The Economist magazine held up in “post-war” Sri Lanka?

ICT for Peacebuilding 1 Minute

Victory’s Rotten Fruits appears in the print edition of the most recent Economist.

This is an email I got this morning from a friend and subscriber to the mag in SL.

This week’s Economist has apparently (as per Vijitha Yapa – to whom I pay a bloody 11,000 bucks for the magazine) been “held up” at Customs. This is the 4th issue that has been held up…reckon this is the reason? Are we moving (already moved?) towards a state where we are going to be cut off from the world in terms of information (much like the Chinese chaps’ paranoia on websites????)

The manic inanity of Customs Officials, obviously in fear of or instructed by higher authorities to censor opinion inconvenient to the incumbents in power shows disturbing signs of growing. Last year, only public outcry and the threat of legal action was able to secure the release of a book by a respected academic, also held up at Customs for no discernible reason along with other publications. Prof. Rohan Samarajiva from Lirneasia writing on this issue last year may have nailed it,

Copies have not been confiscated. They are just reading them page by page, every copy, not knowing that they are identical copies. Poor customs officials. My heart goes out to them.

The free flow of ideas in post-war Sri Lanka is shaping up quite nicely don’t you think?

Update – 15 June 2009

Gawker pointed to this blog post on its home page and through a story featured on the website today.

Gawker on censoring the Economist in Sri Lanka

Click above for large image or click here for the Gawker story as a PDF.

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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4 thoughts on “The Economist magazine held up in “post-war” Sri Lanka?”

  1. Pingback: Sri Lanka after the war: Victory’s rotten fruits « In Mutiny

  2. This should open the eyes of the naive idealists who thuoght the government winning the war will win the Sri Lankan people back the rights they willingly and happily suspended while the war was being waged. Did these people really expect a government that gets hooked on tyranny to give it up after a fixed period? If so, think again!

  4. Pingback: Global Voices Online » Sri Lanka: The Economist Magazine Censored?

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