Morten Hvaal a photojournalist on the road

Splitting heads and hairs, Sri Lankan style

2009-06-10T19:09:54Z

“Thanks to you and others, who was taking pics world can remember the sufferings!”. The words are from an email a stranger sent me recently, and should be heart-warming for an old photojournalist who’s packing up to leave struggling Sri Lanka for a while. But the message is about a war that ended 15 years ago on the other side of the world. There won’t be many such emails to photographers from Sri Lankans who suffered during the war here, now or later. The occasional “thanks for trying”, perhaps, but in photojournalism trying equals failure.

The final stages of the defeat of the LTTE Tamil Tigers must have been an epic chain of events with thousands of people suffering and dying. But there is no independent photographic documentation of it. The dubious “photographic evidence” handed out by both sides as propaganda will hopefully forever gather digital dust. That leaves only the cold clinical satellite images recorded by superpower technology, and the highly volatile visual memories of those who were there and saw it themselves.

Meanwhile, Sri Lankan journalists have more pressing concerns. Dozens of them took to the streets of Colombo today wearing black masks printed with “Stop Media Suppression” over their mouths, and carrying posters of Poddala Jayantha, the Secretary of Sri Lanka Working Journalists Association, who was abducted and assaulted by unknown assailants on June 1st, in what is becoming an all too familiar pattern here.

Although working conditions in Sri Lanka are difficult for foreign media too, we rarely feel threatened. But a BBC interview with Poddala Jayantha does hint at things literally getting a bit hairy, and army commander general Sarath Fonseka didn't help:

“So, especially the media people should behave well and set an example to others. To me, those who stage protests with unshaven beards, long hairs and wearing costumes like in fancy dress competitions are not scribes who are clamouring for media freedom but a gang of thugs”.

I’m keeping my ponytail for now. It's become a matter of freedom of hair.

Magnanimous Mahinda and the Foreign Media Mob

2009-05-25T02:03:03Z

Some little man in a Colombo cafe started shouting abuse at me the other day. I don’t know him, and I don’t know why. That sort of thing is very rare here, but perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, given the current "you're either with us or against us" climate. The vast majority of the Sri Lankan media outlets are now, voluntarily or not, marching to the beat of the government propaganda machine. Even the once incorrigible Sunday Leader now sports editorials that could almost have been written by the ministry of information and some columnists who write as though they’re applying for a job at the Media Centre for National Security. Any foreign media outlet that dares question the official version of how the war was won is immediately labelled as part of some sinister international conspiracy which, having first, for some reason, supported the LTTE, is now, for some reason, hell bent on sabotaging what is presented as the new united Sri Lanka.

Perhaps the little angry man I met in he cafe had just read the newspaper The Island’s feature article “Foreign Correspondent” (worth a read, that one), which ascertains that “The print media are the foot soldiers of the LTTE”, and goes a long way towards explaining how we are ultimately responsible for having prolonged the war so that we could continue to enjoy the comforts of being based in Sri Lanka. The same article appears on the Sri Lankan Ministry of Defence’s website, so I suppose it must all be true.

Also on the MoD website, and just about everywhere else, is President Mahinda Rajapakse’s instructions to his subjects on how to celebrate the victory over the LTTE without hurting anyone’s feelings. “Magnanimous Mahinda” has a good ring to it, and to be fair, most of the 100,000-plus crowd in Friday’s flag-filled festivities to honour the country’s war heroes behaved far better than the man in the cafe. Not all did, though. After a few hundred metres of the parade had passed came the less-than-magnanimous effigies of dead LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. Closely followed, perhaps by coincidence, by the not entirely media-friendly government minister Mervin Silva.

What effects the victory celebrations and the politics that follow them will have remains to be seen, but some are already becoming clear: in my largely Tamil neighbourhood in Colombo there are not many Sri Lankan flags flying from people’s homes.

Sri Lanka: The Gaza Connection.

2009-05-15T05:35:55Z

It's yet another Colombo morning filled with somewhat bizarre events and news. An SMS message from a local news service just interrupted coffee on my sixth-floor balcony in Wellawatte, saying a suspected LTTE cadre has jumped off a seventh-floor balcony in Wellawatte after security services found suicide kits in a flat. I look around, see nothing unusual and go back to coffee and the local newspapers.

The Daily Mirror, traditionally a moderate, reasonably independent paper stills seems to at least be trying to report what they can about the situation in Sri Lanka, and what the world outside has to say about it. Their coverage would indicate that they either don't know a lot more than the international media do, or that that they choose not to publish much of anything that can be perceived as critical of the government.

Such caution is certainly understandable, given how dangerous it can be for local journalists to work here. Even the Sunday Leader, which likes to call itself "Unbowed and Unafraid", recently promised, in court, to "refrain from publishing news causing insult and discomfort to the Defence Secretary", president Mahinda Rajapakse's brother Gotabhaya. Such developments need to be seen in context; many in the Sinhala-Buddhist majority seem to genuinely believe that there is an international conspiracy against them, spearheaded by the former colonial powers and a few other countries.

