Return to War - Human Rights Watch

weekly Sunday Standard. They detained Basnayake for over two months also under
the Emergency Regulations, eventually releasing him on bail; Basanayake is required
to appear before court every month. On March 13 the government froze the assets of
Standard Newspapers Ltd., citing suspected links to the LTTE. The company’s assets
remain frozen and neither Mawbima nor the Sunday Standard have published since
March 29.
Over the past year, Mawbima has reported on government corruption and human
rights violations. The newspaper’s journalists have questioned the government’s role
in the spiraling number of abductions and enforced disappearances as fighting
between the government and LTTE escalated.
The owner of Standard Newspapers, Tiran Alles, is also a close associate of two
former ministers, Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera and Ports Development
Minister Sripathi Sooriyaarachchi. Both ministers lost their jobs in February 2006
after falling out with the president. According to press reports, during an executive
committee meeting of the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party on February 11, President
Rajapaksa accused the two sacked ministers of using Mawbima to plot against him.
One month later, the government froze Standard Newspapers’ assets.
In a letter released to the Free Media Movement in March 2007, Mawbima’s owners
alleged that the government first made subtle overtures to Alles to change the
editorial policy of its newspapers. When this failed, the paper was shut down. 191
In another case against the Sinhala media, on January 5, 2007, government security
forces in Colombo arrested three activists of the Sri Lanka Railway trade union and
its publication Akuna, M.A. Sisira Priyankara, M.L. Senaviratna, and Nihal Serasinghe.
The government did not announce the arrests at first, but one day later army
spokesperson Prasad Samarasinghe produced evidence at a press conference that
he claimed implicated the three trade union activists in planning terrorist acts. He
accused the three men of collusion with the LTTE, and another officer at the press
191 Open letter to the diplomatic community in Sri Lanka from Thilakaratne Kuruwita Bandara, chief editor of Mawbima, and
Hana Ibrahim, chief editor of the Sunday Standard, May 14, 2007,
http://www.freemediasrilanka.org/index.php?action=con_news_full&id=491&section=news (accessed July 16, 2007).
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Human Rights Watch August 2007