By Mohamed Harees –

Some anniversaries call for cake and candles; others call for something closer to gratitude. Colombo Telegraph‘s fifteenth turns out to be both. As a regular contributor to this online journal, I write not as a detached well-wisher but as someone who has watched, from the inside, the cost of keeping an independent Sri Lankan publication alive for a decade and a half — and what Sri Lanka would have lost without it.

The story begins not in a newsroom but in exile. Uvindu Kurukulasuriya launched Colombo Telegraph from London in September 2011, having fled Sri Lanka two years earlier, in the shadow of the murder of Lasantha Wickrematunge, the editor whose killing remains one of the starkest warnings ever issued to the country’s press. A presidential media adviser had publicly threatened Kurukulasuriya on national radio. That he chose, in the aftermath, to build a platform dedicated to precisely the kind of reporting that killed his colleague says something about the stubbornness at the heart of this project. Colombo Telegraph was not founded as a business. It was founded as an act of defiance.

That defiance found its purpose almost immediately. The years after the site’s launch marked the high-water mark of the Rajapaksa family’s grip on Sri Lankan public life — a period of triumphalist nationalism, the systematic intimidation of journalists, and a domestic media landscape that, in large part, had learned the safer art of looking away. Into that vacuum stepped Colombo Telegraph, publishing investigations, leaked documents, and uncomfortable opinion pieces the mainstream press either would not or could not touch. Sri Lanka blocked it more than once, a badge the site has worn as evidence it was doing its job rather than as a setback. When the 2015 election finally ended Mahinda Rajapaksa’s presidency, Colombo Telegraph was widely credited as one of the alternative voices that kept the public conversation alive long enough for that outcome to become possible. It is rare for a single website, run largely by one exiled editor and a scattered community of contributors, to have genuinely shaped a country’s political trajectory. Colombo Telegraph did.

What has always struck me, writing for this journal rather than simply admiring it from a distance, is how seriously it takes the discipline that separates journalism from noise. Kurukulasuriya has built a reputation, among those of us who submit to him, for checking claims rather than simply publishing them because they are convenient, and for pushing back on a contributor’s argument even when he shares its politics. That is not a small thing in the world of online opinion journalism, where outrage travels faster than verification and where many platforms have quietly abandoned the idea that accuracy is owed to the reader as much as passion. Colombo Telegraph has never pretended to be neutral — its founding purpose was explicitly to counter state and self-censorship — but it has consistently understood the difference between having a position and abandoning rigour. Corrections are issued. Comment sections, however unruly, are left largely unfiltered rather than curated into an echo chamber. That combination of fearlessness and care is precisely what independent media in a fragile democracy is supposed to look like, and it is far harder to sustain than it sounds.

It is also worth saying plainly what kind of operation has delivered all this. Colombo Telegraph has run for fifteen years without corporate backing, without a conventional newsroom, and largely on the labour of one man functioning as editor, fact-checker, publisher and archivist, working from exile because home was never made safe enough for him to return. Whatever the site has achieved, it has done so against the economics that usually kill publications like it. Most outlets with a fraction of its influence have the comfort of institutional funding behind them. Colombo Telegraph has had persistence instead, and persistence has proven to be enough.

Sri Lanka’s political weather has changed more than once since 2011, and racist, authoritarian politics have not confined themselves to any single family or party in the years since. What has not changed is the need for a publication willing to say the uncomfortable thing in plain language, to publish the writer that state media would rather silence, and to hold every government, not only the ones it opposed at the start, to the same standard. That Colombo Telegraph has managed to do this for fifteen years, from exile, on nerve and editorial discipline rather than money, is worth marking properly.

So happy fifteenth birthday, Colombo Telegraph. To Uvindu Kurukulasuriya, and to everyone who has kept this journal alive against every incentive to give up: thank you for proving that a small, fearless, ethically serious publication can still matter more than the well-funded institutions built to make it irrelevant. Here is to the next fifteen years of refusing to look away.

*The writer, a regular columnist of the Colombo Telegraph, can be reached at mlukmanharees@gmail.com