The censorship of the media in Sri Lanka is done by a combination of methods.
The primary method is that literally journalists die, disappear, or are forced into exile. There is a very good organization, which you might want to consider taking testimony from if there is time, called Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, which is an organization of exiled journalists, Sinhala, Tamil, and I think Muslim journalists who have been exiled from Sri Lanka. It is an organization of very brave people who monitor what is happening to the media. The most immediate method of controlling the media is that. It is the threat of violence and the threat of expulsion and the threat of the white vans.
The second method is literally attempts to control. They have in the past had regulations where anything on security had to go through the defence media censorship committee. That was during the war. That's no longer the case, as I understand it, but it still operates on a kind of unofficial basis.
There is also, for example, The Sunday Leader, a newspaper that was, as I mentioned, actually founded by a Sinhala journalist, Lasantha Wickrematunge, who was a personal friend of the president and who was subsequently gunned down in the street. Since then, one of his journalists was shot, and indeed, the woman who was editing it has now been forced into exile, and the paper has been taken over by someone who is very close to the president. I won't say more precisely than that, because I'm not absolutely sure of his precise relationship, but I know that the ownership of the paper has shifted. Certainly the perception in Sri Lanka is that the government has, if you like, nobbled that newspaper in a certain sense, although there are still some good journalists trying to do good journalism on it.
Self-censorship is in a sense the key weapon. I know that many journalists would like to be able to do more and cannot. I have to say that I hold those journalists in the greatest of respect. Equally, there are many journalists whose slavish adherence to the government is actually comical if you're an outsider, but not comical if that's your only source of news and you believe the nonsense you've been told, as in this totally fictitious article which is written about me, for example. It wasn't just that there was innuendo; it wasn't just that assumptions were made about what I believed; but actually there was very specifically invented evidence, e-mails that clearly did not exist, and utterly constructed nonsense.
It's a combination of all these things that they use to control the media.
