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UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Friday, April 29,1994
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Murdered mentor is not forgotten by KU student
Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. Suddenly centuries-old ethnic conflicts around the world seem to be hitting the headlines every day. They remind me of the time I covered Sri Lanka's ethnic war with Sri Lankan journalist, Richard De Zoysa.
Richard was my English literature teacher. About a month after I graduated from high school he asked me to join him and three of his friends who were operating a clandestine radio for the Sri Lankan military.
Sri Lanka had been embroiled in an ethnic war between the Sinhalese-dominated government and the Tamil separatist militants, the Tigers. The mostly Buddhist Sinhale constitute 74 percent of the island's population, and the largely Hindu Tamils make up about 17 percent of the population, and many live in the north and east regions of Sri Lanka.
, We left the military after about eight months because we felt we were being manipulated. Richard and I worked first for the state-controlled television corporation, then for the
nominally independent Sri Lankan press. We covered the war in the North and the East and tried to expose the atrocities being committed on both sides.
Once we traveled in the middle of the war zone to get the story of three women whose husbands had been arrested the night before by government soldiers. Just before we interviewed the women, their husbands' bodies were found in a ditch. One of the men, who had asked to take his glasses with him, had his eyes gouged.
Most of the time, Richard and I weren't allowed to print everything we saw. Once during local elections in the coastal town of Tangalla, I visited some of the polling stations and realized that there was widespread stuffing of the ballot boxes by the military. I started taking photographs of the police breaking down doors of shops whose owners were honoring a strike called for by an extremist group. The officer in charge grabbed my camera, smashed it on the asphalt, stuck his pistol to my head and threatened to shoot me.
befriended and taken to visit eight soldiers who were being held captive. Some of them had been held hostage by the Tigers for over a year. Just a few weeks after our visit all were shot mercilessly and their bodies dumped close to a military camp.
The Tigers were just as ruthless. In August 1987 Richard and I were blindfolded by some Tigers we had
The officer took me to the police station and shoved me into a small cell with eight other men, who were "suspected" members of the extremist group. Some of them had been there for more than a month. Two elderly women were being held in the room
immediately outside the cell. Later I found out that they were being held because their sons were suspected terrorists.
I was lucky. Word got out that I had been arrested, and Richard and my friends mustered up all the influence they had with the government to get me out 12 hours later, but not before my editor cut a deal with the police promising not to print anything negative about the authorities.
I left Sri Lanka in August 1988. Richard stayed and continued to write about human rights abuses by all sides. And as he wrote, he was clearly becoming a threat to all those who espoused the use of indiscriminate violence.
On Feb 18, 1990, Richard was dragged at gunpoint from his home in the middle of the night by several policemen. His mother watched helplessly as they shoved him into a marked police vehicle and disappeared into the night. Two days later, Richard's tortured body was discovered on the beach, just outside Colombo, Sri Lanka's largest city. A
coroner determined that Richard had died from a gunshot to his head. To this day, not one of Richard's killers has been caught.
Things are now different in Sri Lanka. Except for the North and the East, the rest of the country is peaceful. The assassination of the repressive president of the country last May seems to have given those Sri Lankans who live in the South and the West a new lease on life. And although complete freedom of the press has yet to be achieved, Sri Lankan journalists are no longer a target of hit squads.
Why am I writing after all these years? I haven't been home in six years, and my plans to visit my parents in Sri Lanka this Christmas can only be jeopardized by writing now. I must admit I agonized over this column more than anything I've written.
In a recommendation letter Richard wrote, "Sanaka...displayed courage, energy and an overriding desire to find out the truth and then do his best to report it — often at the risk of coming into direct conflict with the establishment." When I read that letter
again last week I felt thoroughly ashamed. By standing back and not speaking out for all these years, I have displayed a marked lack of both courage and energy.
In the end, this column may not have any effect on the Sri Lankan authorities. Richard's killers may never be found. But if I leave journalism school — as I will in August — without the courage and energy that Richard thought I came in with, I will have achieved nothing. Indeed I may have lost everything.
Sanaka Samaraasinha is a Colombo, Sri Lankan, senior in journalism.
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