn for solutions to the nightmares of insecurity they face?
There seems to be no solution to the people's despair, either from the state or from any of the political parties. At such times, escape from the theater of the absurd lies with the people themselves. They must find their own ways to replace despair with effective plans of action, to break through the boundaries that hold them hostage to despair. It is above all the task of the educated sections of society, of various origins, to find ways to deal with Sri Lanka's real-life theater of the absurd.
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(Basil Fernando is director of the Asian Human Rights Commission based in Hong Kong. He is a Sri Lankan lawyer who has also been a senior U.N. human rights officer in Cambodia. He has published several books and written extensively on human rights issues in Asia.)
