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It's not news when an autocracy denies its citizens a free press. Freedom of expression is a fundamental right enjoyed only by democracies and free societies, right? In the last two weeks, two south Asian neighbors, both democracies, saw that right seriously threatened.
A Sri Lankan journalist was killed in broad daylight for running a newspaper that was critical of the government. Neighboring India came this close to clearing a legislation that could ban live TV coverage of national emergencies a.k.a Mumbai terror attacks.
Sri Lanka: Lasantha Wickrematunge's obituary, his "Final Ed" that he is reported to have saved on his office computer to be published after his "assassination", is probably the most chilling indictment of the Lankan government's failure to protect a free press, or its complicity in strangling one; its relentless trampling of basic human rights and anything that comes in its way in its war with the separatist Tamil Tigers. On January 8, the editor-in-chief of English language The Sunday Leader was shot dead on his way to work. Apparently he knew it was coming. In a column about his impending death, that rattled the world more than his work as a journalist, Wickrematunge says he was spoiled for choices: he was advised and offered many ways out of a profession that he anticipated would take his life some day. But he decided to stay on, to persevere:
But there is a calling that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and security. It is the call of conscience.
[...]
People often ask me why I take such risks and tell me it is a matter of time before I am bumped off. Of course I know that: it is inevitable. But if we do not speak out now, there will be no one left to speak for those who cannot, whether they be ethnic minorities, the disadvantaged or the persecuted.
Painting a dismal picture of how the free press has been consistantly browbeaten by the Lankan government -- and why he and his paper have been regular targets of threats and attacks -- he holds the government of president Mahinda Rajapakse, a former friend, responsible for his death:
It is well known that I was on two occasions brutally assaulted, while on another my house was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Despite the government's sanctimonious assurances, there was never a serious police inquiry into the perpetrators of these attacks, and the attackers were never apprehended. In all these cases, I have reason to believe the attacks were inspired by the government. When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me.
[...]
As for me, I have the satisfaction of knowing that I walked tall and bowed to no man. And I have not travelled this journey alone. Fellow journalists in other branches of the media walked with me: most of them are now dead, imprisoned without trial or exiled in far-off lands. Others walk in the shadow of death that your Presidency has cast on the freedoms for which you once fought so hard. You will never be allowed to forget that my death took place under your watch. As anguished as I know you will be, I also know that you will have no choice but to protect my killers: you will see to it that the guilty one is never convicted.
As his letter points out, the editor was not new to intimidation. The constant acts and threats of violence against Wickrematunge and his family, forced his first wife and co-founder of the paper to flee to Australia with their three children. One of his friends, quoted anonymously in The Guardian, said:
"I sensed he was seeking martyrdom. He wanted to die," a close friend, who regularly discussed the subject with him, says. [...] "He knew he was walking with death. There was this inevitability. I think he felt that everything he stood for would be proved
