Who Needs Facebook Friends With Enemies Like Gotabaya?

By Rohan Jayasekera –February 3, 2016 

Rohan Jayasekera

Karl Marx said that history repeats itself, once as tragedy, twice as farce. How about three times, as an even more farcical share on Facebook?

How else to describe the spectacle of Gotabaya Rajapaksa using the social network to share a link to the Colombo Telegraph, the very website that he and his brother worked so hard to censor when in power? ‘Liking’ the share hardly seems right – though 769 people so far have, and 183 more have shared it on.

The Rajapaksa brothers’ time in power saw Sri Lankan free speech traduced by a proxy war on the independent media. It included the murder of Sunday Leader editor and International Press Institute (IPI) World Press Freedom Hero, Lasantha Wickrematunge, and the ‘disappearance’ of news cartoonist Pregeeth Ekneligoda.

As the IPI itself put it in a statement this week: “Press freedom was widely seen to have suffered catastrophically under (President) Rajapaksa, whose tenure became increasingly mired in allegations of war crimes and corruption. Journalists frequently faced violence and exile, and impunity for crimes against the press became, by all accounts, a tragic norm.”

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