President’s TV interview and the blame game

Given the widely available content of President Wickremesinghe’s interview with the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, it was inevitable there would be contrary responses to the president’s reaction to a range of questions including two sensitive issues.

But surprisingly a new issue has been raised whose intent appears to be to divert attention from what some have viewed as President Wickremesinghe’s sudden flare-up at interviewer Martin Gak thus doing damage to Sri Lanka’s international image, and lay the guilt elsewhere.

There were two issues-- the Eastern Sunday terrorist attack and the update on Sri Lanka’s human rights record by the new UN High Commissioner for Human Rights presented at the September sessions of the UN Human Rights Council— that sparked Mr Wickremesinghe’s ire.

The Easter Sunday massacre of the innocents and the call for a more independent and impartial inquiry than has been held is nothing new and has been on various political and civil society agenda for some time, especially since the report of the commission of inquiry was not released by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa for quite some time and then not in its entirety.

What has caused renewed interest and the anger of the government and some sections of society is the telecast of last month’s Channel 4 update that claims to provide new ‘evidence’ of the genesis of the Easter Sunday attack, naming names.

Sri Lanka’s relations with Channel 4 are hardly cordial if an understatement is permitted. I have had to deal with Channel 4 coverage of Sri Lanka during my days in both Bangkok and London and we did contest some of the channel’s observations and conclusions when we had to.

The verbal duels with the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner and the UNHRC go back even further, particularly to post-2012 years when the criticism of Sri Lanka over its human rights record escalated.

Whether Sri Lanka should continue to be pathologically antagonistic to both Channel 4 and the UN High Commissioner’s office and target them as Sri Lanka enemies 1 and 2, when they are better armed to do damage and have wider audiences and more weaponry, is good public relations is a subject for another occasion.

But right now we seem to have added another dimension to our problems by adding one more to our list of public enemies, labelling Deutsche Welle as a virtual mouthpiece of the Western world.

One can understand the pros and cons of this debate. Some claim that President Wickremesinghe’s frontal confrontation of Deutsche Welle and his dismissal of the interviewer as a representative of the West’s condescending attitude to the Global South showed that he was not the lackey of the West critics painted him out to be in his early political life.

On the other hand, there were others who thought this was mere theatrics and it was a deliberate attempt to erase that earlier avatar and appear in nationalistic garb to win applause at home and endear him more to the Pohottuwa’s so-called Sinhala nationalists which seems to me rather unfair.

But what one finds difficult to comprehend is an article in a sister paper. The author was unidentified. Part of the headline read “….. who arranged the hostile interview?

Having educated us of the eloquence and oratorical skills of John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill and Barak Obama and how they held their audiences enthralled, and about the cardinal and the Bishops’ Conference and what not, the unnamed writer says: “This begs the question as to why such a hostile interview was arranged for the

President by the Foreign Ministry and the President’s office given that the President was on a very tight schedule according to sources. Critics say some of those running the Foreign Ministry and in the inner circle are isolating the President and making him look bad in the eyes of the public”.

It is not only Alice who finds things getting curiouser and curiouser in their Wonderland. Whoever this writer is, he surely does not seem to know one jot about requesting foreign media to interview your leaders or whoever. It is a far cry from ordering some state media lackey to interview one of your own and even tell him/ her what questions to ask.

I remember an incident when I was working as a consultant to the news and current affairs division of Rupavahini shortly after it opened. Quite often I interviewed visiting dignitaries. On one occasion I was to interview some important visitor--I cannot now remember his name but was one from the Western world--and Dayananda de Silva, a veteran broadcaster of SLBC, was to interview him for radio.

When the two of us met at the venue, Dayananda asked me whether I had sent my questions to the foreign ministry for vetting as was the requirement for SLBC. I told him I had not sent any questions and I did not intend to do so. If they wanted to know what I was going to ask, I would say I do not have any questions except to ask him about the purpose of his visit and I will take it from there.

The intention was to let Rupavahini have some independence and not be pressured by bureaucrats into following existing practices.

One can understand if the writer asked who arranged the interview instead of who arranged the hostile interview which implies forethought and a deliberate “fixing” to embarrass the president.

If the writer’s strategy is to try and absolve President Wickremesinghe for his lack of selfcontrol and his abrasive attitude on this occasion in the face of very relevant questions, he must think of a more credible way of doing so instead of blaming the foreign ministry and the president’s office when the reality lies elsewhere.

To assert that a “hostile” interview was pre-planned as is stated, is not only to argue that Deutsche Welle’s Martin Gak was a party to this “fixing” but those responsible were aware that Mr Wickremesinghe would react in a particular if certain questions are posed to him and if they continue to be followed up more rigorously.

This piece of nonsense does more damage to President Wickremesinghe because it implies he was the victim of a ‘plot’ which suggests he was inveigled into it.

When you request a foreign media outlet to interview one of your leaders you do not tell that organisation what questions should be asked, unless you want to be told to go commit hara-kiri.

No respectable media outlet or journalist, especially a foreign one that upholds the principle of media freedom, would suffer the indignity of being told what questions to ask.

Had the interviewer been David Frost, Jeremy Paxman, or Tim Sebastian, veterans of the BBC who have interviewed Sri Lankan nationals at various times in the past instead of a relatively mild mannered Martin Gak, the interview might have progressed quite differently.

One can understand the pros and cons of this debate. Some claim that President Wickremesinghe’s frontal confrontation of Deutsche Welle and his dismissal of the interviewer as a representative of the West’s condescending attitude to the Global South showed that he was not the lackey of the West critics painted him out to be in his early political life