Sri Lankan Journalist Predicted His Murder by Philip Reeves

[struggle4progress]

by Philip Reeves
... Lasantha Wickrematunge knew he was going to be murdered. He said so, in an article shortly before he died. He also predicted who would do it ... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99385382&ft=1&f=1004


Chronicle of a death foretold
Jan 15th 2009
From The Economist print edition
As the Tamil Tigers face defeat, Sri Lanka’s freedoms are also under threat

... This week saw the publication of a remarkable posthumous column by Lasantha Wickrematunge, a Sri Lankan newspaper editor. He had written it in anticipation of his own murder. That duly came on January 8th, when gunmen on motorcycles shot him on his way to work in the capital, Colombo. He was a brave campaigning journalist. And like too many brave campaigning journalists in Sri Lanka, he is now dead. But at least from the grave he has left an eloquent warning to the government, led by a man he called “friend”, President Mahinda Rajapaksa: that as the army grinds relentlessly towards final triumph in a 25-year civil war, the very foundations of the democratic free society it should be fighting for are in jeopardy.

Mr Wickrematunge carried no brief for the enemy, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who have been fighting for an independent homeland for the Tamil minority in the north and east of the country. He rightly described the Tigers as “among the most ruthless and bloodthirsty organisations to have infested the planet”. But he railed against both the conduct of the war by the Sri Lankan army and the curtailment of civil liberties even among the Sinhalese majority.

Many journalists have suffered harassment and intimidation. Human-rights groups reckon a dozen have been killed in the past two years. Mr Wickrematunge himself had twice been beaten up and his house had been sprayed with machine-gun fire. Two days before his murder, gunmen with grenades attacked a private television station, which, like Mr Wickrematunge, was accused of being less than wholehearted in its celebration of the army’s recent victories.

Mr Wickrematunge predicted that Mr Rajapaksa would be “anguished” by his killing, but would have no choice but to protect the killers. The president has indeed roundly condemned the atrocity. He has suggested it was a plot to deflect attention from the military successes. But journalists find this hard to believe. They know that nobody has been brought to justice for earlier attacks. They suspect that in fact the murder was timed not to distract from military victories but to be drowned in a tide of nationalist enthusiasm. They believe that the security forces must, at the very least, have connived at the brazen attack. Many are understandably scared ...

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12932312