Marie Colvin incident highlights restrictions on media

By Nirupama Subramanian

COLOMBO, APRIL 18. The Marie Colvin incident has brought attention to the tough restrictions placed on media coverage of the conflict in Sri Lanka by the Kumaratunga Government that came to power in 1994 promising freedom of the press.

The award-winning journalist of the British newspaper, The Sunday Times, was wounded in a gun battle between security forces and the LTTE while clandestinely trying to cross back into Government-controlled territory in northern Sri Lanka after spending nearly two weeks in rebel-held Vanni.

Sri Lanka, besides imposing censorship on war news from time to time, has not permitted journalists to visit LTTE- held territory since 1995. Though no reason has been officially given for this policy, Ministers, Defence Ministry officials and top brass, upon persistent badgering, will paternalistically declare that it is for the ``safety'' of journalists. Officials have been more candid in private, admitting that the Government reserves the right to do everything within its means to win the war against the LTTE, and not permitting the media to cover the other side is one of them. The reasoning is that if journalists are allowed free access to the Vanni, they would all return to write pro-LTTE reports, thereby assisting enemy propaganda.

Insulting as both reasons are to the judgment and intelligence of any self-respecting journalist, most have refrained from violating the ban for fear of being caught in precisely the circumstances in which Ms. Colvin now finds herself.

The result, even when hundreds of combatants have perished in a single day's fighting, has been a highly sanitised version of the war, provided by a daily dose of faxed statements from the Defence Ministry, and occasionally from the LTTE.

For journalists in the capital, sometimes, the only real clues to the events on the battlefield are provided by the ambulances that race from the air base to the military hospital, ferrying wounded soldiers who are flown here from the war zone.

Of the civilians in the area, very little is known except what can be assumed of all people caught in the middle of a full-scale war. Journalists, bombarded by statements from the LTTE claiming that the Government is starving the civilians by not sending enough food to these areas, and from the Government saying the LTTE steals the food they send, have no way of ascertaining the real situation.

While reporters have regularly managed to cross military lines in the east where the boundaries are not so rigid, Ms. Colvin was only the second journalist since 1995 to have managed to gain access to the Vanni, the main territorial base of the LTTE after it was pushed out of Jaffna peninsula by the Sri Lankan security forces in June 1996.

In one of her dispatches, she described the journey across military lines on her way into the Vanni as ``an education in LTTE networks''. Predictably, the Government's reaction to the incident has been to tighten its visa regime, especially for foreign journalists, and asking its missions abroad to be ``careful and prudent'' in issuing visas.

But this is to ignore the fact that the incident might not have happened at all if the Government had continued its pre- 1995 policy of allowing journalists free access to LTTE-held areas.

Indeed, Sri Lanka might never have posed a temptation to Ms. Colvin, a seasoned war correspondent with a taste for adventure, had it been just a matter of getting a permit from the Defence Ministry and driving across the lines.

The Government may lose nothing by allowing journalists into the Vanni. It might even win the propaganda war against the LTTE. But by barring the area for the press, all that it gets is a reputation for curbing media freedom.

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Section  : International
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