Sri Lankan journalism has lost one of its most consequential—and quietly courageous—practitioners with the passing of Iqbal Athaas.
In a profession often tempted by proximity to power, Athaas chose distance. In an environment where defence reporting was expected to echo official briefings, he insisted on verification. Where silence was safer, he published. And where many mistook access for authority, he demonstrated that credibility is built by independence, not invitations.
Athaas was not a journalist of theatrics. He did not trade in outrage or self-mythology. His work was defined instead by patience, precision, and a refusal to accept the state’s preferred version of events simply because it was repeated often enough. Over decades, that posture made him indispensable—and, at times, inconvenient.
His reporting during Sri Lanka’s long years of conflict set benchmarks few matched. Defence journalism here was never a neutral beat; it was a minefield, ethically and physically. To question procurement, expose operational failures, or trace chains of command was to invite pressure—from institutions unused to scrutiny and from political actors who equated dissent with disloyalty. Athaas navigated that terrain with discipline and restraint, understanding that the power of his work lay not in provocation but in documented fact.
Internationally, his association with Jane’s Defence Weekly placed Sri Lanka’s conflict within a global analytical frame. That mattered. It meant the island’s war was no longer narrated solely through domestic spin or patriotic abstraction. It was examined with the same rigor applied to conflicts elsewhere—force structures, procurement trails, intelligence failures, and command accountability. For a state accustomed to controlling narrative, this was deeply uncomfortable. For readers seeking truth, it was essential.
Domestically, Athaas’ work with the Sunday Times cemented his reputation as a reporter who understood that defence reporting is ultimately about civilians. About the cost of secrecy. About what happens when decisions taken behind closed doors ripple outward— into villages, budgets, and graves.
There were consequences. Athaas paid a price for his work, most notably when he was forced into exile following threats that underscored how thin the line between journalism and danger had become. That episode should never be sanitised as an unfortunate footnote. It was a stain on a system that could not tolerate scrutiny, and a reminder that press freedom in Sri Lanka has always been conditional, contested, and fragile.
Yet exile did not blunt his purpose. If anything, it sharpened it. Distance gave him perspective, not detachment. He continued to write with clarity about Sri Lanka’s defence and security architecture, resisting the seductions of nostalgia or bitterness. His was not the voice of grievance, but of record. He understood that journalism’s first duty is to history.
What made Athaas distinctive was not merely what he reported, but how. He did not confuse access with endorsement. He did not personalise institutions or demonise individuals without evidence. And he resisted the creeping theatricalisation of journalism— the idea that volume equals impact. In an age of noise, he practiced signal.
Younger journalists learned from him not through instruction but by example:
that sourcing matters; that documents outlast denials; that careful language is not weakness but strength. He showed that defence reporting, done properly, is not about celebrating hardware or amplifying fear—it is about accountability in the most consequential domain of state power.
In recent years, as Sri Lanka has grappled with questions of militarisation, intelligence overreach, and the politicisation of security, Athaas’ body of work reads less like reportage and more like a cautionary archive. He understood early what many are only now confronting: that secrecy, once normalised, metastasises; that emergency powers rarely expire on their own; and that democracies are not undone in moments of chaos, but through prolonged tolerance of opacity.
Iqbal Athaas did not seek legacy. But he leaves one nonetheless—in the articles that still stand up to scrutiny, in the standards he quietly set, and in the uncomfortable truth that journalism of his calibre is rare precisely because it is costly.
Sri Lanka has lost a reporter. The public has lost a witness. And power has lost one of its most persistent auditors.
That is no small passing.
