Let's deal directly with Sri Lanka. For a long time Sri Lanka, despite all this pressure on journalists, has had a vibrant press. Largely that's because it's very often tied to one party or another, or one political group or another. That continues to exist. There still are newspapers, which appear in Tamil, Sinhalese, and English, that are openly critical of the government, but there are fewer and fewer.
When you look at the situation, I see greater repression of media coming in Sri Lanka. We're seeing a very rapid shrinking of the space within which journalists can operate.
CPJ is aware of eight senior journalists--and we're not talking about small fry--who have left the country. They have stopped writing. They have fled for their safety, greatly concerned. Some of them were Tamils, some were Muslims, and some were Sinhalese. A lot of them were defence columnists, which is a very large industry in Sri Lanka. We've seen that people who dare to take on the military establishment in any way--critical reporting on the war, covering corruption in the military, or arms and weapons acquisitions, those sorts of dealings--have been criticized, harassed, and specifically cited by the defence ministry.
The defence secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapakse, is the brother of President Mahinda Rajapakse. He has been very brutally blunt about journalists who would dare criticize the military or the military establishment, and he does not hesitate to call people traitors. Using the term “traitor” is much more than just a rhetorical device, frankly; it's a hook on which you can proceed to bring legal charges.
More now than ever before, I'm afraid we see Sri Lanka media under attack. I would worry about its future.