Editorial

26th March 2000

How to handle issues

Here is an update from the land of Serendib in case you have missed it. The man who bears the Censorial scissors who is also called the Competent Authority, has in his competence and authority given some polite "advice" to this newspaper that the front page news story of this paper last week, about the girl who was stripped by security men is a breach of 'The Public Security Regulation on the Prohibition of Publication and Transmission of Sensitive Military Information.''

Sensitive it may have been, particularly for the woman was subject to the ordeal, but was it military information? .The Competent Authority's attempt at blaming the newspapers smacks of the uptight readiness of government to decidedly avoid honesty and the straight and narrow in most of its pursuits.

Almost at the same time that Justice Minister Prof.G.L. Peiris was telling pressmen in Colombo this week that the state was honest about its attempts to "bring the law in line with contemporary practices'', the Competent Authority issued the above stated advice to the Sunday Times about the story of the mid-day strip.

There is also the case of the wrong signals that are being sent all the time to whoever it may be that's listening. From a cold and calculating if not rational assessment of things, the agents of government should have realized that the news about the strip search, however keen the government was on trying to bury it , was out. The immediate reaction of any trained and finetuned war management operation would have been to ensure the minimum amount of damage from the unfortunate episode. That's in the modern jargon, the art of damage control.

But, the state took the easy position of advising the newspaper that carried the news, ensuring that the state would be labelled buffonish oafish and insensitive to the rights of women in a necessary transaction between civilians and armed personnel.

Our news report, if it is read for what it is, has not sought to cast the security forces in any negative light. It is on the other hand cognizant of the fact that the situation is an absolutely unenviable one. The soldiers, the story read, were ducking, when the woman was removing her Kameez. It should have shown any discerning reader that this was no strip-tease titillation for the Air Force boys, and that we were not trying to conceal this truth.

If the checkpoint personnel were fearing for their lives, the girl would have been dying of embarrassment. As if to add insult to injury some senior policemen go and call her a prostitute and that gets published in the national press for good measure.Not to get carried away by the poignancy of the story — but, this, to convey a stark fact, could have just as well been anybody's mother or sister. Ignore a story, or wish it away, and it will disappear. In quintessence that is the fond hope and policy of the state and its hurrah boys.

The policy can ricochet and make the most inept administration look like Pol Pot's paramilitary or Hitler's Gestapo. Being inept is something that a government may not necessarily be sent to the international doghouse for.

But the portrayal of the state's security forces as an army of thugs and boors is not savvy, particularly, in a situation where Sri Lanka has been finding it exceedingly difficult to shake off the flak on that account.

This is serious business. Despite a virtual civil war that has sapped and tested our every sinew over the past two decades, the stripping of a woman on a street is a new issue.

Yes, there are LTTE woman suicide bombers roaming the streets killing and maiming innocent civilians. Yes, security personnel on city streets are the most vulnerable to these dastardly attacks. Yes, the dignity of a lonely woman must be best preserved.

How? Not by sweeping things under the carpet —like they have done with the reporting of the war —hoping that what is not printed does not happen.

An enlightened public is better than an ignorant public at handling these complex issues at a time of war.

The Political Column