Sri Lanka's defence secretary, Gothabaya Rajapakse, has publicly stated his support for media censorship, the criminalisation of defamation and the prosecution of two media institutions for "critical reportage". Secretary Rajapakse (the president's brother) need not have bothered – in the week following his statement, two journalists who had been receiving death threats were knifed. One of the victims, a news producer at the state-controlled television broadcaster SLRC, had protested the recent storming of the station by Sri Lankan Labour Minister Mervyn Silva. The death threats and knifing are believed to be retaliation for the protests. With the harassment, assault, and murder of journalists becoming the norm in Sri Lanka, perhaps the criminalisation of defamation is a good idea – that way, at least journalists would just get a safe jail cell.
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Over in Bangladesh, the interim government is past the point of simply contemplation censorship. In late May last year, journalist Tasneem Khalil, who was arrested at gunpoint from his apartment in Dhaka in the presence of his wife and son, was taken to a detention centre operated by the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI), a military intelligence agency. Khalil recently revealed that, for 22 hours, he was repeatedly kicked, beaten with batons, and threatened with execution in a cell specially designed for torture. Apparently, his assailants were enraged by his report for Human Rights Watch on extrajudicial killings by the paramilitary Rapid Action Battalion (RAB). Khalil has since fled Bangladesh and sought asylum in Sweden. Chhetria Patrakar has it on good authority that Dhaka's detention and torture apparatuses, including the location of the DGFI detention centre, is well known to locals, international donors and the diplomatic community – all of whom are turning a blind eye to cases such as Khalil's.
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