A new report finds that overseas Sri Lankans are determined to seek a separate homeland. From Asia Sentinel:
With the grim civil war that wracked Sri Lanka finally over after 26 years, and with the Tamil minority seeking to pick up their lives after their rebellion was crushed mercilessly, only one group appears determined to continue the fight, and that is a large portion of the hundreds of thousands of Tamils overseas.
As many as 100,000 people were killed in the civil war, out of a nation of 20.1 million. The Brussels-based International Crisis Group, an independent non-governmental organization, in a new 29-page report, “The Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora After the LTTE” issued on Feb.23, has strongly urged the diaspora to give it up and instead seek to create a sustainable piece in a united country.
Whether that is possible is in serious doubt. The triumphalist government of President Mahindra Rajapaksa, despite statements urging reconciliation, is showing little signs on the ground of actually bringing the Tamils back to full partnership in the government. Nonetheless, the report says, any initiatives to carry on the struggle for an independent state may go forward in the diaspora, “but they must repudiate the LTTE’s violent methods,” said Robert Templer, the ICG’S Asia Program Director in a prepared release. “And they must also recognize that the LTTE’s separatist agenda is out of step with the wishes and needs of Tamils in Sri Lanka.” More:
In its 62 years of independence, Sri Lanka has never had a better chance than it has now to stamp out the last fires of ethnic hatred, violence and mindless chauvinisms that have left over 80,000 people dead in civil wars across one of the most physically beautiful countries in Asia.
Tragically for all Sri Lankans, it looks as if its increasingly autocratic president, reelected in January on a surge of Sinhala triumphalism following the defeat of a Tamil rebel army, is determined to let this hopeful moment pass. Not only a lasting peace between the Tamils and Sinhalese is at stake but also the multiparty democracy that set the country apart from many of its neighbors.
Why should a descent into misgovernment in a nation of 21.3 million people on a relatively small island off the coast of India matter to people anywhere else? This isn’t Zimbabwe or Bosnia or Haiti. Not yet. But it is one of the newest examples — streamed live on the Web if not much present in the American media — of a post colonial collapse. Kenya is another. It is a phenomenon worth study.
Sri Lanka was once the most advanced nation in South Asia by measures of human development. Literacy, education levels and social services are all still higher than in neighboring Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Nepal. The country has no external enemies. Women have held high office for decades. There was a lively press and a functioning two-party system, albeit dominated by mostly people drawn from elite families.
Now journalists live in fear, are killed, disappear or flee. More:
Hambantota, Sri Lanka: For years, ships from other countries, laden with oil, machinery, clothes and cargo, sped past this small town near India as part of the world’s brisk trade with China.
Now, China is investing millions to turn this fishing hamlet into a booming new port, furthering an ambitious trading strategy in South Asia that is reshaping the region and forcing India to rethink relations with its neighbors.
As trade in the region grows more lucrative, China has been developing port facilities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, and it is planning to build railroad lines in Nepal. These projects, analysts say, are part of a concerted effort by Chinese leaders and companies to open and expand markets for their goods and services in a part of Asia that has lagged behind the rest of the continent in trade and economic development.
But these initiatives are irking India, whose government worries that China is expanding its sphere of regional influence by surrounding India with a “string of pearls” that could eventually undermine India’s pre-eminence and potentially rise to an economic and security threat. More:
General Fonseka’s wife, Anoma, broke down in tears as she revealed how the authorities had still not informed her where her husband was being held, after military police bundled him away on Monday evening. She said she feared for his safety and called on the international community to work to free him.
