The mortality rate of journalists is high across Southasia, with harassment, threats and beatings commonplace. Even so, the two brutal murders this month, of editor Lasantha Wickrematunga in Sri Lanka and journalist Uma Singh in Nepal, have stood out. Wickrematunga was shot to death by unidentified gunmen on his way to work on 8 January, and there appears to have been little progress in the case since then, though his posthumous editorial points a finger at the Rajapakse regime. In the aftermath of that deliberate killing, numerous journalists have fled the island, fearing assassination.
In Nepal, Uma Singh was a young woman radio-and-print journalist, working in the tumultuous Tarai. On 15 January, she was brutally hacked to death by a group of more than a dozen men. The motive for the killing remains unknown, though authorities have arrested four suspects. While indiscriminate attacks on journalists and media houses in Nepal have been continuing, the molestation of women journalists has been even more pronounced after Singh's horrific murder.
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On the topic of media suppression, Burma certainly deserves a mention. Journalists continue to be detained, sometimes tried and oftentimes given astounding sentences for challenging the most trivial of the junta's draconian laws. Even after all the international attention the country received after the monks' protests of September 2007 and Cyclone Nargis the following May, so little of what actually happens behind the bamboo curtain actually filters out. Meanwhile, Burmese journalists are said to have watched Obama's inauguration with great interest. Chhetria Patrakar wonders whether the fact that his speech was not censored means that the junta is slipping? Unfortunately, there is nothing else to indicate the possibility of an opening-up anytime soon.