Bravo, Courageous Lasantha

By Carlo Fonseka

(January 30, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The premeditated murder in cold blood of the lawyer-politician-journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge in broad daylight, on a highway, in a high security zone is a matter about which I find it impossible to remain silent. If I remember rightly, it was Martin Luther King Jr. who memorably said that our lives begin to end on the day we become silent about things that matter. I count many friends among journalists and when no less than 15 members of their profession have been killed in recent times for plying their pens according to their best lights; my conscience tells me that it is ignoble to remain silent.

Acquaintance

I did not know Lasantha personally but I have spoken to him a couple of times on the phone. In 2004 my longtime friend Mahinda Rajapakse asked me whether I would care to write an article to commemorate the 37th death anniversary of his father D.A. Rajapakse. I readily agreed and wrote an article titled “The Rajapakses of Ruhuna” and gave it to him. I expected it to be published in a Lake House newspaper, but it appeared as a beautifully illustrated spread in The Sunday Leader of 21 November 2004. Never before had an article of mine been so conspicuously displayed in a newspaper. So I phoned Lasantha and thanked him though I knew he hadn’t done it for my sake.

Liberal Attitude

Last year I phoned him to complain bitterly that The Sunday Leader did not give me a fair and equal opportunity to refute my dear friend Gamini Weerakoon who writes a regular column in The Sunday Leader. Gamini never tires of pooh-poohing the efforts of The National Authority on Tobacco and Alcohol (NATA) to prevent children from acquiring the smoking and drinking habit by imitating their celluloid heroes on television. Laws have been passed to obliterate such smoking and drinking scenes on television. More than once Gamini criticized and tried to ridicule this policy in his column. Three times the Editor of The Sunday Leader refused to publish my refutation of Gamini’s ill informed conjectural criticisms. Gamini has said that Lasantha greatly respected him because he was his father’s buddy. Perhaps he could not tolerate anybody challenging Mr. Weerakoon – as Lasantha unfailingly called him – in his paper. Whatever the reason, I felt very angry with him and strongly disliked the stance he took on this matter. Nevertheless, I did not question then, and do not question now, an Editor’s freedom to publish only what he likes in his newspaper and face the legal consequences, if any. It was as an undergraduate that I first read Bertrand Russell’s essay called “What Is Freedom?” Two lines from it remain etched in my old brain: “To tolerate what you like is easy. It is the toleration of what you dislike that characterizes the liberal attitude”.

Icon

From that digression necessary to keep things in perspective, I must return to Lasantha who has now achieved iconic status in the wide world of journalism. In retrospect he was a bit like a hero in a Greek tragedy who poised himself against the gods and, even with the knowledge of the futility of the struggle, pressed on until he met his inevitable fate. Lasantha Wickrematunge proved himself to be the most courageous journalist of our time in our thrice-blessed land. One might say that muck-raking was his specialty. He seemed to revel in it. If something particularly nasty about anybody had to be written, no one could do it better than Lasantha. It was breathtaking to see how hazardously close he could sail to the wind of the libel laws. He went for the jugulars of the high and mighty, caring not a jot even for what Shakespeare’s Othello called, “pride, pomp and circumstances of glorious war”. For a deeply committed Christian he was occasionally extraordinarily uncharitable and rarely even malicious in his flashes of catty wit. Amazingly, in some 15 years of merciless excoriation of assorted people, not once was this pitiless critic who cared naught for the feelings of his targets, successfully prosecuted.

Deadly Comment

He was murdered on the 8th of January. An editorial poignantly titled “And then they came for me” appeared in his paper three days later while Lasantha was still lying in his unburied coffin. Implicitly he had himself written it in grim anticipation of his impending liquidation. The eternal sceptic in me would sooner believe on the testimony of others that a monkey sang our national anthem than believe that Lasantha had written that editorial for instant replay after his extermination. Is it possible, probable or plausible that he wrote it? Plausible would be my choice of option. So plausible in fact that the editorial was like a thunderbolt that ripped open our society to demonstrate that the exercise of the freedom of expression could be lethal in our society. The world press zeroed in on the editorial and it quickly became the most quoted piece of editorial comment in living memory. It is an indictment of the government of Mahinda Rajapakse. This distresses me because I too contributed my enthusiastic mite to bring it to power. Thereafter, in these troubled times, I have given this government the benefit of every doubt.

Pity of It

Addressing Mahinda Rajapakse directly the editorial categorically declares that “we both know who will be behind my death, but dare not call his name”. This seems to make Mahinda Rajapakse at once guiltless of Lasantha’s blood but somehow responsible for his death as the principal repository of collective responsibility. The pity of it is that this seriously imperils the good name of an amiable President at the pinnacle of his popularity and glory.

Price of Courage

Unarguably Lasantha was the most courageous journalist this country has known. Really courageous men are rare. I have been privileged to know intimately one such. He was Vijaya Kumaratunga. Like the rest of us he wasn’t a perfect human being. Like all of us he had his faults. But unlike the vast majority of us, he was phenomenally courageous and brave and self-sacrificing. Lasantha in his life and death proved to be no less courageous and brave and self-sacrificing than Vijaya Kumaratunga. He too had a strong wish to live in order to try and remold our country nearer to his heart’s desire. He too demonstrated a readiness to die in the struggle to remold it. He said that he was impelled to write what he wrote by the call of conscience. What Ernest Hemmingway once said applies equally to both of them. “If people bring so much courage to this world, the world has to kill them to break them; so, of course, it kills them.” - Sri Lanka Guardian