December 15, 2001	Saturday	Ramazan 29, 1422

COLOMBO: These are confusing times for readers of Sri Lanka’s state-owned newspapers — the bad guys are now the good guys and the former good guys are now the bad guys.

A surprise election result has also seen several politicians go from royalty to rogues then back to kings again in the space of two months.

The metamorphosis from knaves to knights was a result of parliamentary elections that put the opposition United National Party (UNP) into power and tossed out the People’s Alliance (PA) after seven years at the helm.

That left red-faced editorial writers scrambling in the style of Soviet-era airbrush artists who would etch out or superimpose people into photos depending on the swirling political winds.

“The voters have convincingly given a vote for peace,” said the state-run Daily News after the UNP’s Ranil Wickremesinghe was sworn in as prime minister after a campaign fought over his pledge for quick peace talks with the LTTE.

“This is despite the attempts of the PA and others to scare them on the possibility of a calamitous outcome from a UNP-LTTE link-up,” the newspaper said in an editorial.

DIFFERENT TUNE: A vastly different tune was sung by the newspaper before Sri Lankans went to the polls to elect a parliament on Dec 5.

Then, Wickremesinghe had “no formula, except a hazy concept of an interim administration in the north and east. Neither he nor his party has any insight into what lies beyond...In such a situation the adversary is likely to get the advantage out of any negotiations.”

The Daily News, which had been happily lampooning Wickremesinghe as an agent of the Tigers, has now not only run complimentary profiles of the new prime minister, it even printed a poem lauding him as the leader of a “new social order”.

But the turnaround in the status quo has also left some journalists who work for state media in a quandary.

For some editors at Lake House, which publishes the government-run newspapers, the abrupt shift to sycophantic stories on the UNP was natural as the same thing happened the other way around when the PA pushed the UNP out of power in 1994.

“We saw this smooth transition of Lake House within a couple of hours the last time,” said an editor, who admitted the coverage was not always balanced. —Reuters