Speaking by phone from Colombo, she said: “They have not told me where he is. I have tried to find out but could not. There are a lot of rumours: some say he is being held at the naval headquarters, some say he is at the army headquarters. Some say he is at an army camp. I cannot find out; nobody can go there.” More:
When I visited Jaffna recently, like all those returning home after years away I too sensed feelings of nostalgia welling up inside. This was my first visit in six years, and almost 25 since I had last lived in Jaffna, as an 11-year-old. The opening lines are by A E Manoharan, the Tamil pop star and baila singer who took Jaffna by storm in the 1970s – a time when, in my mind, Manoharan was more popular than the youthful leaders of the militant movements who would emerge soon enough. I have vague memories of going to an open-air Manoharan concert, sitting on the bicycle bar as one of my relatives rode us to where we could hear the loudspeakers. Incidentally, Manoharan composed “Ilangai enpathu”, with its reference to the palmyra fruit, two decades before rights activist Rajani Thiranagama and her colleagues would write The Broken Palmyra, for which she would be murdered.
By chance, a few weeks after my recent visit to Jaffna, I was sitting next to Manoharan himself on a flight from Madras to Colombo. The great singer was on his way to Jaffna for his first concert in the peninsula after the war, to celebrate Pongal. Manoharan, now 65 years old, like so many others returning home spoke of his anxiety at what Jaffna might look like – who would be left, who might have died, the suffering people have endured, what people might tell him, and what memories would return. During the flight, Manoharan spoke in eloquent, poetic language on a range of issues. He remembered how his first concert at the large Veerasingham Hall in Jaffna had been a flop, as only 60 people turned up. His manager cursed him, but, three months later he had the hall packed. As the plane jerked and landed, I asked him for a message that I could write about. In a sentimental tone, he replied, “Now I am going back to my land with happiness and peace of mind.” More:
Also at Himal Southasian: The Jaffna diaries by Ben Bavinck, a retired missionary who lived in Sri Lanka for more than 30 years and now lives in his native Netherlands:
17 August 1991, Jaffna. The next morning I went cycling to Vaddukoddai, Uduvil and Maruthanarmadam. Jaffna looked quiet. Everybody was cycling as usual. The Nallur Temple festival was just beginning.
I went to talk with a friend, Daya, who looked back on the Tiger attack on the Elephant Pass army camp. At the time, he said, the community in Jaffna had been in a state of psychosis: “A struggle till the bitter end has started.” Very young boys and girls, many just 10 years old, had joined the Tigers, Daya continued, and parents were now in a state of panic because their children had disappeared. Even schools and other institutions had been persuaded to participate in propaganda meetings for the Tigers, with the result being that schoolchildren, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides had been keeping the roads to the front clear as the fighting was taking place.
In what campaigners claimed was a “settling of scores”, around half-a-dozen websites has been blocked and the offices of one of them sealed. A foreign journalist who had been ordered from the country after asking a question about the president’s brother was subsequently told she could stay after her case received international attention.
“Now that the president has been re-elected, there appears to be a settling of scores with critics of the government,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch (HRW). “Just days after the election, some officials seem to be on a campaign to abuse their power.” More:
Andrew Buncombe meets Sarath Fonseka in Colombo. From The Independent:
The 59-year-old said surveys taken by his coalition ahead of the polls had suggested that he would win, and that even on election day, early results had suggested that he was more than 1.4 million votes ahead.
“There has been large-scale rigging – they are not stuffing ballots but they are doing computer manipulation,” he said. “You can see that the people did not expect this [result]. Normally when there is an election people celebrate for two or three days. You have seen it is very sombre on the streets. For the sake of the people’s aspirations we have to get the result cancelled.”
Outside, his dog, a noisy dalmatian, was locked inside a kennel because the member of his security detail who had overseen its daily walks had been relocated by the government.
Mr Fonseka, whose house has armed troops on watch nearby, repeated his claim that the government’s decision to withdraw his personal security detail was an indication it was planning to kill him. He said his name and a son-in-law’s had been placed on an immigration “blacklist” and that they would be unable to leave Sri Lanka. However a presidential spokesman said this was not the case, adding: “He is not on any list. He is free to leave the country.” More:
If the outcome of Sri Lanka’s bitterly contested presidential election were decided solely by which candidate had the largest billboard, then incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa could sleep easily in his bed.
