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| Sunday, 7 May 2006 |
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POINT OF VIEW: The Enemy Propaganda Within by Susantha Goonatilake President Mahinda Rajapaksa was understandably furious. He lashed out at the propaganda war being carried out against Sri Lanka by some foreign media. Defence spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella exploded at the anti Sri Lanka statements of SLMM. The Sunday Island traced the emergence as a sleight of hand of the so-called "co-chairs", conceivably the bosses of SLMM. SLMM allowed in by the sovereign state of Sri Lanka was making judgments on the country contrary to the elected government or its agencies. It had become our new Supreme Court issuing judgments on us that has replaced the British colonial Privy Council which was abolished decades ago. The Japanese Akashi of the so called co-chairs was suggesting UN peace keeping forces. The "co-chairs" had emerged as a supra governing body through a con act - as the Sunday Island revealed - done on the people of the country without the government being aware. This was even worse than Ranil Wickremasinghe signing the document prepared jointly by Anton Balasingham and Eric Solheim and declaring it the Ceasefire Agreement. The Norwegians had drawn up the CFA, a new interim constitution that rules us. The co-chairs were created by them as another extra-territorial governing body on Sri Lanka. The SLMM was making judgments on the government's behaviour in its own sovereign territory. Some foreign media was creating lies to support all these arrangements. Even now we should realize that we have been driven into the role of a colony once again. Misinformation and lies is the downside of that very desirable condition - media freedom. And in war, truth is the first casualty. What Mahinda Rajapaksa objected as enemy war propaganda was not the usual pro LTTE Sri Lankan outlets like the Tamil Net, Sunday Leader, Irudina, Shakti or Sirasa. He was objecting primarily to the LTTE propaganda channelled through foreign media including the BBC. He implied the fictional report of 40,000 refugees fleeing from Muttur when it had only a total population of 16,000. This was a repetition of an original lie the LTTE put out. Western media When their own countries had been threatened, Britain and other Western countries had behaved otherwise. The BBC brought in censorship. For example when the IRA was carrying its violent actions, no IRA members were allowed to be interviewed on BBC. In the classic case of World War II, the BBC was used as a propaganda arm and to relay intelligence messages. Again during World War II, when in a BBC accent, the fascists put out the infamous Lord Haw Haw's misinformation, the British hanged Lord Haw Haw. And for the USA, it was no different. It was felt that the Vietnam War was hampered by the loss of morale due to unfettered reporting from the War front. The USA defence authorities now decided that there should not be unrestricted direct reporting by independent journalists. Therefore, most recent US wars were covered in their active phases by reporters being briefed or conducted to the battlefront as a group by US defence authorities. But this is not the first time the BBC had worked against Sri Lanka. Its Sinhala programme Sandesaya run by Priyantha Liyanage is a far cry from the Sandesaya when it was under the likes of Bhadra Gunatilleke and H. M. Gunasekera. Sandesaya is the major outlet of anti Sri Lanka propaganda in Sinhalese. The classic case of the BBC working against Sri Lankan sovereignty and helping it be dismembered was when Sri Lankan troops were about to take Jaffna in 1995. It got the then head of an anti Sri Lanka outfit to make an international appeal over BBC air ways (Sandesaya 28th November 1995) to stop the army marching into Jaffna. International Alert was a setup that had been actually founded (as Gamini Iriyagolla pointed out in five well researched articles in the Island February/March 1994) to support the Tamil separatist cause. International Alert's map of future Sri Lanka showed much greater territory ceded to Tamil racists than even the LTTE maps. International Alert was around that time also embroiled in support of the LTTE-equivalent in Sierra Leone, the infamous RUF. The elected leader of Sierra Leone had been overthrown by a coup by the RUF, which the overthrown democratic leader Tejan Kabbah alleged in a letter to Kofi Annan, (dated 3 April 1997) [and in a one hour broadcast over the American Broadcasting Corporation ABC (October 5, 1997)] that International Alert was involved in. This type of misinformation which the President referred to, some members of the government and the public have known for some time. I can remember around 10 years ago hosting Mangala Samaraweera in New York and getting him interviewed on the US public radio. The latter however had swallowed the propaganda line of the LTTE and Samaraweera's carefully marshaled facts fell on skeptical ears. But this is no isolated case. I can relate numerous other examples of misinformation and lies on Sri Lanka. Kofi to takeover The state media had on several occasions been more pro LTTE and supportive of the LTTE ideology than the private media. What the President said was misinformation and enemy propaganda is thus unbelievably also retransmitted through his own government's state media, giving these half-truths the imprimatur of the state and added credibility. The state has also made hero figures of anti Sri Lanka propagandists by giving them space in its media. This was not only in the Nero-like mad, bad days of Chandrika Kumaratunga who had got down the LTTE propagandist Vasantharaja as head of Rupavahini. True to this recolonizing agenda Uyangoda was even now - the previous week-calling in Ravaya for Kofi Annan to take over Sri Lanka. Ravaya is edited by Victor Ivan. (The question which Uyangoda did not address was that if within the next year Jayantha Dhanapala, a Sri Lankan was to become Secretary General of the UN would he still advocate the UN taking over Sri Lanka. I doubt it). In the West, at times of war no equal space is given to the enemy or its supporters. There is a spectrum of dissent but not to proven or suspected enemies. In Indian papers, no one argues for the Pakistan viewpoint on Kashmir and no one in Pakistan for the Indian viewpoint. In Sri Lanka, the impossible and the unique happens, the enemy is given ample room by a some times clueless state. Mr President, like the suicide bombers getting into the most secure of Sri Lanka centres the propaganda bombers have burrowed deep inside. It is not only the country and your government that is at stake. By
encouraging anti national lies, some state media are indirectly targeting
your own life and those of us all. |
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