It has certainly been a mixed-bag week in Sri Lanka. Lasantha Wickramatunga, editor of the Sunday Leader was shot dead and almost simultaneously we had the security forces liberating Elephant Pass and thereby connecting Dondra Head and Point Pedro for the first time in several decades; the former a cause for grief, anger and fear, and the latter a reason to rejoice, one indicating a diminishing and the other an expansion of democratic space and freedom.

Lasantha had one outstanding quality: courage. He had many flaws and this is not the time to talk about them. Suffice to say that in my opinion had his political project succeeded then the map of this country would look very different in geographical, political and even cultural terms.

‘Lasantha’ happened in a particular political context which includes the ongoing military mission in the Wanni, several attacks on media institutions and media personnel, a woefully compromised (ethically and otherwise) media rights movement, a government at the zenith of its popularity, an opposition that is wont to shoot itself in the foot by statement and act, and a back-to-the-wall LTTE. One might add that if it was only about ‘who stands to gain’, then the Government is totally cleared of suspicion. But it doesn’t necessarily mean ‘clear of all complicity’ though (even if it was proved that the Government had no hand in the assassination).

In Lasantha’s case, what we have is not an attack on a journalist, but the assassination of a journalist with fairly clear political affiliations, a political creature if ever there was one, and less so in an ideological sense than in terms of party loyalty. There will be enough analysis on whodunit-lines. It is customary in such cases to demand an impartial investigation and a quick bringing to justice of perpetrators. Conjecture there will be, ranging from reasonable to wild, but none of it is of much use outside the world of the petty political.

Outside of all this, Lasantha was also a citizen, like you and I. Lasantha was gunned down in a country that is supposed to be a democracy, a political entity that references frequently tenets pertaining to law and order. We don’t know who killed him, but we do know whose responsibility it is to ensure that no one, Lasantha included, gets attacked or murdered. And of those structures, this can be said: just as the many arms of the executive presidency reach out and give direction to their operation, so too the responsibility/credit of outcome travel back to the Executive Office.

I am not saying that President Mahinda Rajapaksa is directly involved in all crimes, from picking pockets to grand larceny and murder. I remember that when Lalith Athulathmudali was killed, the finger was pointed at President Premadasa. Years later it was revealed that it was the work of Velupillai Prabhakaran; the President’s crime being one of omission rather than commission. On the other hand, a crime of omission remains a crime and as such has one or more authors.

It is clear that if this was not the work of the LTTE then it is the work of someone who has to be stopped. There are some mad dogs on the loose. It is incumbent on President Rajapaksa to employ all the many means at his disposal to catch the dogs and lock up their master(s).

I am not talking here of political fallout, however. We do know that outfits such as Reporters Sans Frontiers who are severely handicapped by lack of grey cells and the BBC, equally handicapped by the fact that it is congenitally cross-eyed, will spare no pains to accuse the Government for a crime of commission. That however is something that Mahinda Rajapaksa the Politician has to worry about. Mahinda Rajapaksa the President, the ‘temporary custodian’ of this land and all its citizens has to attend to a task that’s in his job description: law and order.

And yet, ‘Lasantha’ is not just a clinical political and legal issue. ‘Lasantha the Man’ was, as I stated earlier, a political creature and as such this assassination casts a terrible shadow on the entire political map. Whoever did it, the act has one serious outcome: it shuts up dissent. It also isolates the objector. This is unhealthy for a participatory democracy to say the least.

And therefore we come to the strange juxtaposition: an assassination and a liberation. The A-9 was cleared right up to Point Pedro when troops took Elephant Pass. The assassination of Lasantha Wickramatunga, on the other hand, is a closing of a door, the blocking of an avenue that essentially puts a people in an open prison.

The bottom line is that we can’t defeat Prabhakaran and rejoice if Prabhakaranism flourishes in any part of the country. We can’t celebrate the opening of a highway if the pathways that make democracy are erased from political maps.

The news of the A-9 coming under the control of Government forces should be celebrated but also provoke reflection. We have to be alert for the next LTTE suicide bomber. We have to be alert also because it is up to us, the citizenry (and not those self-appointed pundits who claim to be speaking for us) to ensure that democracy, independence and such continue to thrive, which of course is a necessary precondition for words such as ‘territorial integrity’ and ‘sovereignty’ to have any meaning.