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Attempt on Journalist's Life Foiled
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Iqbal Athas is a much-coveted journalist in Sri Lanka. His weekly columns to the Sunday Times are filled with bright ideas on how to defeat the Tamil freedom movement. Born a Tamil-speaking Moslem, he sold his soul for a life of the comforts of state patronage.But, last week, he found out that even his style of support is not welcome in the land of fascist rule. Armed men, who Athas is sure belong to the Sri Lankan army, burst into his bedroom at night on Thursday [12 Feb 1998], demanding him to modify his style of journalism. One of the gunmen told the Athas' Tamil manservant (Subrmaniam) that he was there to tell his master "what to write in the newspapers!" Athas has been critical of the Sri Lankan army, not for its aims of defeating the Tamil resistance, but of its corrupt manners. His criticism was about increasing the ability of the army to kill the Tamil resistance and weeding out inefficiency, and not about peace or justice for the Tamil people. The armed men, who broke into his house at 9 p.m., held him, his wife Anoma, and his seven-year-old daughter Jasmin, at gunpoint for nearly half-an-hour, and left only because the neighbors got involved. After this ordeal he said, "Here there was a difference I never expected, having to live and see my seven-year old daughter go through this. That was too much." He didn't, however, say anything about the thousands of 'seven-year-olds' huddled in the jungles of Vanni who face greater peril from the Sri Lankan armed forces. According to the Sunday Times report [15 Feb 1998], the gunmen were either planning to take Mr. Athas downstairs to rough him up, or to abduct him and 'finish him off' elsewhere. Several journalists and writers have been in the past murdered by state agents. The Sunday Times said that, Mr. Athas's terror-stricken daughter, who began to scream when gunmen ran into her room as Mr. Athas was being led out of his bedroom, thwarted their plans. When they tried to lock her and another domestic in her room, the girl bolted outside to her panicking father, clutching his side and continuing to sob loudly. Apparently overcome by fear that neighbors might hear the commotion and alert the police, the gunmen suddenly called everything off, fleeing downstairs and then away in a Blue Light Ace van. But, according to Mr. Athas, the siege laid to his house that night wasn’t entirely over. Despite assurances made by local DIG Indra De Silva that police patrols would afterwards carry out half-hourly checks on his home, Mr. Athas said, until midnight not one policeman was to be seen, and members of the same group of gunmen were later spotted by the bodyguards of a friend who had come to console the family. |
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