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Military or civilian censorship, Chandika rules the media

By our Defence Correspondent
What’s the difference? Most journalists in this country heard on Friday night, or Saturday morning, that the president had appointed Ariya Rubasinghe, Director of the Government Information Department, as the censor, to enforce her emergency law that journalists should not write things about the war that she doesn’t want them to write.

Rubasinghe, a civilian, replaced a long line of senior army officers who have had the misfortune to wear the tag of censor.

Big deal
Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga forced the censorship down our throats in June of this year. Her own party supported her in this and later passed it in the parliamentary vote on the State of Emergency.

Since then, all journalists have had to meekly submit their articles on the war to the censor. If he felt like chopping pieces off the article at random, or methodically, he did so.

Most of the time, there was no method. Junior army officers, many whose knowledge of languages were scarcely above that of GCE O-Level, were given the actual task of brutalizing the articles, since the censor himself couldn’t possibly read all the articles himself. The final butchered copy was stamped and signed by the censor himself.

Now, instead of having the army butcher our stories, we have civilian government bureaucrats doing it.

Why this cosmetic change?

The most pressing reason, was that the Commissioner of Elections, Dayananda Dissanayake, had set January 25, 1999 as the date for the Western Provincial Council election.

To vote for whom they think will run the country, or their province in the best way, voters need to know how those in office have been doing so far. That’s why they read newspapers, watch television, and listen to the radio.

When a censorship is on, the media can’t tell the people how the country is being run, and the people’s right to know is violated.

Without knowing what’s going on, how can a voter make a choice?

Having a censorship in a country is considered a big black mark internationally, in human rights and democracy.

Having an election after eight continuous months of censorship, eight months of fooling the people about what’s going on, is worse.

Having an election after eight months of censorship in which the army has been telling journalists what to right is worse still.

For a president who came to power championing human rights and media freedom, and who still dares to talk of the anti-democratic practices of the last regime, it’s a pretty gloomy situation.

For Chandrika, there are few choices.

She could postpone the election. But then, we may as well change the country’s name from "Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka’’ to "Chandrika’s Sri Lanka.’’

She could remove the censorship. But then, the people would learn the truth about the war, and the corruption within her government and the armed forces in arms deals. The voters might throw her party out of the Northwestern Province. So that’s no use to her as an option.

So finally, she did the only thing she could: try to show the world that the army isn’t interfering in democracy by stifling the people’s right to know. Instead, it’s government bureaucrats who are doing the job.

What does this mean to us journalists? Can we write today, what we couldn’t write last week? No. The Emergency Regulation remains the same. We can’t write about any operation which has been done, or will be done, or is being done, by any section of the armed forces or police.

We still can’t write about deployment of ships or aircraft, which means that we can’t tell you if the air force’s biggest plane crashed, killing 100 people on board, or if the navy’s biggest ship sank, or about any action by any member of the armed forces of police.

If a hundred soldiers went berserk and gangraped dozens of helpless women on the streets of Colombo, we can’t tell.

If the police bodyguard of a VIP drives the VIP’s Pajero through a red light at a junction near a school, and runs over twenty little schoolgirls, we can’t tell you, because it was driven by a policeman, who happens to be a person mentioned in the censorship regulation.

That’s what censorship means.

Forget about the LTTE. The Tigers are not what the censorship is about. They aren’t even mentioned in the law. Neither is the war.

What is mentioned, are the armed forces and the police. We can’t write about them, or anything they do.

You can dress it up in whatever form you like, but the bottom line is that freedom of speech goes into the dustbin.

The method in which Rubasinghe’s appointment was announced to the media also showed a total contempt towards the media on the part of the president. This is sad, considering that her resume proudly states that she herself was once a journalist. It’s not just Sri Lanka’s journalists that she looks down upon either. The foreign media in Colombo received the same treatment.

On Friday night, the Government Information Department sent a 2-page fax to all media institutions, including newspapers, and radio and TV stations.

All it contained was the text of a new Emergency Regulation ordered by President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga on December 9, 1998.

At first glance it looked ominous, with the words " PUBLIC SECURITY ORDINANCE’’ written in bold letters on top.

As many people in this country are aware, especially journalists, that means that the President has done something using the draconian powers which she gave herself by proclaiming a nationwide State of Emergency in August, and which her own People’s Alliance continues to extend to her every month at the end of the parliamentary debate on the State of Emergency.

There was no note accompanying it, and it took journalists a while to read and re-read through the legalistic jargon, and finally understand what it

THE PUBLIC SECURITY ORDINANCE (CHAPTER 40)

REGULATIONS made by the President under Section 5 of the Public Security Ordinance.

Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, President.

Colombo.
Regulations

1. These Regulations may be cited as the Emergency (Prohibition on Publication and Transmission of Sensitive Military Information) Regulations No. 1 of 1998.

2. No Editor or publisher of a newspaper or any person authorized by or under law, to establish and operate a Broadcasting Station or a Television Station shall, whether in or outside Sri Lanka, print, publish, distribute or transmit, whether by means of electronic devices or otherwise, or causes to be printed, published, distributed or transmitted whether by electronic means or otherwise, any material containing any matter which pertains to any operations carried out or proposed to be carried out, by the Armed Forces or the Police Force (including the Special Task Force), the deployment of troops or personnel, or the deployment or use of equipment, including aircraft and naval vessels, by any such forces, or any statement pertaining to the official conduct or the performance of the Head or any member of any of the Armed Forces or the Police Force.

3. Where any person prints, publishes, distributes or transmits, or causes to be printed, published, distributed or transmitted, whether by electronic means or otherwise, any matter in contravention of the provisions of Regulation 2, the Competent Authority may, after issuing such directions as he considers necessary to effect compliance with the provisions of such regulation, make order that the press or equipment used for such printing, publication, distribution or transmission shall, for such period as is specified in that order not be used for the purpose of printing, publication, distribution or transmission of  any matter referred to in Regulation 2 and the Competent Authority may by the same order authorize any person specified therein to take such steps as appears to the person so authorized to be necessary, for preventing the printing, publication, distribution or transmission of any such material.

4. The President may for the purpose of these regulations, appoint, by name or by office, any person or body of persons to be the Competent Authority.

5. Any person who prints, publishes, distributes or transmits, any material in contravention of the provisions of Regulation 2 shall be guilty of an offence.

THE PUBLIC SECURITY ORDINANCE (CHAPTER 40)

Emergency (Prohibition on Publication and Transmission of Sensitive Military Information) Regulations No. 1 of 1998.

BY virtue of the powers vested in me by Regulation 4 of the Emergency (Prohibition on Publication and Transmission of Sensitive Military Information) Regulations No. 1 of 1998, I, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, President, do by this Order appoint Mr. Ariya Rubasinghe, Director of Information as the Competent Authority w.e.f. 9th December, 1998 for the purposes of the said Regulation.

Colombo, 09th December, 1998.

(End of regulation)

Note the date on the regulation: December 09. That’s Wednesday. Yet, it was Friday night before the people were told. How dare the president do that?

In other words, she signed a secret law on Wednesday, and then kept it a secret for two days. During that time, the Sri Lanka Army, which has been censoring articles since June 5, continued to do so, although it now had no authority in law to do so.

In this day and age, when events in remote and unheard of countries in the darkest corners of Africa can be sent live into the living rooms of billions of people, can there be any excuse for the 2-day delay in telling the people of the president’s order?

But then, a president who has tied journalists’ hands behind their backs, isn’t going to bother about telling them the news quickly, is she?

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