By Farah Mihlar

Farah Mihlar works as media officer at Minority Rights Group International. She is a Sri Lankan activist and academic who has reported on the country's ethnic conflict for over a decade and is currently doing a PhD on religious fundamentalism in Muslim minority contexts.

In March Sri Lankan police used anti-terror laws to arrest and detain J.S. Tissanayagam, a prominent journalist working for The Sunday Times, a maistream English-language weekly. After two weeks behind bars he was finally served a detention order charging him with engaging in terrorist activities, which today in Sri Lanka can be interpreted as criticising the government.

In the last year, with a return to war and a rapidly deteriorating human rights situation, Sri Lanka has very slowly managed to grab a few international headlines. But the real-life narratives of the people who fight to draw attention to these headline-making stories remain untold.

Sri Lanka is now one of the most dangerous places in the world for human rights defenders - broadly defined to include journalists, aid workers, activists, NGO workers and religious leaders.

Since the country's human rights situation plummeted following the breakdown in 2006 of a four-year Norwegian-brokered ceasefire between the Sri Lankan government and Tamil Tigers rebels, human rights defenders have increasingly been targets of killings, disappearances, abductions, arrest and detention. They live and work in a climate of fear that international activists say at times parallels countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to a recent report by one of Sri Lanka's leading non-governmental organisations, the Law and Society Trust, a humanitarian worker was killed or disappeared every single month between January 2006 and December 2007, with the exception of just two months.

In August 2007, U.N. humanitarian relief chief John Holmes said Sri Lanka was one of the most dangerous places in the world for aid workers. He referred in particular to the gruesome execution-style slayings of 17 aid workers of international NGO Action Contre la Faim in August 2006.

At the time, the government responded by calling Holmes "a terrorist", but last week an internationally acclaimed human rights monitoring group, the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), said in a damning report there was evidence to implicate the military in this incident.

In January this year, the Sri Lankan government unilaterally abrogated the ceasefire, forcing the exit of Scandinavian ceasefire monitors and leaving the country void of any human rights scrutiny.

Local and international human rights activists have blamed the Sri Lankan military of either being directly involved in killings, disappearances, abduction and threats or of supporting paramilitary groups who are running amok and committing these abuses.

The Tigers are also intolerant of dissent - gunning down political opponents and activists and journalists who oppose them. Human rights defenders are caught up in the melee, dubbed the enemy as they attempt to expose the perpetrators.

"Since I am in politics I can understand the pulse of the government, the general trends, and moreover two of my colleagues, both MPs, were killed in Colombo," says Mano Ganeshan, a Tamil parliamentarian and possibly the country's most high-profile minority activist who leads a human rights monitoring group.

"So it is crystal clear the guns are pointed at me."

His predecessor, N. Raviraj, was shot dead last year and fellow member of parliament, T Maheshwaran, was killed in January this year.

If they are not murdered in cold blood or abducted, they are followed, searched and harassed with warning phone calls and letters. Family members are preyed on and sometime attacked.

"When I get up in the morning, if I can make it through the day I count it as a blessing," said a human rights activist from the north who did not want to be identified.

Media workers are also targeted. In August 2007, gunmen walked into the home of Tamil journalist Sahadhevan Nilakshan and sprayed him with bullets, killing him on the spot.

In a press statement in August 2007, Reporters Without Borders said the northern town of Jaffna was one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists, where in just one year up to eight media workers were killed.

Even when lives are spared, repercussions often follow. Like The Sunday Times' Tissanayagam, journalists face possible arrest. Their offices are raided by security personnel and they are quite often taken in for questioning by police.

The danger is not simply limited to those who fight for human rights in their professional capacity. Several people in their day-to-day lives are under threat because they stand up to the culture of impunity but have no protection because they don't fall into the recognised category of a "human rights defender".

One such person is a Tamil woman whose husband "disappeared", reportedly abducted by the military, who when approached denied involvement in the incident. She then turned to some paramilitary groups, thinking they could help because of their close affiliation with the government. They promised to help but some days later abducted and raped her.

"I had to run around embassies begging for a visa to help get her out because her life was obviously under threat," a local activist said. "I had no luck, just because she is not high profile enough."

The story speaks of the complexity of the problem. There have been many instances in which foreign governments have come to the aid of activists but local human rights groups are urging diplomatic missions in Sri Lanka to be more flexible with their visa laws to recognise the nuanced threat associated with working and reporting on human rights.

They are calling on EU countries, the United States, Canada and India to act faster to temporarily get people out of the country in such situations. Within the country, activists have formed networks and are putting in place protection mechanisms such as safe houses.

But quite often the threat is too serious to be able to manage at a local level. In such situations, leaving Sri Lanka is not just an option, it is the only option, to which diplomatic missions have to more effectively respond.

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