Tense / Messy dark region - Pakistan Vs Indian, Sri Lanka Vs Tamil Tigers

How Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapaksa reacted when heard of attack on Lasantha

Just a few hours after Lasantha Wickrematunge was shot dead in a busy Colombo street last week his elder brother, Lal, rushed to the pioneering journalist's home.

Lasantha, the editor of Sri Lanka's The Sunday Leader newspaper, had warned Lal a few days earlier that the Government would try to kill him, and told him about a cupboard containing all his sensitive documents.

Rifling through it, Lal piled the papers into a plastic bag. Only later, as he read through them, did he realise that one was the handwritten draft of an obituary that Lasantha had prepared for himself, explicitly accusing the Government of assassinating him.

That extraordinary obituary, published in the The Sunday Leader, is now making waves around the world and spotlighting the assault on the media that has accompanied Sri Lanka's military campaign against the Tamil Tiger rebels since 2006.

“When finally I am killed, it will be the Government that kills me,” said the obituary entitled And Then They Came For Me. “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.”

Under President Rajapaska the Army has made unprecedented gains against the Tigers, whose 25-year struggle for an ethnic Tamil homeland has claimed more than 70,000 lives.

The army captured Kilinochchi, the Tigers' capital, on January 2, and is now on the brink of a conventional military victory as troops close in on the rebels' last outpost in Mullaitivu.
Lasantha, however, was one of a small group of critics who accused the Government of systematically eroding civil liberties since a 2002 truce unravelled four years later.

A member of the ethnic Sinhalese majority, he also criticised the Government for failing to find a lasting political solution to address the Tamil minority's concerns.

“He was a lone dissenting voice,” said Sonali Samarasinghe, Lasantha's second wife, whom he married three weeks ago. “He was perceived as denigrating the Government's so-called victory.”
Lasantha knew the risks: he had survived other attacks, including the burning of his newspaper's printing press in 2007, and was used to regular death threats. Dilrukshi Handunnetti, the Leader's investigations editor, showed The Times an envelope that he received three days before he died.

It contained half a page of his newspaper with a message in red paint daubed across a critical story on Kilinochchi's capture. “If you continue to write this, you'll be killed,” the message said.
Be that as it may, on the morning of Thursday, January 8, President Rajapakse was busy with meetings at Temple Trees. At a meeting of four associations related to the coconut industry the President had been talking with key industrialists about the problems facing them in the present economic scenario.

The meeting was attended by the Coconut Product Exporters Association, the Coir Products Association, the Horticultural Exporters' Association and the Poultry Association where representatives of these bodies were making presentations setting out the current problems facing exporters.

While the Coconut Product Association presentation was being made by its representatives Rajapakse was to get a phone call. He would listen attentively interjecting only once to say 'oluwatada wedune' before terminating the call.

Immediately assuming the matter related to the military drive in the north and wondering if the President would be in a mood to continue with a coconut exporters' presentation the representative asked 'Can I continue Sir?' at which time Rajapakse told him to please continue his presentation.

In fact when a representative from the Poultry Association observed during the meeting that due to certain constraints they were better off doing business in Singapore, Rajapakse was to say jokingly 'then we should send you to Singapore.'

However when it was time to ask questions President Rajapakse had told those present, 'I'm hungry, aren't you'll hungry let's go out and eat.'