At the international airport near Colombo, a huge hoarding shows the president, dressed entirely in white, a beatific smile beaming across his face. His advisers believe that as voters go to the polls tomorrow, their best asset is the candidate himself, a man who oversaw the defeat of separatist rebels and ended a brutal 30-year civil war.
Indeed, less than a year ago, after government troops crushed the rebels of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the authorities responded with a deluge of flag-waving celebrations that projected the president as something half-way between a God and a king, no one could have guessed that eight months later Mr Rajapaksa would be engaged in an ugly political dog-fight. And yet he is. More:
Seven months after Sri Lanka’s long and bitter civil war was brought to an end by a withering government assault, the political coalition that supported the Tamil Tigers has thrown its support behind the former army chief who crushed them.
In an ironic twist to the presidential election campaign being fought on the island, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) announced yesterday that it was supporting General Sarath Fonseka in his bid to defeat President Mahinda Rajapaksa.
At a press conference in the capital, Colombo, the leader of the TNA parliamentary group, Rajavarothayam Sambanthan, said his group had decided to support Mr Fonseka’s candidacy to prevent another victory by Mr Rajapaksa, whose poor record on human rights and law and order made it vital that he be beaten. More:
Shaped like an eyelid in a halo of azure water, the tiny Indian Ocean island of Dhuvaafaru in the Maldives is a fresh-minted community that has been transplanted to the Raa atoll. Clinics, schools and roads have all been built from scratch. Its homes, all newly peopled, are the legacy of tragedy on a vast scale: 2004’s Boxing Day tsunami.
This year – at the culmination of the single biggest construction project in Red Cross/Red Crescent history – 4,000 people from the nearby low-lying island of Kandholhudhoo, a place made uninhabitable by the waves that destroyed houses and snapped trees like matchsticks, were finally moved to Dhuvaafaru on the opposite side of the archipelago to begin new lives.
Among them was Hussain Alifulhu, 48, one of the last to escape the island when the tsunami swamped his home. He was among those who helped build the new community, an electrician by trade who spent the last four years living with his family in temporary shelters, fishing for sea cucumbers to make a living. On his new island home, he is working as an electrician once again. More:
Padma Wawlanbokke’s family were shocked when the woman they thought had died in 2004 reappeared three weeks ago. But is it really her? Andrew Buncombe in the Independent:
There are a million questions one could ask of the woman sitting on the edge of a hospital bed in southern Sri Lanka, but for now only one of them matters: is she Padma Wawlanbokke?
Five years ago, the 42-year-old’s family mourned after she, her husband and the couple’s young children disappeared and were presumed dead after the train in which they were travelling was struck by the deadly Asian tsunami. An estimated 1,500 passengers and villagers lost their lives after the tsunami hurled the Matara Express from its tracks in the quiet coastal hamlet of Peraliya.
But just three weeks ago, Mrs Wawlanbokke’s brother, Premawardan, was buying spare parts for his car in a town near his home when he spotted a woman begging beneath a clock-tower built during the days of British rule. Instantly, she reminded him of his sister. He returned with another sister, who was equally adamant that the dirty, unkempt woman with the outstretched hand was their sister, Padma. More:
The temple, the city’s star architectural attraction, takes its name from the relic it houses: a tooth of the Buddha, kept in a stupa-shaped gold casket. Crowds of Sri Lankan devotees jostle past, carrying offerings of jasmine, lilies or lotus flowers. The tooth is also the focus of Kandy’s famed perahera, or procession, held for 10 days in the month of Esala (which runs from July into August). The perahera features Kandyan dancing and drumming, and this year drew about 500,000 people on its final day — more than in previous years.
