Journalists
demand action not mere rhetoric
They tormented him psychologically
with a velvet glove before coming after him with a mailed fist.
For Iqbal Athas, the seasoned journalist and defence analyst for news organisations at home and abroad, enemies high-up in the State, who fear the power of his pen, have struck back in recent months, waging psychological warfare against him and his family.
In their ploy to strike fear in the hearts and minds of Mr. Athas and those close to him, his powerful adversaries engaged initially in a series of psychological operations - PsyOps as intelligence terminology dubs them - drawing on a spymaster’s arsenal of surveillance, character assassination, and subtle intimidation, an investigation by The Sunday Times revealed.
Then, ten days ago, they resorted to the overt tactic of brute force and terror, violating up-close the sanctity of his home and its occupants.
“When all their efforts failed, and I was not yielding, they finally got inside my home to try to murder or torture me,” Mr. Athas later said.
Iqbal Athas, no stranger to danger, has been the target of previous threats from his enemies - generals and other Armed Services brass, whom he has alleged, in his news columns, have lived off Sri Lanka’s seemingly endless ethnic war. Some of them, evidently, didn’t dig what he had to say.
In the past, apart from being tailed and having his phones tapped, he says, he has received numerous death threats as well as threats to kidnap his daughter Jasmin. On one occasion, during a late 1993 military offensive launched under the then-UNP Government, which he had also criticised in print, his enemies sent him a wreath of flowers. But that, according to Mr. Athas, was a long time ago.
This time, he suspects, those whom he has accused of being corrupt, incompetent, and bent on power - he also counts himself lucky, however, to have friends in the government and military who have provided him with protection and reliable leads - have until lately been up to a subtler game.
In recent written appeals to President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga and senior government officials, Mr. Athas has called this a “deliberately staged conspicuousness” intended “both to embarrass me in my neighbourhood as well as to intimidate and harass me.”
He expanded on this point in a July 16, 1997 letter to the President, carbon copies of which were sent to Media Minister Mangala Samaraweera, Deputy Defence Minister General Anuruddha Ratwatte, Police Inspector General W.B. Rajaguru, D.I.G. T.V. Sumanasekara of the Criminal Investigation Directorate, and the three Service Chiefs:
“In as much as I am honour bound to protect the confidentiality of my sources, an inalienable right of a journalist, I recognise the right of the security establishment to mount surveillance on targets they deem necessary. I am fully aware that in the past too, my previous residences and even my telephone, have been subjected to this on numerous occasions.
“But the manner in which this particular operation has been carried out leaves me with the feeling that an insidious attempt is being made to intimidate and harass me....”
For Iqbal Athas and family, the latest round of torment began seven months ago. During a month-long stretch, from July to August, the Athases and other witnesses in their Nugegoda neighbourhood first noticed strangers repeatedly taking up positions around “Jasmin Court”, their two-storey house. By some accounts, they mounted a watch nextdoor, from within the walls of a local Buddhist sanctuary. The strangers, who came and went in rotating shifts, seemed to watch and wait for signs of visitors, simultaneously checking vehicle plate numbers.
Mr. Athas described the scene in his letter to the President on July 16:
“Their continued presence made me suspicious and I observed them regularly from a second floor window of my house. A person sporting a beard and another would take turns walking past my house, observing both the entrance and upper floors. Occasionally, they were joined by a cyclist who would remain parked opposite my gate and later pedal up to the men in [a] three-wheeler. I have observed them chatting, pointing their finger in the direction of my house.
“On occasions when my office assistant was on errands, visiting a shop, the person in beard would follow him and observe what he does. On one occasion he walked behind him to a photocopy booth where I asked my assistant to copy some newspaper clippings.”
At another time, according to Mr. Athas, when a Deputy Inspector General of area police stopped by to collect a university prospectus that he held for him, from his office window both men spotted the mysterious observers noting particulars of a visitor’s car. The Sunday Times traced the license plate number of the trishaw, independently verifying that the vehicle came from the C.I.D. fleet and was registered in the name of the Inspector General of Police.
The spooks, it turned out, also spoke. They were reported to have approached Mr. Athas’s neighbours, questioning them and branding him an LTTE sympathiser engaged in acts of terror in greater Colombo.
They specifically claimed that “terrorist” activity was going on inside his house, a charge that Mr. Athas himself disclaims. He says they failed to approach him directly to ascertain details and clear any doubts regarding those allegations.
