With a police force more than willing to subvert justice, and politicians adamant in conducting witch hunts, where are scribes to turn?

The journalist community stood shell-shocked last Wednesday, as text message followed text message, and mobile phones started ringing incessantly. The news that The Sunday Leader’s Arthur Warmanan had been arrested by the Criminal Investigation Department made us gasp collectively at how gravely hounded the scribe community had become.

We all know Arthur; fresh faced, will-o’-the-wisp that he is, with his ready smile and ever-willingness to crack a joke. He has earned the respect of his colleagues for having established a wide contact base, and has carved a niche for himself in the realm of ethnic affairs, despite his relatively few years experience in the newspaper industry.

In fact, part of the outrage and concern for Warmanan stemmed from the fact that he was a mere 23 years of age, and, as such, it seemed doubly unfair to arrest and detain him on baseless charges. Warmanan’s ethnicity, cited by the CID as a reason to detain him further for fear of a ‘public outcry’, was a further cause of apprehension when news of his arrest first broke.

The CID first entered Warmanan’s house on the evening of Wednesday, October 24. The officers informed him that they needed to take him to the CID Headquarters in Fort for questioning and to record a statement.

“No proper reason was given as to why I was being taken in,” Warmanan told The Nation following his release on Friday. “They just kept saying that I would be sent back after they recorded a statement. It was only much later that some other CID officers told me that I was under arrest.”
When Warmanan walked out of his Mount Lavinia residence on Wednesday night, media crews were already at the gates. But the CID officers would have none of it. They insisted that the television crews pack up their equipment before they finally escorted Warmanan out of his house. However, the camera crews, past masters in the art of surreptitious filming, managed to catch a few moments of Warmanan’s arrest on reel and aired it later on a news bulletin.

The CID questioned Warmanan at its headquarters until the wee hours of Thursday (25) morning.
“They insisted that I give my statement in Sinhala and not in Tamil or English, which was very difficult for me,” said the 23 year-old scribe who was informed after the interrogation was finally concluded that he would be kept overnight.

The following day, as if the strain on Warmanan’s parents was not enough by the fact that their eldest son was in police custody, the CID then ordered that his mother, Suhenthra Sornalingam be brought in for questioning since her son’s mobile phone was purchased in her name. She was released after questioning on Thursday.

Warmanan’s mobile phone remains in CID custody, despite his being granted bail by the Mount Lavinia Magistrate, Ayeshani Jayasena on Friday.

Like the telephones of most journalists practicing in Sri Lanka today, Warmanan’s phone stores the numbers of many of his contacts and fellow journalists, and it can only be hoped that this information will not be used to implicate him further.

In fact, the Magistrate took the CID and the entire police force to task during the proceedings in court on Friday, when she gave a 15 minute lecture on setting a dangerous precedent with regard to arrests and blowing things out of proportion.

The magistrate also censured the CID officers on making an arrest and filing action in court without evidence to back their case against the suspect.

Holding a brief for media freedom in the country, Magistrate Jayasena added that the CID’s conduct could seriously affect the freedom of journalists, whose professional obligation was to report the goings on in society.

“Just because some people are embarrassed by a news report, the media must not be subject to restriction,” she added.

Warmanan was represented by attorneys-at-law Nalin Ladduwahetty and Jeewantha Jayatillake, who were instructed by G.G. Arulpragasam.

To say that all Arthur’s friends in the media sighed with relief on Friday afternoon when he was finally released would be an understatement. Arthur’s arrest was the latest in a string of wake up calls for scribes around the country and resulted in quite a few sleepless nights for all those who held the principles of justice and fairplay above all.

It is a travesty of justice that a young boy was arrested and would have been detained for 14 days if the judiciary had not intervened, because of a complaint by a government minister, with no further evidence to corroborate his claim. There are dozens of complaints about extortion, blackmail and thuggery by politicos that lie in dusty police files for years without an iota of action taken by the law enforcement arm; but the khaki-clad are quick to bow to the dictates of politicians and do their bidding, no matter how trivial or baseless the allegation.

What the CID action smacks of is the sorry state of the country’s police force. To expect just treatment from the police is now unthinkable. They have become nothing but the stooges of the political powers that be, ready to sacrifice principle, law, and fairness at the altar of political favour.

The fact that Arthur’s ethnicity was the greatest weapon the CID possessed, and used quite freely, is not only deplorable but tragic, in the context of a nation that has been striving for over two decades to resolve an ethnic feud.

In such a society, the importance of the media is increased a thousand fold. As the watchdogs of the law fail miserably in their duty, the task has fallen unto the scribes to tell it like it is and, in so doing, force the hand of justice when all other things fail. We are happy to have found recourse in the justice system so far, and salute the judiciary for refusing to avert their eyes in our time of greatest need.

Asked if the support of the media community was apparent to him following his release, Warmanan said that he had been totally in the dark about what was happening in the outside world while he was inside the CID building. “But I think that there was a lot of support. And I think that it was the pressure that the media kept up that helped me to get released as soon as this,” he said.

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed