Abstract
The Sri Lankan government is drafting new laws to control social media this summer. In the 70th year since independence, Sri Lankans were hoping for a new liberal era, but
No one takes any notice of the fact that the blown-up remnants of a colonial era register office that was destroyed during the country’s 26-year civil war are clearly visible nearby.
But the conflict, like the ruins, still casts a long shadow over Sri Lanka, and many fear hard-won freedoms are in retreat.
Women in this northern city, in particular, are acutely aware of what they have gained – and what they have lost – since the war ended in 2009. Many women joined the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) and fought with the same brutal efficiency as the men in the group’s long battles against the Sri Lankan government. When the war ended, those who survived were sent to military-run “rehabilitation centres” where they were meant to receive vocational training to start a new life. In reality, they found themselves unskilled and ostracised by their communities.
“Once they strode about confidently. Today they have to go the extra mile to be as meek and mousy in the community as possible to show that they have ‘reformed’,” said Thulasi Muttulingam, a journalist based in Jaffna.
“Apart from the various tabs kept on them by the government military, they are also under watch in their own communities and dare not step out of any demarcated boundaries.”
More generally, women complain they feel intimidated by the high military presence and feel they are more vulnerable to sexual assault and rape than they were when the north was under the control of the LTTE, which had strict rules against sexual crimes.
Across the country, women who have gone into politics in response to recent electoral law reforms that stipulate 25% of all candidates must be women have been attacked by online trolls, religious groups and members of their own community.
Other groups are also feeling uneasy. President Maithripala Sirisena came to power in 2015, unseating the more authoritarian Mahinda Rajapaksa, who had drawn international condemnation for ordering the killing of civilians at the end of the civil war.
Sirisena won by calling Rajapaksa out on corruption, nepotism and the mismanagement of the economy, and by winning the support of the country’s Tamil and Muslim minorities.
A Sri Lankan Muslim woman in Aluthgama in 2015, where Pope Francis visited to bring a message of peace between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority
CREDIT: Eranga Jayawardena/Rex
He promised constitutional reform and transitional justice that was meant to bring perpetrators of war crimes to justice; to set up a system of reparations; and to open an office of missing persons to offer answers to the families of the thousands of civilians who had disappeared during the war.
The government also promised to investigate the killings of journalists, including the murder of Lasantha Wickrematunge, who was assassinated in 2009, just before he was due to give evidence in court against thendefence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the former president’s brother.
The narrative was a powerful one, and in many ways it worked. Travel pages ran stories of new hotels and new tourists. The Sri Lankan Tourism Development Authority said the tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka reached an all-time high of 2.1 million in 2017.
Most visitors travel on a well-trodden circuit: covering Buddhist monuments in Kandy, Anuradhapura and Dambulla, alongside the ancient fortress of Sigiriya and the atmospheric ruined city of Polunaruwa before flopping on a beach.
The media, which had been so brutally supressed under Rajapaksa, began to breathe again. A huge variety of civil society groups stepped out from the shadows, calling for gay rights, women’s empowerment and freedom of expression.
But the government has not repealed the Draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act that was long used by security forces to detain and torture suspects without charge, and the outdated Penal Code, which criminalises same sex relations between adults, still holds.
And while the media is much freer than it was, journalists are still wary. Six months after being elected, Sirisena re-activated the Press Council: a body that had the power to imprison journalists.
Last year the investigative journalism website Groundviews found evidence that the president issued an order to block the news site Lanka E News.
Meanwhile, Prageeth Eknelygoda, a cartoonist and columnist for Lanka E News who was abducted in January 2010, is still missing.
The Committee to Protect Journalists said the authorities had not secured a single conviction in the cases of 10 Sri Lankan journalists murdered in retaliation for their work since 1992.
The investigation into Wickrematunge’s assassination is still ongoing.
The result is a society where no one is clear what is acceptable and what is not.
Civil rights activists in the former war-torn areas of northern Sri Lanka report ongoing threats and intimidation from authorities.
Ruki Fernando, a civil rights activist who has been detained several times by authorities, says people still do not feel they have the full protection of the law.
“I recently got a call from Jaffna, where the family of a missing person has filed a court case against the authorities,” he told Index. “Intelligence operatives had gone to these families to ask about the civil rights activists who had helped them bring the case to court. What is alarming is that this behaviour makes people afraid to bring cases to court.
“I don’t think the top levels of government are ordering [the] mid-level to act like this, but they are sending out a strong signal that this behaviour is acceptable and there will be no punishment for it.”
This feeling, that there is impunity for a certain section of society, intensified this year with a set of anti-Muslim riots that had echoes of the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1983 that pushed the country into war.
In February, at the tail end of Sri Lanka’s peak holiday season, a group of Sinhala men went to eat at a Muslim restaurant in Ampara, some 45 miles inland from the trendy surfer hangout of Arugam Bay on the country’s east coast. They spotted white powder on their plates and accused the owner of sprinkling powder that would render them infertile on their food.
Ethnic Sinhalese, who are predominantly Buddhist, make up 82% of the population, while Muslims make up just 8.5% but a certain strain of Sinhala nationalism has played on fears that the Sinhalese will be wiped out by the minority groups within their country.
The white powder turned out to be clumps of flour, but the rumours that Muslims were effectively trying to poison Sinhalese led to several Muslim-owned businesses and cars being attacked.
A few days later, a Sinhalese lorry driver was killed by four Muslim men near the town of Kandy: a town on Sri Lanka’s tourist trail held as sacred by the country’s majority Buddhist population. In retaliation, Sinhala mobs, encouraged by ultra-nationalist Buddhist monks, attacked mosques and businesses owned by Muslims.
CCTV footage of mosques that were attacked during the time, seen by the Reuters news agency, shows police officers hitting Muslim worshippers and clerics with batons.
The government declared a state of emergency for the first time since the end of the civil war, set up a curfew and placed a temporary ban on social media platforms including Facebook and WhatsApp, which it accused of encouraging the violence to spread.
The ban was lifted, and new regulations covering social media and hate speech are in the pipeline, but Sanjana Hattotuwa, the founder of Groundviews, says the focus on the role social media platforms played in spreading rumour and hate speech should not detract from the fact that much of the violence was implicitly or explicitly condoned by the government.
“Social media may have been an accelerant, but was not the cause of those riots. The larger, more visible and disturbing complicity is from the government that has done nothing to address the root causes of this antiMuslim sentiment,” he said.
There is a sense that the time for true reform is running out. The government is weak, reeling from party rifts and a disappointing performance in February’s local elections. Rajapakse may well be able to come back to power, bringing back his authoritarian, Buddhist nationalist-dominated regime.
Many fear that the anti-Muslim riots are merely a precursor of what is to come. The government has not managed to protect minority rights nor hold anyone to account for their crimes. Authorities still collect information on activists and protesters.
The country still has wartime legislation that allows the government to suspend internet services, impose curfews and give police more powers to detain suspects without democratic scrutiny.
This, combined with a lack of progress in safeguarding freedom of association and in bringing high profile people to justice, means the country’s new found freedoms can easily be snatched away.