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• Groundviews on Twitter
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• Groundviews on your mobile - Citizen Journalism on the go!
• Groundviews back online, with new features and enhanced for mobile phones
• New email subscription service and Facebook integration

We reproduce in full a letter from Sonali Samarasinghe Wickremetunge to the IGP asking him to record ‘very important details’ known to the Sri Lankan President and at least one other senior government minister, based on the minister’s own admission, pertaining to the identity of her husband Lasantha Wickremetunge’s killers.

The Editor in Chief of the Sunday Leader and one of Sri Lanka’s best known journalists, Lasantha Wickremetunge was murdered on 8th January 2009 en route to work, in broad daylight and on a busy road. The murderers, whoever they are, have yet to be captured.

Groundviews was told that no newspaper in Sri Lanka was willing to carry this letter in full. Therein too lies a story of the pervasive nature of anxiety and fear in Sri Lanka, and the conditions facing independent journalists and media. We publish this letter in the hope that sustained domestic and international pressure to reveal the identity of Lasantha’s killers, especially as they seem to be known to the highest authority in the country, will help find and bring them to justice.

Groundviews captured the unequivocal condemnation of Lasantha’s assasination from many citizens, including former President of Sri Lanka, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunge, Vivimarie Vanderpoorten, winner of the Gratiaen Prize in 2007 and two other award winning poets Malinda Seneviratne and Indran Amirthanayagam, Lionel Bopage, a former General Secretary of the JVP and Prof. Sumanasiri Liyanage.

View all these articles and more, including videos of Lasantha’s funeral, here.

• Chandrika Kumaratunga responds to Dayan Jayatilleke’s comment on the murder of Lasantha Wickremetunge
• In conversation with Vivimarie Vanderpoorten
• None Other Than Mahinda Rajapaksha!
• Protest march by lawyers over Lasantha Wickremetunge’s assassination
• The murder of Lasantha Wickremetunge and Sri Lanka’s future

Violence does not make me laugh. Yet humour has not only survived nearly two and a half decades of exposure to violence, brutality, intolerance, discrimination, corruption and abuses of power, it has preserved my sensitivity and been a soft padding that shielded me from the hard blows of reality. It has been a key to our resilience as a nation and a safer platform for us to speak truth to power. Because we somehow feel that the death of a comedian is more tragic than the death of a philosopher, soldier, a politician or indeed a straight talking newspaper editor.

It’s not easy to make people laugh and it is especially difficult to laugh in the midst of death and destruction of the very essence of our humanity. The most difficult aspect of satirising tragedy however, is dealing with the mix of emotions that you are left with at the end. It actually is painful to make people laugh in the face of tragedy. It is impossible the laugh at the fate of the two LTTE pilots who were shot down without appreciating that their fate is in a way tied to mine. Satirising the story only heightens the awareness that a nation that could produce a suicide bomber out of a Tamil could indeed make suicide bombers out of Muslims and Sinhalese and Burgers and Malays and all and any Sri Lankan. I cannot laugh at Mervin Silva without feeling sorry for myself as a Sri Lankan.

Adding to the difficulty and pain is the fear that in satirising reality, one may be inadvertently softening a bit too much – it’s harshness and leasing a false sense of complacency to the audience. Yet laughter is a conduit that reaches out to a broader audience, much more deeply. It is a good conversation starter – which could lead to a social debate about issues at workplaces and lounge rooms. Satire is a good solvent of tension and diverse opinions. Most of all it adds another perspective to the discourse and debate on social issues and in doing so, teaches us to look at problems from different angles, and inspires us to question not only the status quo, but also our own understanding of reality.

Perhaps that is why comedy should be a vital ingredient of social discourse and debate. The commission of the comedian in the face of conflict, violence and injustice is not to extract a cheap laugh out of the shallows of apathy, but to lift his audience to the heights of laughter and preserve their sensitivity so that they may be able to dive deeper and with more empathy, into the dark and empty ignorance of our greatest tragedies.

• How high is our Social Esteem in Sri Lanka?
• Circles of Violence: A Return to Sri Lanka
• Thoughts on Chatroom, a play by Enda Walsh directed by Tracy Holsinger
• The Weligama Declaration
• The psychopathology of the LTTE suicide bombers

by Global Citizen for Banyan News Reporters

Colombo, Sri Lanka: - Elite black tiger commando units of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) carried out an attack last night on farmers who may or may not have produced the vegetables and eggs that caused 270 people including 202 students to be hospitalised for suspected food poisoning in Trincomalee yesterday.

Leader of the LTTE’s political wing P Nadesan who himself was the victim of food poisoning from kottu roti told reporters that he will personally hunt down the bacteria responsible for the calamity, but the lack of VIM Dishwash bars in the no-fire zone was severely hampering his efforts. “Our organisation takes the battle against food poisoning and gluten intolerance very seriously” remarked Nadesan who is affectionately known as “Padasami Hari Gandeshwaran” by his associates in reference to his sensitive digestive system.

Defence Secretary Mr. Goatspirit condemned the LTTE attack on innocent farmers claiming that there was no credible evidence that they were responsible for the food poisoning. “We are a democratically elected government” he explained, adding that “You can’t kill people when there is no evidence of any involvement in criminal activity. As a democratically elected government, we will abduct anyone we suspect of causing the food poisoning and remand them indefinitely under the “Prevention of Food Poisoning and Propagation of State Terrorism Act”.

President Rajapakse who was severely distressed by the event, urged all patriotic Sri Lankans to contribute generously to rebuild a railway line so that the government will be able to transport varieties of ‘malu banis’, ‘seeni banis’, ‘kimbula banis’, ‘gal banis’ and ‘nikang banis’ to the war torn northern regions of the country. The President also donated his entire March salary to the project commenting that the flow of ‘malu banis’ to the North will show the world that his government is committed to safeguard the newly won freedom in the North by our heroic soldiers”.

Without this month’s salary, the President is expected to ask for an IMF bailout to balance his budget and meet balance of payments obligations to ‘Paradise cakes’ this month, failing which he will have no alternative but to dip into his retirement savings or start “Helping Hambantota” again to survive.

• Government and LTTE differ on value of life
• Hawks and hypocrisy in the Rajapaksa administration
• Situation in Vakarai
• TASTY CHOCOLATE AIDING TERRORISTS
• Vaharai starves - International Community is Silent

Mr K died today
Not unusual, all things perish
But he was very young
And had just got two tiny teeth
And was a little fighter
He tried hard to live
In difficult times.

Mr K died quietly today
And I don’t have a right to
Cry, besides
I am a tad too old
for that.

Death stalks me
heroic, wearing a shiny cloak of war
but death, nonetheless
In the jungles booming with mortar fire
In IDP camps
In accident wards full of
Young men hoping the pain would end
Death immortalized in
the news
the moving image
broadcasts and
telecasts and podcasts

So what right do I have
To mourn a tiny chipmunk
parted from its mother
Caught in the crossfire
During an ambush by birds
And the chipmunks’ retaliation
In their quest for food.

I fed him and kept him warm
Swaddled him and held him
Formed an attachment
So I thought he needed me.
But the truth is
These few, silent, tears are
Because it is I
who needed
him.

24th March 2009

Part of the Writers Under Siege collection on Groundviews. For more information, click here.

• Alliance Of Parties In The East?
• Until the Guns are silent
• Death at Noon
• The cost of liberation…
• An Eye for an Eye, a Bomb for a Bomb