Ranil tears into media

"Journalists’ hands aren’t clean" 

By Saman Indrajith-January 28, 2016, 10:44 pm

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe yesterday, in Parliament, lashed out at the media, accusing them of promoting racism.

"You don’t talk big because your hands are not clean. What are all doing with regard to racism? I mean all newspapers. I am asking the electronic and print media. What do you have to say about the incident at the Homagama Court? Write an editorial, if possible, on the Homagama incident."

The Prime Minister was participating in a debate at the time of adjournment of the House on the recent incidents in Embiliptiya and issues involving the police.

The Prime Minister’s statement:

"There are problems as regards police the world over. Following police shooting in Ferguson in the US, people took to the streets against it. Similar incident happened in England last year. Police have to maintain law and order.

Recently, we saw such problems here. Embilipitiya incident is only one of them. The other incident was with regard to the conduct of officers at the Kotadeniya Police station. That has been investigated and courts of law have been moved. If the police have done anything wrong, we have no intention of covering up their wrongdoings. We all came here after fighting for the need for restoring the rule of law. The British instituted the police here. Within 30 years of establishing the police in Britain, they established the police here. It is not only the police who are involved in maintaining law and order. Courts of law, the police and the media are needed for that purpose.

Courts were established in Sri Lanka in 1835. Sri Lanka was the first country in Asia and Africa to have a modern judicial system. We have forgotten that tradition. We have a similar history as regards the media, too. All these institutions are needed for maintaining the law and order and to restore the rule of law. The police cannot perform that task single-handed. What we have witnessed during the last ten years was that disintegration of those three institutions and the politicization of them. The Rajapaksa regime destroyed all those three institutions. We fought against it.

We need to modernise them. We have sought the assistance of Britain and other countries. We have to increase the salaries of the workers in those institutions. There was a time that Sri Lanka had the best police in the Asia. That was soon after the Second World War. Now, what do we have? We have to regain that position. We had an exemplary judicial system. All these institutions have been destroyed. Politicians got the police and army to kill people. We have to investigate those instances. We have to probe the shortcomings of the police. 

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