{"id":94276,"date":"2013-07-06T00:01:01","date_gmt":"2013-07-05T18:31:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=94276"},"modified":"2013-07-15T16:18:48","modified_gmt":"2013-07-15T10:48:48","slug":"journalist-flees-sri-lanka-media-crackdown-seeks-safety-in-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/journalist-flees-sri-lanka-media-crackdown-seeks-safety-in-u-s\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalist Flees Sri Lanka Media Crackdown, Seeks Safety In U.S."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By\u00a0<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/\">Sarah Stuteville<\/a><\/span>\u00a0&#8211;<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_94277\" style=\"width: 133px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/journalist-flees-sri-lanka-media-crackdown-seeks-safety-in-u-s\/st\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-94277\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-94277\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-94277\" title=\"ST\" src=\"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/ST-123x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"123\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-94277\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sarah Stuteville<\/p><\/div>\n<p><em>Frederica Jansz worked for decades as a journalist in Sri Lanka \u2014 a country Reporters Without Borders ranked among the worst for press freedoms. After 25 years of taking on powerful people, Jansz is seeking asylum in the United States and making her home in the Pacific Northwest.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?s=Frederica+Jansz&amp;x=8&amp;y=6\">Frederica Jansz<\/a><\/span> is used to making people mad. She worked for decades as a journalist in Sri Lanka \u2014 a country ranked among the worst for press freedoms by Reporters Without Borders.<\/p>\n<p>As a young journalist she interviewed key leaders from the militant separatist group the Tamil Tigers. At the end of the Sri Lankan civil war she wrote an article about the defense secretary suggesting he shared a similar psychological profile to that of the leader of the Tigers (a sworn enemy).<\/p>\n<p>But after 25 years of pursuing tough stories and taking on powerful people, Jansz is seeking asylum in the United States and making her home in the Pacific Northwest.<\/p>\n<p>In the winter of 2010, Jansz was editor and chief of The Sunday Leader, a paper on the verge of ruin. The Leader, long known for its stance against the Sri Lankan ruling party, was engaged in multiple lawsuits brought on by outraged officials and bankruptcy loomed.<\/p>\n<p>Presidential elections were on the horizon when Jansz interviewed the opposition candidate \u2014 a former army commander in the Sri Lankan army. She asked the commander about a rumor \u2014 that the army had shot a group of Tamil Tiger rebel leaders as they attempted to surrender at the end of the war.<\/p>\n<p>The general told Jansz that the rumors were true, and that other officials (specifically ones currently in the ruling party) had ordered the killings without his knowledge.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen he told me this, I knew this was my page-one story,\u201d says Jansz. She also knew she was dooming her already beleaguered paper to more attacks.<\/p>\n<p>Over the years, The Leader\u2019s presses had been burned down and its reporters subjected to numerous death threats. The former editor and chief (Jansz\u2019s predecessor) was gunned down in 2009 as he drove to work, a murder that remains unsolved.<\/p>\n<p>The government used the story to paint the former general as a traitor and terrorist sympathizer \u2014 he was publicly shamed and lost the election.<\/p>\n<p>As a result, The Leader \u2014 and Jansz \u2014 had made an enemy out of both the government and the opposition, an impossible position in a climate where independent can mean unprotected.<\/p>\n<p>Jansz didn\u2019t stop there.<\/p>\n<p>A year ago \u2014 in the midst of mounting lawsuits \u2014 Jansz learned that Sri Lanka\u2019s defense secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa (the very same guy she\u2019d already ticked off with that profile comparing him to a Tamil Tiger) was planning to commandeer a Sri Lankan Airlines flight in order to fly a puppy to his wife in Switzerland.<\/p>\n<p>When Rajapaksa was asked to comment he \u201cwent berserk,\u201d shouting a string of threats and curses.<\/p>\n<p>Jansz put the call on speakerphone just in time for her and all of her colleagues to hear him say:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf you and I were at the same function together and I were to point you out &#8230; 90 percent of people there would want to see you dead.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After the story ran, Jansz was followed by motorbikes, received death threats and in September was fired from The Leader. According to Jansz, a pro-government businessman bought the paper in an attempt to control it.<\/p>\n<p>She knew she had to get out. She had a U.S. visa and left, arriving in Seattle with her two sons this past October.<\/p>\n<p>The three have applied for asylum and in the meantime are trying to start a new life in Puyallup, amid the mountain views of south Puget Sound.<\/p>\n<p>Jansz says she doesn\u2019t think her future includes journalism \u2014 her family has paid too high a price for her profession.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, she\u2019s happy to announce that she\u2019ll begin a new job working as an assistant for an interior designer next week.<\/p>\n<p>But her passion for her past profession is still close to the surface.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI had a story and I would say it the way I felt it had to be said,\u201d she says, recalling a fight with her publisher at The Leader. \u201cI told him the day I have to [change] that is the day I leave the profession.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And she\u2019s kept her promise.<\/p>\n<p><em>*Sarah Stuteville is a multimedia journalist and co-founder of The Seattle Globalist, www.seattleglobalist.com, a blog covering Seattle&#8217;s international connections. Sarah Stuteville: sarah@seattleglobalist.com. Twitter: @SeaStute . Courtesy The Seattle Times<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p> [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":48351,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8,2938,6968],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-colombotelegraph","category-editorial","category-popular","category-popular-columns"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Journalist Flees Sri Lanka Media Crackdown, Seeks Safety In U.S. - Colombo Telegraph<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/journalist-flees-sri-lanka-media-crackdown-seeks-safety-in-u-s\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Journalist Flees Sri Lanka Media Crackdown, Seeks Safety In U.S. - 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