Sri Lanka: Dogs of War

In memoriam Lasantha Wickrematunge. From South Asia Citizens' Web, an editorial from the Sunday Leader

Sri Lanka: Dogs of War:

[In the death of the Sunday Leader editor, Lasantha Wickrematunge , Sri Lanka lost a very courageous and visionary journalist who strived to expose corruption, human rights abuses and supported the rights of minorities in the face of great personal danger. He had obviously anticipated his own demise and the manner of it as is evident from his last editorial published in Sunday Leader.]

Sunday Leader
Editorial

AND THEN THEY CAME FOR ME

No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka , journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last.

I have been in the business of journalism a good long time. Indeed, 2009 will be The Sunday Leader's 15th year. Many things have changed in Sri Lanka during that time, and it does not need me to tell you that the greater part of that change has been for the worse. We find ourselves in the midst of a civil war ruthlessly prosecuted by protagonists whose bloodlust knows no bounds. Terror, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the state, has become the order of the day. Indeed, murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty. Today it is the journalists, tomorrow it will be the judges. For neither group have the risks ever been higher or the stakes lower.

Read the entire editorial here