Press Freedom in Sir Lanka?

I am shocked by the murder of Sri Lankan Sunday Leader journalist Lasantha Wickrematunga, who was was assassinated in Colombo on 9 January 2009.

Lasantha Wickrematunge was the editor of Sri Lanka's Sunday Leader and an outspoken critic of the government. Before his death, knowing that he was a target, he wrote an editorial entitled ‘And then they came for me’. The Leader published this 3 days after his death.

It begins:

"No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces - and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the last few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print institutions have been burned, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories, and now especially the last...."

Read the full text of this amazing piece here on the Guardian website. It has now been republished in a number of sites.

Mobile Sri Lanka

While the ASAA Conference in Sri Lanka was not a rich experience in terms of emerging technologies, there were some interesting observations I made on the use of technology in the country generally and at the conference.

Sri Lanka, like many developing countries, has leapfrogged the wired era to some extent and are well into using mobile technologies. So you are more likely to get mobile coverage rather than wired. The major company providing mobile phone coverage is Mobitel

Of course mobile phones are everywhere. Monks even use them! I’m not sure why I should be surprised by that, but I was. Those ASAA conference delegates who used their global roaming had the joy of constant welcome messages from Sri Lanka’s mobile providers.

As far as internet connection goes there were some internet cafes in Kandy. At the Hotel Suisse in Kandy where the conference was held, the one wired internet computer for guest use, was pretty slow. The hotel rooms did not have internet access. However good wireless coverage was available in the hotel lobby for those who brought their laptops.

Visit to University of Peradeniya Library

The ASAA Conference in Kandy was a great success . There's a brief report about the conference in the 21st December 2008 edition of The Island which is the main independent English newspaper in Sri Lanka.

After the conference we visited the largest university in Sri Lanka which is 20 minutes drive from Kandy: University of Peradeniya

Their beautiful campus was established in 1954.

After speaking with the Vice Chancellor and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, I visited their Library which is the the oldest and the largest University Library in Sri Lanka. It was quite late in the day when we arrived, so I did not have a lot of time, but did have a meeting with the University Librarian, Harrison Perera, and took a photo of their atmospheric Periodicals Reading Room.

I'll hopefully find time to post more about some of the fabulous conference papers from this cross-disciplinary conference.

Off to Serendip

All the security problems have been elsewhere in Asia this week.

Sauron's evil eye is focussed elsewhere (I hope), so this little hobbit is headed off to Sri Lanka to attend the ASAA conference in Kandy. There’s been so much drama surrounding DFAT Security warnings and so forth, that it looked like my paper (on literary blogs) would be read by someone else. But now it’s all happening.

ASAA, what's that? stands for Association for the Study of Australasia in Asia.

No more blog posts for 2 weeks, then, while I’m out in elephant country. I hope I see some.