'I told them we would not cave in'- 'Lal Wickrematunga

'I told them we would not cave in'
RICK WESTHEAD/TORONTO STAR
Lal Wickrematunga poses outside the Sunday Leader's offices in Colombo, where his brother Lasantha — the Sri Lankan newspaper's co-founder and managing editor — was gunned downed on the street in January 2009.

Journalist brother of murdered editor tells why he must carry on in Sri Lanka rather than join family in Toronto
Feb 15, 2009 04:30 AM
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Rick Westhead
SOUTH ASIA BUREAU

COLOMBO – In Sri Lanka, deemed one of the most perilous countries for journalists to cover, Lal Wickrematunga is determined to keep publishing his crusading newspaper.

This is despite the murder last month of his younger brother, Lasantha, 52, who had honed a reputation as an intrepid journalist for the Sunday Leader.

The staff of the Leader was worried that the murder would prove to be too much for Lal Wickrematunga, who founded the newspaper with his brother.

His reporters feared he would shut down the operation and leave the country to join his parents and siblings in Toronto.

"But I told them I was going to take Lasantha's place as managing editor and we would not cave in," says Wickrematunga, 58.

Lasantha was a critic not only of the Sri Lankan government, which has clamped down on civil liberties but also of the Tamil Tiger rebels who have been fighting the government for the past 25 years in their no-holds-barred bid for independence.

The Tigers, Lasantha wrote, are "among the most ruthless and bloodthirsty organizations to have infested the planet."

Sure that he was in mortal danger, Lasantha left a column that was published after gunmen shot him down on his way to work.

"The wounds of war," he wrote, "will scar (Sri Lankans) forever" and create an "even more bitter and hateful diaspora."

Looking out the window of his large, spartan office across the street from a cement factory, Wickrematunga says he'll continue to keep the Sunday Leader going "until my brother's work is finished.

"If I didn't, his death would be in vain."

Sri Lanka is a beautiful island – home to a riot of wildflowers, coconut palms and seaside vistas – but it is a place of great danger.

For journalists, that translates to eight slayings over the past two years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Lasantha Wickrematunga's murder came two days after the country's largest private television station, MBC/MTV Networks, was attacked by 15 masked assailants armed with grenades.

"My wife calls me every 30 minutes to see where I am," Wickrematunga says. "And I don't ever take a car with my children. When we have to go somewhere, I just tell them I have something I have to do and I meet them there."

For Sunday Leader reporters, such precautions are routine.

Dilrukshi Handunnetti, who leads the paper's investigative team, changes her route to work and the time she leaves home every day.

"Lasantha always told us if we were on the phone and told someone we were leaving at 9:30, we should leave at 9 or 10," she says.

In 2006, Handunnetti published a story about a Colombo police inspector who was falsely accused of corruption.

The inspector, Douglas Nimal, had taken his story to other newspapers here, but they wouldn't publish it.

"We verified his story and ran it," Handunnetti says. "The day it ran he called to say he was so happy to be vindicated.

"He told me he had more information about the guilty people and said he would bring it over to me at the paper."

Nimal and his wife were murdered in their car en route to the Sunday Leader's newsroom.

Handunnetti's eyes well up when she speaks about her murdered boss.

"He had terrific sources I could only dream of – and he would always take risks and go the extra mile with a story."

Great sources may have led Lasantha to an early grave.

After years of publishing stories critical of the government, Lasantha was shot to death by a group of men on motorcycles on Jan. 8, peculiar in a city where security checkpoints pepper the streets.

In a twist that attracted attention around the world, the Sunday Leader subsequently published Lasantha's self-written obituary, which he had kept in a closet at his home with other documents.

In an open letter to the president, titled "And then they came for me," Lasantha wrote: "Murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty ....When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me .... As for me, it is with a clear conscience that I go to meet my Maker.

"I wish, when your time finally comes, you could do the same. I wish."

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa denied government involvement in the death of Lasantha, whom he called a "courageous journalist," and immediately pledged to investigate the murder.

Sri Lankan Foreign Secretary Palitha Kohona said in an interview that it wouldn't have made sense for the government to attack the journalist at this time.

"Why now, after all these years, when we are on the verge of a great victory (against the Tamil Tiger rebels in the north) would we want to create this distraction and negative publicity?" Kohona asked.

"It just doesn't make sense.

"We don't know who killed him. We think it must have been someone he knew, because he actually had pulled his car over to the side of the road before he was shot."

In 1994, the brothers started their paper – using their own cars to deliver the Sunday Leader to subscribers at 5 a.m. – because they were tired of reading what Wickrematunga refers to as the "propaganda" printed in Sri Lanka's host of dailies.

It wasn't long before they received the message that their paper's coverage was unwelcome.

Once, Lasantha and his wife were in their car when it was attacked by a group of masked men wielding baseball bats spiked with nails. On two other occasions, the paper's printing presses were burned.

Comments Wickrematunga: "The police suspected we had burned the 60-million-rupee presses to collect the 5-million-rupee insurance money."

Giving a tour of the Sunday Leader newsroom, Wickrematunga says again that he needs to stay in Sri Lanka.

"There's a light at the end of the tunnel, but it's a train coming the other way," he says. "When this war is over, the abuses we have in our country won't stop.

"Sri Lanka doesn't matter in the international community. We don't have oil or any other assets of value, and geopolitically we are considered India's baby.

"We need to stay and continue to do this reporting, exposing corruption when we find it."
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