NOT THE POSTER BOYS FOR GOOD JOURNALISM

A shockingly biased, factually incorrect editorial comment in the Washington Post about Sri Lanka and post-war progress under the current regime, should be a very good reminder about the state of journalism in the part of the world that calls itself the ‘free world.’ It seems that in that world, journalists are free to make claims without substantiation, free to distort the reality, and very much free to have a rocking wild-ass ride.

Well, what’s new? The Post editorial paints a picture of a Sri Lanka in which ‘Tamil activists are continually detained, abused, and subject to sexual assault by the forces.’ Their source? A Human Rights Watch report, which scarcely documents any of the details regarding such assaults or cases of abuse, though sweeping generalizations abound. A report so flimsy, that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay herself, with her rather venomous approach to Sri Lanka, has never spotlighted, because none of her UN commissioned reports say anything about this kind of ‘abuse and sexual assaults of activists’ either.

It means that barring a stray case of possible misbehaviour by a deviant member of the Armed Forces, the question of abuse and sexual assault of Tamil activists is a fiction so grossly biased, that the UN High Commissioner, gullible and biased as she normally is, herself does not believe it.

Comments such as this tall story in the Washington Post however, cannot be happening by accident. This is a repeat of what happened during the war on the LTTE, particularly before the US began its own war on terror and the policymakers in the Pentagon and by the Potomac realized that it will not be a good thing to keep up a negative tirade against one government fighting terror, when a world war on terror had been declared.

But, it seems to be back to square one for Sri Lanka, now that ‘post-terrorism’ rebuilding is not an issue for Western governments and their pliant media arms, ‘privately owned.’ Suffice to say that this ‘post-terrorism’ empathy is not forthcoming, because the US for instance never came to the post-terrorism stage, having been bogged down in war wittingly or unwittingly with their various nemeses for years.

As Jeevan Thiagarajah the head of the Consortium for Humanitarian Agencies said recently in a radio interview, be it the Post or any other organ, the license to slander without substantiation and to distort the picture, is not something that comes with the territory of being a hoary old institution.

Thiagarajah states that most of the critics simply do not engage, and this goes for home-grown critics, and outsiders such as the editorial writer of the Washington Post, whoever his organ grinder may be when he engages in his creative writing. Thiagarajah, who has years of experience working on the ground and relating to the reality in areas which were previously war torn, says that for example, the prevalence of rule of law in these areas cannot be questioned because in his experience the quality of law enforcement – police, prosecutors and the judges – has been exemplary.

The problem he says is that the non-governmental sector unfortunately does not engage these good people constructively, which is ironic, it has to be stated, because it is the same non-governmental sector that is complaining that civil society is not being engaged by the government, as per the recommendations of the LLRC report.

It is easy to see therefore that it is for the most part a situation of a no-win, a damned if you do and damned if you don’t conundrum for the authorities. But, the caravan has to roll on, whether the carping comes from the direction of Washington, or Cambridge Place Colombo 7, and that’s what is important.