And then they came for me

 "No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last.

I have been in the business of journalism a good long time. Indeed, 2009 will be The Sunday Leader's 15th year. Many things have changed in Sri Lanka during that time, and it does not need me to tell you that the greater part of that change has been for the worse. We find ourselves in the midst of a civil war ruthlessly prosecuted by protagonists whose bloodlust knows no bounds. Terror, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the state, has become the order of the day. Indeed, 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. For neither group have the risks ever been higher or the stakes lower.....

We have espoused unpopular causes, stood up for those too feeble to stand up for themselves, locked horns with the high and mighty so swollen with power that they have forgotten their roots, exposed corruption and the waste of your hard-earned tax rupees, and made sure that whatever the propaganda of the day, you were allowed to hear a contrary view. For this I - and my family - have now paid the price that I have long known I will one day have to pay. I am - and have always been - ready for that. I have done nothing to prevent this outcome: no security, no precautions. I want my murderer to know that I am not a coward like he is, hiding behind human shields while condemning thousands of innocents to death. What am I among so many? It has long been written that my life would be taken, and by whom. All that remains to be written is when."

This was the beginning of the last piece that Lasantha Wickrematunge, then editor-in-chief of Sri Lanka's independent and critical Sunday Leader, would ever write; clearly sensing his own assassination was imminent. Murdered a few days later, probably by the government thugs he expected [we do not know yet for justice has not yet been done, and these days is not readily apparent in a Sri Lanka still in denial over the massacre of the Tamil Tigers], his article reminds us of the fearlessness of great journalists and how much genuine freedom of speech is one of the best indicators of the moral and political state of a society. This is amplified by the fact that in his own country Wickrematunge was much revered and seen as one of the fathers of investigative journalism there - he was no minor figure but internationally respected and an award-winner.

Here is the article in full:

And then they came for me

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