This is a tale of censorship. Of how a government belea guered by war with a deadly opponent, chose to muzzle its media. Of how the media took on the government, and the way the court dealt with it. The lessons are plenty to learn from the "heightened" media censorship announced by the Sri Lankan government on 3 May.
At first impact, however, neither the press nor the public was unduly perturbed. After all, the country had been under emergency rule for the better half of the past two decades and had witnessed successive rulers summarily using emergency law to control the press for varying ends and to varying degrees. And there was nothing to indicate that this current round of censorship was going to be anything worse. Matters soon became clearer.
Towards the end of the week after the censorship regulations were announced, copies of the Sunday newspapers that were sent to the Competent Authority were coming back blotted out. As one sub-editor at The Sunday Times put it, "It is shock upon shock. All our copies are being sent back, slashed to senseless rubbish." This sense of horror was echoed in newspaper offices throughout Colombo—news reports, columns, cartoons, all were being dealt the same black markers.
The full glory of Competent Authority Ariya Rubesinghe´s handi¬work was there for all Sunday readers to see as they settled into their weekend reading. Page after page of Sunday´s newspapers highlighted enormous sections which had been deleted by Rubesinghe, including political comment, satire, social comment, as well as legal analyses of the May regulations themselves. The connection of the censored items with national security or public order was hard to find. It was a censoring without parallel in the history of the country´s media. Only the pages of the govern¬ment-controlled Sunday Observer were left untouched. A collision course had been set between Rubesinghe and the Sri Lankan media, which was to reach a dramatic climax three months later.