Oh, the Gaza connection: decipher if you can today's Sri Lankan Daily Mirror editorial, which made my Colombo morning even more surreal. Am I missing something here?

Free Tiger tour, anyone?

2009-05-03T13:13:07Z

So, "Foreign media taken on a free ride by the LTTE", according to the Sri Lankan Government's propaganda website "Media Centre For National Security" (MCNS). Apparently, many of us are terrorist sympathisers and, well, stupid. I might actually have been insulted, had I not been at the receiving end of similar accusations for many months now. And, one does need to try and stay in the MCNS' good books, because they too occasionally take the foreign media on free rides.

Saturday morning, 0500hrs, a military airport in Colombo; I'm reading the printed program for the day's "VISIT OF MEDIA PERSONAL" (sic) to, amongst several other unpronounceable locations, Pudumathalan, which is on the frontline to the LTTE-held "no-fire zone". After several hours of flights, briefings, displays of captured LTTE weapons, refreshments and rides in armoured personnel carriers, the motley crew of close to 30 sweating journalists and a handful of senior Sri Lankan military officers dismount "near the front line".

The television talking heads do their thing: "We're at the front line where LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran is about to face his destiny". Except we're not. The front line is four or five kilometres away. All we can see is a dirt road, Pudhumathalan lagoon, some very relaxed-looking soldiers and a few red buses, supposedly waiting to transport civilians coming out of the no-fire zone. Apart from the chatter of the TV crews it's very quiet.

The ultimate proof of how safely removed we are from what might be left of the war is that two of the Sri Lankan Army's most important general officers are happy to hang around and chat. Both are adamant that it would all be over soon if it weren't for the civilians. No surprises there; everything indicates that the Tigers are on their last legs as a conventional fighting force, and the generals are visibly proud to declare that the army has killed thousands of terrorists. The surprise comes when they say they're not killing any civilians.

Some people are getting hurt though. Our departure from the helipad at nearby Puthukudirippu is delayed, and while we wait several casualties arrive in ambulances, only to be loaded back in and driven off again after we try and photograph them. We start hearing the sounds of distant detonations, and for a few moments there is a real sense of a war being fought. Then there is only the noise of TV reporters shouting speculation into cameras.

May you live long, but not here

2009-04-29T18:02:11Z

"Ayubowan", is the first word a visitor to Sri Lanka hears on arrival. These days one could be forgiven for thinking it means something very rude. It doesn't, and the increasingly rare tourist would probably not suspect any hostility behind the still ever-present smiles. Until, that is, she or he makes the mistake of picking up a local newspaper. Traditionally fairly diverse, most Sri Lankan media outlets now speak with one voice to the "International Community", and the message is not "ayubowan", it's "mind your own business".

Increase the impact of the culture shock by going to cover what appears at first sight to be a peaceful demonstration against Foreign Secretary David Miliband by orange-robed buddhist monks in front of the British High Commission in Colombo. Nothing much to photograph (most people smile at the camera and ask where I'm from), and I soon get sleepy from the buddhist chanting and incense. I wake up when the monk speaking into the microphone switches to English. It turns out his rhetoric is somewhat less than peaceful, and within minutes he has concluded that Miliband "represents terrorism" and has come to Sri Lanka to rescue LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. The monk, who has stopped smiling at this stage, gives no reason as to why Miliband or any reasonably sane individual or nation would want to rescue a Tiger with a reputation as spotty as Prabhakaran's. Some of the banners do though, by suggesting that Miliband is jealous of Sri Lanka's apparent success in "wiping out terrorism".

Granted, the monks at the High Commission are from the JHU, a small-ish Sinhala buddhist political party that rises to the surface by stirring up a murky brew of religion, nationalism and anti-pretty-much-anything-else propaganda. But the same recipe seems to also work well for other, more moderate Sinhala buddhist Sri Lankans. There is very little real debate about the war. Politicans and local media have all draped themselves in the flag to combat their two main enemies. The main foe is the Tamil Tiger, now threatened by the process of "eradicating terrorism", a term much loved by the spin doctors. The other enemy would appear to be us. In the eyes of many Sri Lankans, the international community has become an international conspiracy. Foreign governments, the UN, NGO's of all kinds, and of course the media are treated with suspicion and disdain. Many of the ever smiling Sri Lankans seem to genuinely believe that we are at best incompetent, and at worst have a hidden agenda. Hence, we the media simply aren't allowed to cover events in and around the no-fire/combat zone, and the "welfare villages" where the internally displaced are being held.

So when the Swedish Foreign Minister gets snubbed and leading international officials are vilified, there are, in the minds of many here, good reasons for it. More surprising perhaps is that many of the young and educated have wrapped their heads in the same opaque flag. The other day Indi Samarajiva, a brilliant young Sri Lankan Canadian American blogger publicly dismissed my colleagues and me as a "tourists". And he didn't even smile and say "ayubowan".