Columns

Ten years have passed. The tears have dried except in the eyes of those to whom Lasantha Wickrematunga was very near and dear. The tears have gone but not the memories of an intrepid journalist, a bundle of energy often mixed with mischief and determined to follow the trail like a blood hound in pursuit of the scent.

Ten years after his brutal murder, candles were lit once more, white and yellow flowers laid and prayers said in silent memory of a husband, father, brother, an adoring relative and an editor determined to complete a story he had begun.

But he was also conscious of the dangers he had set in train. He could hear, in the words of Andrew Marvell “Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near”.

Unfortunately I could not be at the Kanatte cemetery this week when many in the media and some who only knew him by reputation paid tribute to Lasantha’s journalistic odyssey cut short by those who fearing his undertaking decried him. His relentless pursuit to expose those he considered should be brought to justice unnerved many.

I was glad to know friend Marwaan Macan-Markar, who I have not met since I parted ways in Bangkok in mid-2012 to return to London on a diplomatic assignment, and was Lasantha’s features editor on the Sunday Leader, read a tribute to his then editor.

My memory goes back to the day Lasantha was killed for I had arrived in Colombo a few days earlier and was due to meet him for the usual chat and lunch. It was a habit of mine to catch up with former colleagues — just a few of them still around- and with other journalist friends whenever I was in Colombo.

Family members and friends of Lasantha Wickrematunga attend a memorial service at his grave in the Kanatte cemetery on January 8 to mark the tenth anniversary of his assassination. AFP

I telephoned Lasantha that morning to confirm the time and venue of our meeting. Usually we met for lunch and talked for hours, me keen to hear his assessment of happenings at home and exchange views on political and other developments, interrupting serious thought with jokes and humorous anecdotes of yesteryear.

His cell phone rang for a minute or more but went unanswered. I thought he was either driving or was still asleep after a long night. This was around 9am. I switched off, thinking of calling him again in an hour or two.

But that never happened.  I was back at my computer trying to complete what I was writing when the telephone rang. It was a friend of mine to break the news that Lasantha had been “shot” and had been taken to Kalubowila Hospital. It was less than two hours since I had tried to reach him to decide on our lunch venue.

That news came as a shock. A shock yes, but it was not entirely unexpected, particularly against the background of the violent assaults and torture of some other journalists that had gone before.

The dangers facing some journalists came up whenever we met. I was almost a victim of killers waiting for me during the troubled days in 1989 when anarchy seemed to rule the country. I escaped because fortuitous circumstances made me change my route that Sunday morning on my way back home from Lake House and the supermarket. But that’s another story to be told later.

During our working days in Colombo, I would often run into Lasantha at the briefings that Minister of State Anandatissa de Alwis gave after cabinet meetings. I was there as a foreign correspondent while Lasantha was covering the briefing for The Island, if I remember correctly. This was in the early 1980s.

Though I left Sri Lanka in September 1989 for Hong Kong we did keep in touch. Now and then he would try to persuade me to write a piece for him under a pseudonym which occasionally I did. He used to enjoy a satirical or light piece especially if it was a humorous dig at some uppity politician or two.

On one occasion we met for lunch at the former Holiday Inn. After a long lunch lasting several hours we walked to the hotel entrance. When the driver of the car I was using came to pick me up, he leaned into the car and told the driver to take me home safely as there were people after me.

I could not help but laugh. It is you who needs to be careful, I said as we parted. He seemed to be amused by my remark, his infectious smile lighting up his face.

One night he called me to London. It must have been well past midnight in Colombo. He said the President (Mahinda Rajapaksa then) wanted to speak to me. He gave me a telephone number and asked me to call the president in the morning. Which I did, but that again is another story.

As I remember Lasantha now, I wonder what he would have to say about the Sri Lanka’s political scene — if one may call it that — today and who he would be targeting, collecting and collating information to lay bare corruption among politicians and malfeasance in a bureaucracy that has been largely reduced to a political appendage unlike the public service of decades ago when public officials stayed out of politics.

Lasantha’s coruscating writings antagonised many politicians, especially those in power and bureaucratic bunglers. He had his critics as many journalists do because their work exposes the corrupt, the crooked and the crass conduct of the political class.

He would have revelled in today’s political atmosphere and made more enemies. But he seemed to care little about whom he upset once he had got his teeth into a story that smelt of dubious doings. While other journalists of the day might have been more circumspect in their approach, Lasantha would go charging in as though he was determined to breach the Maginot Line with two shots of artillery fire. But he would have marshalled facts before hand and exposed some as though stirring a hornet’s nest.

Not all agree with Lasantha’s journalistic approach that seemed intent on stirring the pot. But he did liven up journalism of the day with his acerbic style that was too brash for some.

Ten years have passed since that tragic happening. Yet those who promised from political platforms to hunt down his killers and bring them to justice somehow seem to have lost that early enthusiasm. Was it because it was politically profitable to make such promises in order to win political support or have they abandoned all that hype about justice and building a just society?

There are too many contradictions in the whole story of the Lasantha killing, including post-mortem reports, the ‘lost’ notebook in which Lasantha had written the registration numbers of the motorcycles that trailed him and then cornered him.

I remember his wife Sonali telling me a day or two later of some of the ‘facts’ that seemed curious even at the time — like the story circulating that he was shot but there were no entry or exit wounds, no shells in the body and no shell casing in and round the car though the post-mortem report appeared to suggest he was shot with a gun.

It would appear that the investigators have not had a free hand in pursuing their investigations and the quarries. Back in London I had problems answering foreign journalists’ questions addressed to the high commission.

Lasantha’s killing was not the only one that interested them. There were others like the killing of a British aid worker somewhere in Tangalle if I remember correctly. The MP of the constituency in which the aid worker resided would often call to find out the progress in the investigations and what action was being taken by the Sri Lanka government.

Lasantha’s murder case is not the only one that is dragging on and on giving the impression that justice works by fits and starts. The brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian journalist and columnist for the Washington Post, a few months back in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul reminds one of the dangers journalists the world over face in pursuing their profession and what devious means those in power use to cover up their sins.