Freedom of expression: comparisons from Sri Lanka

BY ROHINI HENSMAN| IN Media Freedom | 15/04/2010

                       From the Free Speech Hub

Freedom of expression is central to democracy: one cannot talk about ‘rule of the people’ where some people are killed for reporting the truth or expressing an opinion, while others are deprived of the chance to make informed decisions by being kept in the dark. Conversely, where freedom of expression exists, it is possible to fight for other democratic rights and freedoms that may be under attack by writing and talking about these issues. Therefore, if India is indeed a ‘fake democracy’, as Arundhati Roy called it in her talk at the finale of the Left Forum 2010 in New York in the middle of March, then this must mean that freedom of expression is under serious attack in India.

Yet in the same month her long essay ‘Walking with the Comrades,’ supporting the struggle of the CPI (Maoist) in the tribal areas, was published by a mainstream, corporate-controlled Indian magazine, Outlook. How would that be possible if India were just a ‘fake’ democracy? By way of a comparison, across the border in Sri Lanka, the March issue of Himal Southasian was seized by customs on account of an article of mine, despite the fact that I have always been sharply critical of the insurgencies of the LTTE and JVP, and cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as sympathetic to terrorism or violence. Earlier editions of Himal with articles by writers critical of both the government and the LTTE have suffered the same fate. My articles have been turned down by one newspaper after another in Sri Lanka, and I do not blame their editors and owners: so many journalists, editors and owners who have been critical of the regime in power have been jailed, killed or disappeared, even if they, too, have been critical of the LTTE.

Indeed, Arundhati herself had mentioned the plight of journalists in Sri Lanka in an article she wrote around a year ago, warning that ‘genocide waits to happen’. She wrote eloquently about the civilians trapped in the war zone being bombed and shelled indiscriminately by government forces, but failed to mention that the LTTE was holding these same civilians hostage and shooting them if they tried to escape, using them as human shields from behind which they fired at government forces, forcing civilians to build bunds under enemy fire, putting guns into the hands of children and sending them to the front line. ‘Genocide’ has a precise legal meaning that revolves crucially around ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’, and it was not on the agenda in Sri Lanka. What both sides were perpetrating were heinous war crimes, and if those of us who were anguished about that situation had been able to prevail on both sides to stop committing those crimes, thousands of civilian lives could have been saved. The fact that so few people took this stand speaks volumes about what had happened to freedom of expression in Sri Lanka.

Between 1994 and 2005, a war-weary Sri Lankan population had been willing to concede the democratic rights and freedoms demanded by Tamils. Equally significantly, this period saw a restoration of democratic rights including freedom of expression in the government-controlled parts of Sri Lanka, by contrast with the previous period, during which all democratic rights and freedoms had been under lethal attack. But there was no corresponding restoration of democratic rights in the parts of Sri Lanka controlled by the LTTE, where Tamil dissidents (i.e. anyone who criticised or disagreed with the LTTE leadership) continued to be hunted down and killed. Indeed, even Tamil dissidents who had escaped to other parts of Sri Lanka (or in one or two cases abroad) were ruthlessly wiped out.

This trend had started much earlier. Shortly after the Indo-Lanka Accord was signed in 1987 and the Indian Peace-Keeping Force occupied the North-East, war broke out between the IPKF and LTTE. Four academics in the University of Jaffna wrote a book, The Broken Palmyra, which tackled the issue of human rights violations by all sides: the Sri Lanka government, the IPKF, the LTTE, and other Tamil militant groups. They also set up University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), which continued to document and analyse violations. One of them, Rajani Thiranagama, was killed by the LTTE in 1989, and the others could survive only by fleeing. Literally thousands of dissidents were arrested, tortured and killed by the LTTE. This totalitarian regime survived to the very end, when they were defeated by government forces.

The LTTE had been formed as a response to persistent discrimination against and persecution of Tamils, including large-scale massacres. To that extent their concerns overlapped with those of Tamil democracy activists. They took up armed struggle for a separate Tamil state, arguing that non-violent protest had not worked. But that had a logic of its own, leading to the stand that anyone who was not with them was with the enemy, and had to be eliminated. In the 2005 presidential election in Sri Lanka, the LTTE leadership enforced an election boycott in the areas they controlled, leading to the victory of Mahinda Rajapaksa. There was a return to hostilities, and the LTTE was wiped out, along with thousands of civilians. In the process, democratic rights, and especially freedom of expression, suffered massively in the whole of Sri Lanka.

The reason I have gone into such detail is that I see so many parallels with what is happening in the forest belt of India today. The CPI (Maoist) and its supporters justify recourse to armed struggle by saying that non-violent resistance has failed, and to some degree their concerns overlap with those of tribal rights activists. Yet the Maoists’ own practices are far from democratic, as dissidents who have left the party testify, and their goal of capturing state power diverges from the adivasis’ goal of gaining greater control over their lives, livelihoods and habitat. (See, for example, this interview, where a former Maoist area commander says, ‘Whenever a tribal raises his voice against the Maoists, he is killed’).

It appears that there is a disconnect between the adivasi struggle for democratic rights and livelihood and the CPI (Maoist) armed struggle for state power, and that the former is being sacrificed to the latter, just as the struggle for the democratic rights of Tamils in Sri Lanka was sacrificed to the LTTE’s armed struggle for state power.

As the situation becomes more polarised, not only are unarmed civilians in the conflict zone victimised by both sides, but the mantra of ‘either you are with us or you are with the enemy’ is used more stridently by both sides, resulting in an attack on freedom of expression even in other parts of India. The use of the utterly reprehensible Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act 2005 (CSPSA) against Arundhati for stating her political views in her writing is a dramatic illustration of the subversion of democracy by political forces that have always been opposed to it. And I very much fear that these forces will gain strength if the conflict escalates further.