ABSTRACT
In 1984 a young Sri Lankan diplomat was facing a tricky problem. All three of the US TV networks had asked for visas to send teams to Colombo in anticipation of violence on the anniversary of a major civil war clash the previous year. A group of American journalists had arrived in Colombo and were asking to go north to the Jaffna peninsula. The problem was that the Tamil Tiger separatist movement was, at that time, beginning seriously to wage the war that would disrupt Sri Lankan society for the next 20 years or more. The last thing that Sri Lanka needed, dependent as it was on the tourist dollar and its reputation as the peaceful Buddhist isle of Serendip, was potentially hostile and, at the very least, embarrassing coverage of a nasty civil war in the making. But Sri Lanka was a democracy and a free country and simply forbidding travel would be as bad in the terms of news reports as allowing the journalists to see the problem at first hand – and this was before issues of their personal security were taken into account. ‘Journalists Killed in Sri Lanka Terror Attack’ was not something that our young diplomat wanted his political bosses to see on US TV or to read in the foreign press. So he temporized while he thought up a plan.
