Sri Lankan army ranks media freedom low priority

THE sign on the army spokesman's wall rang the first alarm bells.

Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara had pinned his statement of faith to a map used to brief journalists visiting Sri Lanka: "It's the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press," it began. It went on to say the soldier, not politicians, "ensures our right to Life, Freedom and the Pursuit of Happiness".

I was recently in Sri Lanka to report on the final stages of a civil war that has been raging for a quarter of a century.

As I write, 200,000 civilians are caught between the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil Tigers.

Unfortunately, it became a story about the difficulty of reporting at all and, in the case of local journalists, about its perils.