“I have never been questioned so far on anything,” he said.
In a follow-up letter to the President on August 21, 1997, Mr. Athas added:
“As my name denotes, I am a Muslim and married to a Sinhalese. Such a sinister campaign of incitement is calculated to arouse religious sentiments in a predominantly Sinhala neighbourhood which includes a Buddhist Temple. This is ironically by men from State agencies serving a Government which is struggling hard to bring about communal amity on the one hand and fighting terrorism on the other.”
By his reading, later, in September, his tormentors changed the version of their accusation. Two men drove up to his home on a trailer motorbike, rang the doorbell, and asked from the household staff whether prostitutes were kept there. According to Mr. Athas, Mirihana police later detained one of them, whom they let go, citing an inability to determine a motive.
Today, Mr. Athas remains convinced that some vested interests in the national security services, profiteering from the multi-billion rupee arms lobby, ordered the July-August surveillance and personal discreditation to be carried out.
He suspects they were looking to contain damaging information about corruption that was being leaked to him from well placed contacts in the SLAF, as well as determine the identity of any leakers.
“They were watching to see who was coming to see me, and infringing on my freedom for well over a month,” Mr. Athas told The Sunday Times. “This kind of thing cannot be done without the backing of some powerful people, using the resources of State agencies.”
A glance at how senior government officials handled Iqbal Athas’s suspicions that particular interests within the State security apparatus were keeping an eye on him while the surveillance operation centering on his house was in full swing might shed light on those mysterious events recently surrounding him.
On July 25, at a Cabinet press conference, Media Minister Mangala Samaraweera noting how he had checked with the heads of C.I.D. and N.I.B. denied that State agencies had anything to do with the then current goings-on around the Athas home.
The next day, Mr. Samaraweera, stating he was acting on Presidential orders, officially notified him that he had inquired about the “surveillance” of his house from C.I.D. and N.I.B. Their chiefs had categorically ruled out that their services were involved, the Minister stressed.
Mr. Samaraweera wrote:
“Immediately on receipt of your letter, I contacted the D.I.G./C.I.D. and Director N.I.B., on the advice of Her Excellency the President, and inquired about the incident of ‘surveillance’ of your house. They all confirmed that they were not aware of such an incident.
“Apparently whoever did it had done it not only to intimidate and harass you, as you claim in your letter under reference, but more with the intention of causing severe embarrassment to the Government as well. I am confident that no Government institution will do anything of that nature in such obvious and clumsy manner.
“I assure you that the Government has nothing to do with this incident and take immediate action against the strangers involved in it. On your part, I would like to request you to lodge a formal complaint with the Mirihana Police in order to help the Police to proceed with the investigations.”
Mr. Athas, acting on the Minister’s recommendations, filed that complaint with the area police. They investigated. Thereafter, Mirihana Police D.I.G. Indra De Silva wrote to Mr. Samaraweera, stating that a surveillance operation had, indeed, been mounted with the knowledge of C.I.D., The Sunday Times learnt.
It is perhaps ironic, given D.I.G./C.I.D. Sumana sekera’s stated denial to the Media Minister who was acting officially on behalf of the President that no such operation was on. This therefore begs a question: Did anyone at C.I.D. act roguishly, with regard to Mr. Athas, without the prior consent or knowledge of its chief?
The Sunday Times also learnt that Anoma Athas, wife of the veteran Sri Lankan journalist, informed police that the head priest of the temple opposite their house revealed to her what he had learned about the shadowy observers. Alarmed by their suspicious behaviour when they first materialised, he alerted the Emergency Police at nearby Mirihana Police Station.
When a police patrol arrived on the scene, they checked the Identity Cards of the strangers, telling the Buddhist priest that they were from the Air Force Police and C.I.D., Mrs. Athas told police. The priest, she adds, also told her that he later tried to contact Air Marshall Oliver Ranasinghe by phone to verify this information, but the call was never patched through. Some days later, as it happened, a C.I.D. official contacted him, instructing him to let the operatives station themselves at the temple, Mrs. Athas says.
But, it can be noted for the record, that after Mr. Athas, as instructed by Mr. Samaraweera, filed his complaint with Mirihana Police, the spies almost immediately dropped out of sight, reportedly because the surveillance operation had been called off.
