The Sri Lankan Minister of Parliamentary Reforms and Mass Media visited Jaffna this weekend, as part of a government organised trip to the northern peninsula. Though Colombo claimed the project would build “professional solidarity” amongst journalists, the minister’s visit instead fueled fears that Sinhalisation of the North-East looks set to continue.

“The whole event was carried out under a Sinhala name,” said a Tamil journalist who was invited to the event. “There was no consideration given to the Tamil language at all.”

He was referring to the visit’s slogan “Enna Ekata Husma Ganna”, a Sinhala phrase which roughly translates to “let us breathe together”. It was printed on T-shirts using Tamil characters and distributed to journalists who were invited to accompany the minister across Jaffna.

T-shirts distributed to journalists in Jaffna

“It means nothing in Tamil,” said the journalist, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The neglect of the Tamil language was also highlighted in the construction of a memorial pillar for murdered journalists in Jaffna. The memorial, a proposal put forward by members of the Jaffna Press Club, the Working Journalists Association and Operational Group for Press Freedom last week, has been built with an inscription written in Sinhala only.

The inscription on the memorial written in Sinhala only using Tamil characters.

The Sri Lankan navy released a tranche of land that it had occupied for almost a decade in Sampur last week, but pledged not to let the move affect troop deployment in the area.

The military base, which was established in 2007 as the Sri Lankan government launched a major offensive on the North-East, spans across 237 acres in the Eastern Province.

Commander of the Sri Lankan navy, Vice Admiral Ravindra Wijegunaratne, handed the occupied land over to the Governor of the Eastern Province Austin Fernando, in a ceremony also attended by Tamil National Alliance leader R Sampanthan.

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has decided to bring several ministries under his supervision, saying that they were subjected to bureaucracy during the Rakapaksa regime and have not been able to achieve the targets set for the first two quarters, the Daily Mirror reported.

Tamil journalists wrote to Sri Lanka’s Minister of Parliamentary Reform and Mass Media calling for support in developing Tamil journalism, which has suffered from decades of conflict, in order to establish “reconciliation and good governance”.

The journalists and former students from the Media Resources and Training Centre of the University of Jaffna, wrote to Sri Lankan minister Kajantha Karunathileke, stating that media training was hindered “due to the oppressions unleashed on the media sector during the period of the former regime and the crisis situation that prevailed in the North”.

The North-East has been highlighted as one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists to work, with a long history of murders and censorship.

Though a new government has since come in to place, the UN Human Rights chief Zeid Al Hussein said on a visit last month that the North-East was yet to have full media freedom, noting that the fear of reprisals “has mutated but, sadly, still exists”.

The former Prime Minister of Australia Tony Abbott called Mahinda Rajapaksa’s decisions in the final stages of the armed conflict “tough but probably unavoidable,” in an essay published in Quadrant this week, defending his government’s close relations with Sri Lanka.

“Personal contact isn’t everything—it won’t change a nation’s fundamental interests—but it can make a big difference where interests might align,” said Mr Abbott. “Mostly, though, articulating a significant but often unacknowledged truth turned out to be a good diplomatic ice-breaker.”

He then went on to state,

“I’m sure that the Sri Lankan president was pleased that Australia didn’t join the human rights lobby against the tough but probably unavoidable actions taken to end one of the world’s most vicious civil wars”.