Columns

What confusion. The government’s left hand goes one way and its right hand another way. It seems that two ministers who were at the same Cabinet meeting have completely contradictory views on what was said there on a vital issue that would resurrect the tragic story of the Easter Sunday carnage four years ago.

Labour and Foreign Employment Minister Manusha Nanayakkara told parliament that the Cabinet had agreed to appoint a parliamentary select committee to inquire into that Sunday massacre following the revelations by the UK’s Channel 4 after watching, one supposes, a trailer of that documentary the day before it was telecast here at an hour before midnight on September 5.

Sometime after Minister Nanayakkara’s announcement on the floor of the House, Transport and Media Minister Bandula Gunawardena stated that the Cabinet took no such decision as the matter was not even discussed at the Cabinet meeting that day.

So what do we have here? Two ministers—and one of them the Cabinet spokesman—talking of what transpired at the same Cabinet meeting which both presumably attended but have totally different recollections of what transpired.

Did the Cabinet decide to appoint another unproductive parliamentary select committee or not? That is a simple enough question. Yes or no? If two ministers cannot agree on a simple issue like that, this country is surely in a sorry state. Who can a people, already battered and bruised in multiple ways, trust?

This clashing stance and confusion are the typical reaction of a government caught unawares of an impending expose’ and thrashes out hither and thither, as one witnessed with government MPs, including Namal Rajapaksa who seemed to think that the British TV’s Channel 4 had a vendetta against the Rajapaksa family and was out to get them.

Perhaps the government would be better prepared to react if it had been alerted earlier about what to expect—not in detail but a broad sweep of what to anticipate, especially if it is claimed that Channel 4 (and perhaps other media networks too) air programmes embarrassing to Sri Lanka, or publish critical articles, ahead of sessions of the UN Human Rights Council.

Particularly so if Sri Lanka is on the UNHRC agenda, as it is this month.

Had the London High Commission’s antenna been up and it had the proper contacts or any connections at all in London’s media world, it should have been able to pick up static of what could lie ahead as we were able to pick up vibes here well before Sri Lanka was to host the Commonwealth Summit in 2013.

We were able to come close enough to be able to anticipate another episode from Director-Producer Callum Macrae, who was responsible for the first Channel 4 documentary “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields” in June 2011 which was followed up with “Sri Lanka Killing Fields-War Crimes Unpunished”. But to that story later due to space limitations.

Here was the time for our Mission to be particularly on the alert, for Channel 4 is right here and the UNHRC sessions and the UN General Assembly were both meeting in September. If this TV channel has a bad reputation in Colombo of being anti-Sri Lankan—or anti-Rajapaksa as Namal Rajapaksa claims—all the more reason why our Foreign Ministry and its missions should have been even more on their toes.

It was known last month that President Ranil Wickremesinghe is due to address the UNGA—if I remember correctly—on September 21.

Such tip-offs and information do not come from one’s media contacts alone but also from politicians and their aides who have an ‘in’ to goings on.

But sadly in recent years, we seem to have distanced ourselves from important media contacts not only at the top but also the “leg men” who are on their beats and pick up news of what is going on in their worlds. Not only them but also Sri Lanka’s longtime foreign friends who have come to feel isolated and their contributions to improving bilateral relations are no longer considered necessary.

Some believe in the mistaken notion that one must ignore or even ‘ostracise’ critics and critical media instead of trying to cultivate them and explain one’s standpoint and discuss theirs instead of engaging in slanging matches which only estrange relations further. That does not mean one should not respond to electronic and print media, civil society, and professional organisations when there is a credible case to be made.

It was this approach that was followed from 2009 January to August 2014 when I served in two missions—Bangkok and London—during that critical phase when post-war Sri Lanka was under attack on several fronts including by the International Bar Association in London, and Channel 4 was at its ‘peak’ producing Sri Lanka documentaries and print media filing stories critical of Colombo’s human rights record. Bangkok was the media hub of Southeast Asia.

Engaging in rhetoric as Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe and several mediocre government MPs did last week, might win them some rounds of applause at home particularly from those hardly knowledgeable in the working of international media. But it hardly wins them friends and understanding internationally, except from like-minded sections of the diaspora.

Not to be left out of what was obviously going to be a much-discussed issue with serious consequences domestically and internationally, Justice Minister Rajapakshe, not inclined to miss an opportunity to be in the spotlight, offered his thoughts on the issue.

Not just his thoughts mind you, he seemed to be speaking on behalf of the government. At a media conference at his ministry, he reportedly said the “government stands ready for an international investigation into the 2019 Easter Sunday terror attacks.”

We have heard such promises before, even from the Yahapalana government in which Ranil Wickremesinghe was prime minister. Anyway, now Minister Rajapakshe was not speaking for himself but presumably for the government led by Mr Wickremesinghe never mind whether this subject was beyond his remit.

But just before leaving for Havana, President Wickremesinghe is reported in our sister paper as advocating “a constrained response to the allegations” and “only those implicated in the allegations should respond.”

Rajapakshe’s spiel on Channel 4 being a “pro-diaspora” institution leaves one wondering whether he meant all ethnic groups in the Sri Lankan diaspora or the Tamil community alone. It is a dangerous thing to generalise for not all those who belong to any of these ethnic communities hold common views.

There is much more to be said on the documentary itself and the reactions to it but space has run out.

So for the moment, two points should hopefully suffice. If the government thinks that it can bail out of the charges raised in the documentary by promising a parliamentary select committee that would be treated as a huge joke, one hardly to be made on a gravely troubling issue.

Such committees and commissions are seen by the public as side-tracking devices whose reports hardly reach the people and so have not only lost their usefulness but public trust, given past experiences. If that is how they are treated at home one does not need a vivid imagination to see how they would be treated internationally.

Namal Rajapaksa’s naïve remark that Channel 4, probably scared of the Rajapaksa wrath, had pulled out the documentary from its website is ludicrous. Had he done some research without blabbing, he would have discovered that the first documentary—Sri Lanka’s Killing fields—did not stop with one telecast. It was re-broadcast in India, Australia and Norway.

Over time it was also screened for special audiences—legislators in Washington DC, Brussels, Ottawa and Wellington. The carefully selected capitals should allow him to draw the proper conclusions—if that is possible.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran
Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later,
he was Deputy Chief-of-Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London.)