We Are at 19: The Truth is Still Inconvenient

Note From the Editorial Team

Nineteen years ago today, on 16 August 2007, we began. Nineteen years after we began during Sri Lanka’s civil war, governments have changed, crises have multiplied and political narratives have shifted. Our obligation has not: to question power, confront convenient lies and follow evidence wherever it leads.

For nineteen years, that commitment has been the reason we exist — and it remains our guiding principle today. During the height of Sri Lanka’s civil war, we started our journey. We did not have the technology, money or institutional backing that media organisations take for granted today. There were no sophisticated publishing platforms, no powerful social-media distribution systems and, for much of the time, barely reliable internet connections. What we had was limited technological knowledge and a determined group of writers who wanted to see a different Sri Lanka, a different Asia and, ultimately, a different world. We believed that journalism was not supposed to decorate power. It was supposed to question it. That principle was never particularly comfortable, and we have never tried to make it comfortable. Sri Lanka Guardian was established in August 2007 as an independent, non-profit initiative, built around the participation of journalists, academics, activists, retired public servants and other citizens who believed that public discussion should not be controlled by governments, political parties or commercial interests.

Nineteen years later, the circumstances have changed but the problem has not. Around a thousand writers have contributed to our pages over the years, with thousands of experts, academics, politicians, officials, activists and ordinary citizens participating in interviews and discussions. We went beyond the comfortable distance of commentary. We travelled towards conflict, spoke to victims, recorded experiences that powerful institutions preferred to leave undocumented and published accounts that were inconvenient to those who controlled the machinery of the state. That work came with consequences. Sri Lanka Guardian was among independent media initiatives blocked by the authorities around the 2010 presidential election, and later faced further restrictions as online censorship expanded. We did not interpret censorship as an administrative inconvenience. We understood it for what it was: an attempt to decide which citizens were entitled to know what was happening in their own country. The experience reinforced something that has remained central to our work. A media organisation that becomes frightened of power eventually becomes useful to power.

The political history surrounding our nineteen years has been equally unforgiving. The end of the civil war did not produce the democratic maturity many expected. The political class repeatedly demonstrated that defeating an armed insurgency was considerably easier than building institutions capable of restraining political power. The change of government in 2015 generated expectations that Sri Lanka might finally move towards stronger institutions, accountability and constitutional restraint. Those expectations did not survive the familiar struggle for political dominance. The country returned to factional competition, institutional weakness and the politics of personalities. In 2019, Gotabaya Rajapaksa won the presidency with 52.25 per cent of the vote, carrying with him a powerful mandate built partly on security, nationalism and the promise of disciplined government. The experiment ended disastrously. Economic collapse, public anger and mass protests eventually forced his resignation. Ranil Wickremesinghe then became president through a parliamentary vote rather than a direct presidential election, receiving 134 votes from Parliament to complete the remaining term. He attempted to stabilise an economy that was already in ruins, but economic management alone could not manufacture political legitimacy. In 2024, voters rejected the established political order again and elected Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who assumed office as the ninth executive president after winning the presidential election.

The lesson is not that one president was good and another was bad. That is the childish version of politics. The deeper problem is that Sri Lanka repeatedly invests extraordinary faith in individuals and then becomes disappointed when individuals cannot repair institutions. Every election is treated as a national rescue operation. Every new leader is presented as a possible cleanser of the previous government’s failures. The electorate then discovers, often painfully, that political slogans do not reform courts, rebuild public administration, create competent institutions or produce an honest political culture. Populism succeeds because it simplifies problems that are genuinely difficult. It offers villains when institutions need reform, promises when budgets require discipline and personalities when systems require redesign. It is therefore attractive not only to irresponsible politicians but also to exhausted citizens. That is precisely why it is dangerous.

This is not exclusively a Sri Lankan disease. Across Asia and beyond, politics has increasingly become an argument between competing claims to represent “the people”. Political movements on different sides of the ideological spectrum have learned to exploit public frustration with corruption, inequality, migration, economic insecurity, cultural anxiety and institutional failure. The result is a politics in which outrage travels faster than evidence. Social media has made this worse. A false allegation can reach millions before a factual correction reaches thousands. A conspiracy can become politically useful before investigators have established the facts. A government can accuse its opponents of treason, while its opponents accuse the government of dictatorship, and both sides can mobilise supporters without answering the central questions. The public is then left with political theatre instead of political accountability.