Yet, they were followed, in a matter of days, by the two men who pulled on the bike and then drove away.
After September, the respite, it turned out, proved but temporary relief to Iqbal Athas and his family. Then, in mid to late November, came the notorious Senthinathan affair.
It hit the headlines as Operation Jaya Sikurui neared stalemate along a deadly stretch of Highway A9 in the North, and a specially-appointed committee, investigating air crashes and alleged irregularities in the Air Force, found Air Marshall Ranasinghe whose tenure has just been extended guilty of gross negligence and irregularities in aircraft procurement procedures.
Members of a service arm, a Sunday Times investigation revealed, took the psychological war against him to a new level. In this instant, they plainly appeared to be using state-run media and television theatrics to broadcast to the nation disinformation against him, in which he was virtually branded a traitor.
“This was again a campaign to denigrate me,” he said.
In
the build up to this apparent propaganda pitch, The Sunday Times learnt that a
security official, dealing with disciplinary matters, flew to Vavuniya on a
mission to coach one Selvathurai Senthinathan, an LTTE cadre who had reportedly
surrendered to government forces in the northern jungles, in the art of staged
disinformation.
About two weeks before state-run media launched into a three-day blitz against Mr. Athas, he says he was warned about by his own sources.
“One of them told us that a so-called LTTE surrendee was being coached at a military camp in the Wanni,” Mr. Athas said.
This is how Lankadeepa and its sister newspaper, The Midweek Mirror, broke the story ahead of time about an LTTE surrendee, who, facing the cameras, would tell the world about how LTTE supremo Vellupillai Prabhakaran gathered intelligence about the separatist war by reading Mr. Athas’s Sunday Times “Situation Reports”.
Meanwhile, The Sunday Times has also learnt, at a Joint Operations HQ meeting of the service chiefs and the IGP on November 17, Deputy Minister Anuruddha Ratwatte was overheard ordering that the Tiger P.O.W. be interviewed on video camera, and that the tape be flown to Colombo within 48 hours.
On November 21, some senior state media officials have told The Sunday Times, at a Colombo meeting, Mr. Ratwatte is said to have instructed them that the state-run electronic networks air the Senthinathan tape, and that transcripts of the interview be released to the print media.
One of those attending this conference was also overheard remarking, without actually mentioning Mr. Athas’s name: “We must corner the bugger and get him to tell us who is giving the information.”
The blitz, however, died down after President Kumaratunga, according to a Presidential Secretariat source, intervened. She called a halt to it, it is understood, in order to avoid prolonged embarrassment to her administration, that now came under fire from worldwide media freedom pressure groups.
But, in the latest twist in the saga surrounding the Athas family, their worst nightmares came close to becoming a reality on February 12, when five gunmen — with some ten to 15 others outside serving as back-up burst into their home. According to witnesses, they assaulted and menaced the householders at gunpoint, including Mr. Athas and his seven-year old daughter, before fleeing, out of apparent panic, in a blue Lite Ace van.
Reflecting on this last incident, Mr. Athas suspects that these men were servicemen out to execute him outright, or extract a confession from him forcibly.
The Sunday Times investigation exposed that they flashed Armed Services I.D. cards, before assaulting domestic aide M. Subramaniam and forcing themselves into the house.
Immediately after the intrusion, says Mr. Athas, he reported it to D.I.G. Indra De Silva. According to the victim, the police chief dispatched officers to the scene of the crime, and also reassured him that police patrols would promptly conduct half-hourly checks on his residence.
Mr. Athas adds that, soon after he gave his statement to the police, he was visited by three fellow journalists who stayed till midnight: Varuna Karunatilleke of Reuters news agency, Victor Ivan, editor of Ravaya newspaper, and Sanka Samarasinghe, a journalist contributing to The Sunday Times.
But, in the three-hour interim, they can all confirm, not a single police patrol swept by as earlier promised by D.I.G. De Silva. At around 12:00a.m., Mr. Athas says, as the other reporters took leave of him, a personal friend, accompanied by two ex-policemen in his employ, popped by to check on Mr. Athas and his family.
The Sunday Times learnt that, while the two talked upstairs that night, downstairs, the two ex-cops, who were standing watch outside, spotted a group of suspicious-looking men walking by. When Mr. Subramaniam confirmed to them that these were some of the men who had earlier taken part in the break-in, suddenly a vehicle cruised past. According to the domestic, it closely resembled the getaway van.
