Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa inaugurated a new satellite tv channel The Buddhist, according to a June 30th report by the Hindustan Times. The channel is meant to celebrate the long-standing religious and cultural ties between Sri Lanka and India that date back to the third century B.C. when Prince Mahinda of India introduced Buddhism to the island. As the Times notes, this should be a welcome development for the Sinhalese Buddhists, who until now did not have a channel to call their own and should also bolster their support for President Rajapaksa. The Sri Lankan constitution charges the government with protecting the Buddhist tradition and The Buddhist will enhance its ability to do so. The channel will begin to broadcast in Sinhalese and English but plans to provide programming in Tamil, French and other international languages.
The Buddhist’s inauguration arises against the backdrop of a worsening armed conflict between the Sri Lankan-Sinhalese controlled government and the Tamil Tigers. After the two sides met in Oslo on June 25th, the Times reported that they agreed to return to the negotiating table although diplomats from Norway and the United States, among others involved in the mediation remain less than optimistic. Confronted with an aggressive Sri Lankan military that has caused more than 20,000 Tamilians to seek refuge in India and an unpredictable party chair of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Velupillai Prabhakaran, there is no indication that the negotiations will even take place, let alone the fruition of an accord.
The Buddhist stands to be an incredibly powerful new element in this ongoing struggle. On the one hand, if the government commandeers the station, thereby fortifying its dominance over the hearts and minds of Sri Lankans, the channel may prove to exacerbate the conflict and elevate its intensity by becoming a mouthpiece for inflammatory rhetoric. On the other hand, if the channel remains relatively independent from the Sri Lankan government and adopts an inclusive, critical and conciliatory philosophy, it will prove a powerful tool for the realization of a heretofore elusive peace. If a recent note submitted by the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) to the International Press Freedom and Freedom of Expression Mission is any indication of what avatar of The Buddhist we can expect to see, then inflammatory rhetoric and suppression of free speech will prevail, at least in the beginning. According to this report, both the Sri Lankan government in the South and the LTTE in the East and North are brazenly infringing upon the freedom of press and human rights in general, leading to a “serious deterioration” in the security of media personnel. Abuses include abductions, murders and use of governmental agencies and the courts to silence, intimidate, and in some cases, shut down news gathering organizations.
