The return of the white van, as evidenced by last Wednesday’s ordeal of journalist Krishni Ifham who was bundled into one and driven to Kandy, asked some questions by her abductors – that is what they were - before they dropped her off at the Kandy bus stand to get back home having given her Rs. 200 to pay her fare, raises many disturbing issues. By the victim’s own account there has been no rough housing or harassment. She had been well treated while she was in the custody of whoever took her; they had even given her a fish bun and a sachet of milk to ward off any pangs of hunger. While we commend the civilized conduct of whoever took her into their custody, that does not in any way mitigate from the outrage that had been committed.

Ifham, who once worked for the Virakesari, the Tamil language daily, currently works for an agency called Internews which is into media development. She had previously worked for the Colombo office of Panos South Asia, an NGO which describes itself as an organization that "encourages and facilitates public discourse and debate on a wide range of issues, particularly those that have a direct impact on the least privileged and most marginalized sectors of society.’’ Panos works with the media in many matters and recently attracted attention from security related agencies as well as a parliamentary select committee that probed its activities. However, as far as is publicly known, the authorities have not faulted the organization for any acts of omission and commission. From all accounts, the questions directed at Ifham, had focused on Panos and her employment in that organization although other ground too had been covered. If an official agency was in fact responsible for taking this young mother of two to Kandy from Wattala to ask her some questions about her previous employer, to say the least this is conduct that is not only reprehensible but also unacceptable.

We have said so before and we repeat that journalists are not above the law. There is nothing sacrosanct about working for a media organization and if it is necessary for a law enforcement agency to ask a media person any legitimate question or questions relating to an ongoing investigation, it is perfectly in order that they are asked and statements recorded. It is of course open to a journalist to decline on ethical grounds to reveal sources of information and conflicts on this score between law enforcers and journalists are not uncommon both here and abroad. According to the police spokesman, as far as he knows, neither the police nor military were responsible for Ifham’s few hours in somebody’s custody - whoever that somebody may have been. The self-same spokesman said as much some weeks ago when a Tamil newspaper editor was dragged out of a funeral parlour where he was attending a relatives obsequies and bundled into, yes, a white van. This version changed later when it was established that the editor had in fact been taken to custody by the military and thereafter handed over to the Terrorism Investigation Division of the police. He was held in custody for several weeks and thereafter released.

In a front page editorial published yesterday our sister paper, The Island, made the point that the government may deny any hand in Wednesday’s incident but nobody would believe such denials. Who else but an agent of the state would dare engage in such a brazen act and drive past dozens of checkpoints from a suburb of Colombo right up to Kandy with a young woman they had abducted inside their vehicle? And who but an organization investigating Panos will want to ask questions about that organization from a former employee? This is only the latest of many such white van abductions, not one of which has been solved. Who then can blame the public for reaching the obvious conclusion? The victim in this case being a web-based journalist, fellow professionals are naturally concerned about yet another incident that aggravates the ever-growing climate of repression of the media. What is particularly sad about it all is that it is totally unnecessary. If Ifham had to be questioned, she could have been summoned to a police station, or taken to one properly chaperoned as the Sri Lanka Press Institute had said in a statement we publish today, and her statement duly recorded. We say this, of course, on the assumption that a state agency was involved in the abduction.

If this was not so, it is even more frightening. That would imply that some extra-legal authority or gang intent on besmirching the reputation of the government is roaming our streets. If this be so, it is all the more important that the government and its various agencies should get to the bottom of the whole business, arrest the perpetrators and haul them up before the law. But investigations concerning recent attacks on the media and media professionals have led nowhere. Lasantha Wickrematunga was murdered in broad daylight in an area where there was a strong military and police presence and all that those working on the case have been able to do up to now is to arrest somebody who had stolen his mobile phone. Upali Tennakoon, the editor of the Rivira, a Sinhala Sunday paper run by no less than a relative of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, was thereafter brutally attacked while driving to work. To borrow police jargon, there has still been no "breakthrough.’’ Ditto in the case of Poddala Jayantha, Secretary of the Working Journalists Association who had a leg broken by some toughs. The list of such unsolved cases is endless and Krishni Ifham believes that it will be the same where she is concerned. Meanwhile several media people, some who were physically attacked and others who are convinced that they risk the same fate, have fled the country and are afraid to return.