The Sunday Times also learnt that Mr. Subramaniam and the others noted the van’s plate number, which was eventually passed on to Mirihana police for verification. But, according to Mr. Athas, “strange things have happened since.”
It now appears that the authorities are trying to deflect attention away from the alleged second sighting of the intruders that night. Police officials, visibly embarrassed by the absence of any police presence at the Athas home for up to three hours after the intrusion, even suggested that those persons spotted later were policemen dressed in civvies. They claimed these men had been rushed to the scene.
According to one of the two ex-policemen, who later gave a statement to local police, questions put to him by a police interrogator steered clear of those concerning the second sighting of the intruders. Mr. Athas notes that, for reasons unexplained, police have yet to question the second ex-cop.
“Nowhere did we complain that the men, who came that second time, used the van,” Mr. Athas adds. “It bore the same colour as the getaway van. We asked the police to check out the number of the vehicle we saw.
And, in a late breaking development, the State-owned Daily News on Friday quoted Media Minister Samaraweera as telling a Cabinet press briefing that the People’s Alliance Government would not shield perpetrators of the attack on Iqbal Athas and family, and that the PA was committed to avoiding a return to press freedom abuses committed under previous UNP regimes.
“In the preliminary report of the Defence Secretary, which was handed over to the President, it has been mentioned that, out of two complaints made by Mr. Athas to the police about the incident, the first complaint makes it a case of intimidation and threat,” The Daily News reported. “The blue colour van mentioned in the second complaint was owned by a neighbour living close to Mr. Athas.”
It may be worth noting here that this news report never mentions the alleged return of the intruders to the scene of the break-in.
In the final analysis, it appears that Mr. Athas has been consistently been victimised at critical junctures where he has come out hardest against the SLAF’s handling of the war and its overall policies.
On top of this, he continues to live in the shadow of his stalkers, in spite of on-the-record assurances from the Media Minister, and other senior government officials, that they will guarantee the safety of him and his family, bringing to book those perpetrators who invaded their privacy.
“The Government is not dismissive of threats made on journalists by intimidators and there is no acquiescence on the part of the Government,” Mangala Samaraweera declared, for one, on behalf of President Kumaratunga, in an August 4 letter to Article 19, the London-based media watchdog.
“Her Excellency the President has requested me to write to you, that the Government shall deal decisively with this type of situation by taking the appropriate legal steps. As long as this Government is in Office, it must be stated unequivocally there will be no return to ‘vigilante’ rule.”
But Article 19 and other watchdogs have since pointed out to the President that her Government has been slow to press through on that promise.
“We very much regret that we should have to write to you again about the situation of Mr. Athas... following our previous intervention this year when he was being subjected to threatening surveillance and harassment,” Malcolm Smart, Article 19’s Deputy Director, wrote President Kumaratunga on November 28, 1997.
Mr. Smart’s appeal was soon followed by another from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
“The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply concerned over what appears to be a government-sponsored offensive directed against Iqbal Athas...” the CPJ wrote the President on December 4. “We are particularly concerned over the recent state-tolerated and state-directed campaign to discredit Athas....”
If the Government does, indeed, deliver on its promises made at the hustings in 1994, that the Sri Lankan State will no longer muzzle the Media, its proposed package of Constitutional reforms will supposedly safeguard some much demanded freedoms for Iqbal Athas, his colleagues in the national media, and all other citizens of Free Lanka celebrating 50 years of democracy.
“Every person is entitled to the freedom of speech and expression...” opens Article 16 (1) of the October 1997 Draft Constitution.
The same virtually applies to the clause spelling out the right to privacy and family life.
“Every person has the right to respect for such person’s private and family life, home, correspondence and communications and shall not be subjected to unlawful attacks on such person’s honour and reputation,” states Article 14 (1).
But, at the same time, the future charter also appears to leave it to those who will enforce the new laws to exercise their judgment and discretion on whether they should impose limits to those freedoms.
The newfound rights of Mr. Athas and his fellow Lankans to free expression and privacy will rest ultimately, perhaps, on those who decide what restrictions to these liberties are “necessary” in the defence of national security and public order.
As Mr. Athas’s story illustrates, uncertain times lie in store as that question will be left wide open to the subjective interpretation of the State and its judges, jurors, and executioners.
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