Gen. Scissorhands

On 5 June, the Sri Lankan government imposed the latest blackout on war news after the government forces, battling for over a year to establish a main supply route between Vavuniya and Jaffna, suffered some very heavy casualties. Confirming the losses in Parliament, Deputy Defence Minister Anuruddha Ratwatte claimed that the military gave as good as it got and imposed even more fatalities on the Tamil Tigers. As for most Lankans, especially residents of Colombo, the wailing of ambulance sirens was sign enough that the war was going badly.

On all previous occasions when the government decided to begin censorship, the director of the government information department was named to be the concerned authority. But this time it is the army HQ which is vetting the news. General Ratwatte is on record saying that censorship became necessary because newspapers were publishing classified information. He accused one newspaper, which he did not name, of publicising a military plan complete with a map that led to the calling off of a whole military operation. Predictably, the minister was silent on leaks in the military establishment itself that made such publications, if they had happened, possible.

Protest against news censorship came from the local press and foreign correspondents accredited to Colombo. Independent newspapers dashed off protest editorials, while the government-controlled press made lame excuses about what they say is a necessary evil. Given that the Sri Lankan press as well as the corps of foreign correspondents in Colombo have not as a rule been irresponsible, the present restrictions are widely regarded as unnecessary.

There were signs that the foreign correspondents at least would be exempted from censorship some days after it came into force. There have been precedents when the foreign press were let off the censorship hook quicker than the locals. This time, however, that did not happen probably because the local press began to scream apartheid!

Meanwhile, a most peculiar situation has arisen. News that has been ‘red pencilled’ by the censor is freely accessible to anybody with a radio set tuning on to the BBC programme, Sandesaya, relayed both in the Sinhalese and Tamil languages by the state-owned Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC) after the night newscasts. And this has nothing to do with the general perception in Sri Lanka, as in other parts of South Asia, that the Beeb is truly independent. It springs from an agreement between the BBC and the SLBC that requires Sandesaya to be relayed exactly as it is produced without any deletions or alterations.

True, BBC stringers in Colombo are subject to the same rules as any other foreign correspondent and thus not allowed to transmit any uncensored war news out of the country. But that does not prevent the BBC London office from gleaning information that the army censor mayhave blocked and including it in the programmes beamed to Sri Lanka. The authorities have had this anomaly pointed out to them, but given the agreement with BBC, there is nothing they can do about it, except turn a red face to the public.