COLOMBO: The unjustified four-month incarceration of female journalist Munusamy Parameshwari under anti-terrorist laws is being seen here as an example of the repressiveness that she was reporting on.

Parameshwari, 23, was released last Wednesday, after the attorney general’s department informed the country’s Supreme Court that there was no evidence to press charges against her.

Sunanda Deshapriya of the Free Media Movement (FMM) said Parameshwari was held for an additional night after the Supreme Court ordered her release and that during the months she spent in police custody visits by relatives were severely restricted. “What does it tell us about the environment? There is a lot of pressure on the independent and professional reporters here,” he said.

Despite Parameshwari’s release the FMM is worried that the escalating warfare between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has, since December 2005, “created dangerous working conditions for journalists.” The FMM said eight journalists and media workers have been killed over the last two years and that most of these were from the ethnic Tamil minority.

An ethnic Tamil herself, Parameshwari was arrested on Nov 23 under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) on suspicion that she had connections with the suicide cadres of the LTTE. “I have no link with them, I just went to get a story and I informed the officials as well,” Parameshwari told in an interview.

Parameshwari had written several stories on abductions and threats suffered by Tamils living in the capital for ‘Mawbima’, a Sinhala-language newspaper she works for. She was arrested when she went to meet a woman whose brother had been abducted.

Soon after her arrest, the country’s media rights groups launched a campaign to clear her name and push for due legal procedure. They were joined by international media rights watchdogs like the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ). “We are relieved at the long overdue release of our colleague Parameshwari. However, she should never have been held without charge. The use of anti-terrorism laws to detain journalists without trial is a serious threat to press freedom in Sri Lanka,” CPJ executive director Joel Simon said in a statement released in New York.

“Parameshwari’s detention was a frightening example of the threats to basic human freedoms in Sri Lanka – it is disgraceful that legislation, supposedly introduced to protect Sri Lankans from terrorism, is instead being used to silence and intimidate the media,” IFJ president Christopher Warren said in a statement.

The situation is worse in Tamil-dominated northern Jaffna where newsprint is scarce and journalists face abduction, harassment and violence. Two days after Parameshwari’s release, the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said it suspected that a missing Jaffna journalist, Subramaniam Ramachandran, was in fact in military custody. “The fact that the government publicly acknowledges the participation of the security forces in kidnapping and forced disappearance is very worrying, but at the same time gives us hope that Ramachandran is still alive,” it said.

“We are being throttled and systematically targeted – we need your help, now more than ever, to secure our livelihoods, our profession and a shared commitment to the inviolable values of democracy and the freedom of the media,” V Kanmailnathan, editor of ‘The Udayan’, one of Jaffna’s prominent Tamil dailies said in a letter to the Editors’ Guild of Sri Lanka.

Reporting from conflict areas has become tightly restricted. Reporters need permission from military authorities to visit Vaharai in the east of the island which was wrested from Tiger control in January. A massive resettlement drive is going on in the area despite reservations expressed by UN agencies over the policy. Deshapriya said that the restrictions have resulted in lopsided reporting.

Parameshwari’s newspaper, Mawbima, is also facing closure after the bank accounts of its parent companies were sealed by the government. The companies are closely linked with former foreign minister Mangala Samaraweera who was sacked by President Mahinda Rajapakse. Its finance director Dushantha Basanayake is in custody. The management of the newspaper has called this a ‘frontal attack’ against fair reporting.

“The media is under stress and reporters who try to be independent feel it. Parameshwari’s case was just oneà there are scores more, and unfortunately the government has not done much,” Poddala Jayantha of the Working Journalists Association said. He added that when an international fact-finding mission brought the threats and intimidations to the notice of the government last October, pledges were made that they would be looked into and rectified. “But nothing happened.”

Parameshwari who is back at her job with Mawbima said: “It was a traumatic experience, I was harassed by the police and maligned by some of my own colleagues, but I will continue writing,” she said. What she is unsure of is whether Mawbima itself will survive. —Dawn/The IPS News Service