18 January 2023 12:02 am Views - 547
When the inspirational and the fearless are taken from you, suddenly and brutally, it gnaws at you. As the years pass, the memories become distant, the pain inconsistent. It becomes a scar, indelible.
How do you preserve their memories? How do you preserve the memory of someone equally charismatic and divisive like Lasantha Wickrematunge. This year, his death commemoration gained wide play in the media. The condemnations were many as were the absences, super conspicuous by their silence.
Lasantha chose his sides openly and aggressively, literally to the bitter end. Justice is unlikely to be served in this case and those responsible for the crime are unlikely to be punished.
So far it has been a few of his family members and colleagues who have taken upon themselves to seek justice and to keep his memory alive. What do we tell the generation after us as to who he was? What he stood for?
To say that he was the ideal journalist would be a lie. He never was. He was a real product of an era, high on investigative story telling, political intrigue and sometime partisan reporting. During the last few years, we worked together, I learnt to respect Lasantha not for any pretence of impartiality, but for being transparent in his biases and fearless, but selective reporting. And also, for not supplanting those biases on others.
There were those that Lasantha would not criticise, but that did not mean, others working in the newspaper under him could not. If they followed suit, that was because they chose to do so.
He was ground-breaking in some ways that he may not have wanted to be. He was the first editor to give prime real estate in the newspaper to report on the human tragedy that was unfolding in the north and east.
When I first started visiting the war zone and reporting I was astounded to see the tens of thousands of humans trying to get on with simple tasks in life like taking a bath without getting blown out. My impressions of the war were formed by what I read. And most of what I read were reports written by those firmly based in Colombo. Those reports did serve a purpose, but what was not told in them was the level of human suffering.
I came back and I told Lasantha that I wanted to write this because I found it astonishing not to write. Not as a one-off story but week in week out. He was not thrilled. But a good story always swayed his hand.
There are numerous other instances where if not for Lasantha Wickrematunge, the story was dead before the pitch was made. Careers were made because he said yes. This is why so many have defied the popular narrative and vile aggression on so many occasions to celebrate his memory. This year was an exception.
If not for all those journalists who he nurtured, his memory would have faded into a footnote. Sri Lanka journalism organisations, decimated by personal and organisational rivalries have conveniently decided to stay silent on his legacy. His legacy may not be the easiest to reconcile with, but that is no reason to deny the rightful place for someone who was murdered for his journalism.
We, as a journalism community have found it hard to preserve the memories of our own who have been violently taken away. We have let petty rivalries and the wide political chasms that separate us get in the way.
May be the best way to preserve the memories of all those journalists who have laid down their lives irrelevant of their political convictions is to keep telling their stories. To keep reminding those who have benefited from their lives and their works, that at least there are the few that do not let political expediency override human decency.
The writer is a journalism researcher and the Project Lead at the Dart Centre Asia Pacific. He can be contacted on amantha.perera@cqumail.com