Bring It On, Percy

The Rajapakse Brothers' attempt to impose censorship on the media through last week's extraordinary Gazette notification may have come as a surprise to many, but not to us. It was, if anything, a symptom of the paranoid, beleaguered mentality that is fast developing in Temple Trees.

What was surprising, however, were the pathetic excuses offered by Cabinet Spokesman Anura Priyadarshana Yapa and Director General, Media Centre for National Security, Lakshman Hulugalle, for unceremoniously withdrawing the hastily-drafted regulations. According to Hulugalle, the media were being rewarded for good behaviour. Since the cancellation of the broadcasting licences of the Asian Broadcasting Corporation were revoked last week, said Hulugalle, the government had been "monitoring the media in the country and they have worked in a more responsible manner." And we thought all along that the licences of ABC were cancelled because they had been legally invalid from the outset.

More responsible. More responsible than what, pray? If the government wanted to establish an arbiter of media responsibility, surely they could have picked a better example? It is not for the government, and certainly not for Hulugalle, to judge whether or not the media are responsible: that is a matter for the courts, if at all. The freedom of "speech and expression including publication" is guaranteed by the Constitution (Article 14, to be exact). It is not guaranteed by political hangers on and henchmen of the Rajapakses. And the Constitution is not answerable to the Rajapakse Brothers.

Hulugalle waxed on in his customarily shameless sycophancy: "President Mahinda Rajapakse is a person who wants to have a free media in the country. He has taken this decision to allow free reporting by the media." Nota bene, Mister Hulugalle, that a free media is not Mahinda Rajapakse's to give. It is the birthright of every Sri Lankan citizen. Rajapakse can, like all two-bit dictators, seek to take it away. He will not be the first: we have seen his like before, and the whole country knows their fate.

It has become a hallmark of the Rajapakse Administration that each of its spokesmen invent separate and often mutually contradictory versions of the truth. Thus it was just recently that the military spokesman alleged that the photos of the naked cadavers of LTTE cadres killed in the attack on the SLAF base at Anuradhapura being paraded publicly in a garbage tractor were the result of doctored images. Hot on his heels, Keheliya Rambukwella says no they weren't (doctored, that is), and that a full-scale inquiry has been ordered by the President. That, like all 'full-scale inquiries' ordered by Rajapakse (the Muttur massacre comes to mind), is unlikely ever to see the light of day.

And as if on cue, no sooner had Hulugalle uttered his two cent's worth than Anura Priyadarshana Yapa came up with a gem of his own. The censorship had been raised, he claimed, not because the media were conducting themselves more responsibly, but "to prevent any communal clashes resulting from the publication of sensitive military matters, as there are several communities living in the country." What could be richer than that?

How it is that exposure - for example of the MiG scam - could possibly lead to communal clashes, Yapa did not vouchsafe in us. And scandals such as the MiG deal, done with shady businessmen cowering in offshore tax havens, is precisely what the Rajapakses sought to hide from public exposure through the censorship Gazette that criminalised news regarding arms procurement.

That the Rajapakses are angry and embarrassed is wholly understandable. After all, the brothers have repeatedly been caught with their pants down: they have a lot to hide, starting even before Mahinda's election with the Helping Hambantota fiasco. Censorship would certainly be good for the business of the Rajapakse Brothers. They have nothing to fear except exposure.

The truth behind the censorship bid is explained elsewhere in our pages today. It has nothing to do with media responsibility or with communal clashes. It has to do with dictatorship. Mahinda Rajapakse is an embattled president as no other president has been. Offering the carrot of war to the country's small but influential minority of Sinhala-Buddhist extremists, he has made the military defeat of the LTTE his last refuge. For a man of his intellectual capacity, it is perhaps the only refuge. To him, the issue of Tamil emancipation is essentially a question of suppressing Tamil militancy. Then again, no president who bombs his own people can be expected to see the distinction.

As they trudge on from one blunder to the next, the Rajapakses desperately need censorship. By seeking to introduce curbs on media freedom, they join a select club of 21st century despots: Robert Mugabe, Hugo Chavez and their ilk. "We were described as enemies of the state,"  says a journalist. The observation is so true of present-day Sri Lanka, but it was in fact made by Geoffrey Nyarota, the award-winning Zimbabwean journalist. Just months ago, an increasingly despotic Chavez banned Radio Caracas Television, which, in his view, was siding with the opposition. His authoritarian rule, according to Venezuelan journalist Marcel Granier, has "slowly evolved into systematic language of hatred and aggression towards journalists, humorists, editors, newspapers, radio stations, employers and employees of the media."

Such perceptions of ruthless and dictatorial regimes elsewhere in the world are today commonplace of the Rajapakse government in Sri Lanka.

Having disported himself as a liberal human-rights activist for the entirety of his first 60 years, Mahinda Rajapakse as President has metamorphosed into an altogether different creature. Gone are the days of fighting for human rights, personal freedoms and the poor. Today he is little different from the Mugabes and Chavezes of the world, reducing his country to pariah status in the eyes of the international community.

Rajapakse displays every hallmark of a classic dictator. Disappearances are rife, but he denies they exist or cynically passes them off as owing to emigration of the disappeared. Arbitrary killings are commonplace and rarely inquired into, even though "full inquiries" are routinely promised. Journalists are routinely harassed through arrest, abuse or worse. Nepotism is everywhere, with relatives - both close and bizarrely distant - being given plum jobs. The police have been politicised into a virtual Gestapo. State-owned media are shamelessly misused for personal propaganda or anti-opposition misinformation campaigns. Slice him where you like, Rajapakse is a tyrant of the worst sort.

Most tragic of all, even as it fills its own pockets, the government completely ignores the suffering of the poor. A packet of milk powder now costs about as much as a bag of cement. A family with two under-tens each drinking two cups of milk a day would consume the equivalent in milk of enough cement to build a small house in a year. Incredibly, the government fails to see there is something wrong with that equation. What is the President's solution? He gave it last week: a return to the 'socialist' economy of the 1970s.

From which planet has Rajapakse descended? The whole world, including those Gardens of Eden of Communism, Russia and China, have adopted open, investment-driven economies. And Rajapakse wants to return to the 1970s, when the poor were eating out of dustbins, personal incomes were limited to Rs. 5,000 a month, and one had to obtain an 'exit permit' to leave the country.

In one sense, the President is right: he has put the country on a steady course for the economic ruin of the 1970s. And don't forget, media censorship too, began then, to say nothing of forcing whole media organisations into closure: remember Dawasa? Rajapakse's yearning for the 1970s is not merely through a pang of nostalgia for his youthful beginnings: it is through desperation. An opposition snapping at his heels, the economy in a downward spiral, committed to an unwinnable war, and with 'deal' being the operative four-letter word that best defines his administration, the Rajapakse Government contains in abundance all the ingredients of disaster.