This is particularly serious in Sri Lanka because the country has already paid an enormous price for politically manipulated information. The Easter Sunday attacks demonstrated what happens when warnings, intelligence, institutional coordination and political responsibility fail simultaneously. The attacks must be investigated without fear and without political interference. But investigation is not the same thing as conspiracy construction. Allegations must be tested against evidence. Individuals must be prosecuted where evidence supports prosecution, and cleared where evidence does not. The present investigation has entered a politically motivated phase, including the February 2026 arrest of former State Intelligence Service chief Suresh Sallay in connection with the Easter attacks. The government has also said that the Presidential Commission report and accompanying material were handed to the Criminal Investigation Department in 2025 as part of renewed investigations. These developments deserve scrutiny. They do not, by themselves, establish the wider political theories circulating around the attacks. A serious country must be able to hold both propositions at once: powerful people must not be protected from investigation, and unsupported accusations must not be converted into facts simply because they satisfy public suspicion.

That distinction is central to our existence. Journalism today has to operate in an environment more hostile than the one in which we began, despite the extraordinary technological advantages now available. Information is abundant. Reliable information is not. Anyone can publish. Far fewer people are willing to verify. The commercial model rewards speed, anger and emotional engagement. Artificial intelligence is multiplying the volume of synthetic information. Political operators understand that controlling attention can sometimes be more valuable than controlling newspapers. The old censorship model was simple: prevent information from being published. The new model is more sophisticated: allow everything to circulate until truth becomes indistinguishable from fabrication. Both methods damage democracy.

There is another problem that deserves less attention than it receives: inequality. When wealth becomes concentrated, political influence tends to follow it. When citizens struggle to pay for food, housing, education and healthcare while watching privileged groups accumulate extraordinary wealth, the resulting anger is not irrational. It is a political fact. But anger can be directed towards useful reform or manipulated towards scapegoats. Journalism has a responsibility to distinguish the two. It must investigate wealth without becoming an instrument of envy, expose corruption without becoming a political weapon, and report social grievances without manufacturing enemies. Natural disasters, economic shocks, technological disruption and climate pressures will continue to test governments. The absence of collective responsibility will make every crisis harder.

For Sri Lanka Guardian, nineteen years therefore cannot be treated simply as an anniversary. It is an audit of what journalism is supposed to do when institutions fail, governments change, public memory becomes selective and political narratives compete with evidence. We have made mistakes. We have published material that deserved greater scrutiny. We have sometimes been impatient. But we have never accepted the proposition that journalism should be designed to please governments, political parties, advertisers or ideological camps. That independence is not a marketing slogan. It is the reason the publication exists.

Sri Lanka is again at an uncertain point. The present administration has received a powerful electoral mandate and has promised institutional reform, accountability and a break from the old political culture. Those promises should be tested, not applauded automatically. The judiciary must remain independent. Investigations must follow evidence. Appointments must withstand scrutiny. Parliament must exercise oversight. The media must be free to criticise the government without being treated as an enemy, while journalists themselves must accept the burden of accuracy. If the new political order repeats the old habit of treating criticism as hostility, it will eventually reproduce the same failures it promised to replace.

Nineteen years ago, we began with little more than conviction and a small group of people willing to write. Today, we have a larger community and a far wider reach, but the fundamental obligation remains unchanged. We will continue to publish because silence is not neutrality when citizens are being misled. We will question because unquestioning journalism is public relations. We will challenge conspiracy when evidence is absent and challenge authority when evidence demands it. We will defend the right of governments to govern and the right of citizens to question them. The next nineteen years will not become easier. They should not. Journalism becomes valuable precisely when the truth is inconvenient. Our anniversary is therefore not a declaration that we have arrived. It is a declaration that we are still here, still independent and still unwilling to look away.