The dates of next year’s Esala Perahera haven’t been set. But there is ample opportunity to hear Kandyan drumming and watch local dance — Kandyan dancers and drummers are some of Sri Lanka’s emblematic symbols — at any time. At the Kandyan Art Association and Cultural Center, a quick walk from the tooth temple on the lake’s northeast shore, the sound of a conch shell welcomes visitors to a show. Bare-chested men emerge in blue- and red-fringed white sarongs, with diamond-shaped headgear, beating geta bera with their hands. Women dancers pay graceful tribute to guardian deities and to their gurus. Before the evening is over, the dancers will enact the taming of a cobra and move like peacocks. More:
Not even six months has elapsed since the protracted war with Tamil Tiger rebels ended in a bloody climax, leading to the Sri Lankan government’s triumph. But already the leaders of the military campaign are sparring ahead of an election due next year. For weeks the press has been speculating about friction between the administration of President Mahinda Rajapaksa and Sarath Fonseka, the hawkish army general who commanded troops in the final assault against the Tigers.
Jittery over rumours, spread mostly by opposition parties, that General Fonseka will challenge Mr Rajapaksa in the election, the government in October banned reports about his political ambitions. A communiqué from the army’s spokesman warned the press that several laws would be used against those who published “false reports” using the names of serving senior army officers. More:
You have to go to a tropical paradise to find the latest front in the brewing cold war between China and India.
On the southernmost tip of the Maldives lies the island of Gan, a tiny patch of coconut palms and powdery white beaches. It was here that Britain set up a secret naval base in 1941, building airstrips and vast fuel tanks to support its fleet in the Indian Ocean during the Second World War.
The RAF then used it as a Cold War outpost until 1976, when the British withdrew and the officers’ quarters were converted into a resort called Equator Village.
Now, 33 years later, India is preparing to reopen the base to station surveillance aircraft, helicopters, and possibly ships, to monitor Chinese vessels in the Indian Ocean. Under a deal signed in August, India is also installing radar across the Maldives, linked to its coastal command. More:
Also read: Opportunity, Made in China by Shekhar Gupta in the Indian Express
A group of victims of terror attacks by Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers rebels filed suit against Raj Rajaratnam, the Galleon Group hedge-fund founder charged in an insider-trading case, accusing him of funding the Tigers’”crimes against humanity.”
The suit was filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in New Jersey by 30 people who say they are survivors of attacks carried out by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during decades of civil war against the Sri Lankan government.
The lawsuit alleges that from 2000 to 2007, Mr. Rajaratnam and a family foundation led by Mr. Rajaratnam’s father gave more than $5 million to a U.S. charity, called the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization, that the U.S. government subsequently declared in 2007 to be a fund-raising front for the Tamil Tigers. More:
Illegal insider trading: A reflection of character
From Knowledge@Wharton
Recent news of the illegal insider trading charges against Raj Rajaratnam of the hedge fund Galleon Group and five others, the biggest such case in decades, has spawned its own round of jokes on Wall Street. Who are the most sought-after professionals in finance these days? Answer: Electricians, who are experts at figuring out if cell phones, landlines or offices have been bugged by the FBI. And what is the most popular spot in New York City? Answer: The area under the Brooklyn Bridge, where in the 1980s Ivan Boesky, the last big financial executive to be convicted of illegal insider trading, was said to exchange non public material information about stocks the old fashioned way — directly in person. More:
A daughter studies the void in her parents’ relationship. Natasha Singh in the New York Times:
That day I had no papers to grade or classes to prepare for, so I busied myself with cleaning our apartment, mailing bills and exercising. It wasn’t until evening that I remembered my stomach, that I had not fed it. Just then the phone rang – my mother calling to remind me that it was Karwa Chauth, the day Hindu women all over the world honor their husbands by fasting.
My parents’ fates were tied together 40 years ago in an arranged marriage in India. On each Karwa Chauth since then, my mother has dressed in her red wedding sari and lost herself in the world of preparations. Usually she makes my father’s favorite dishes along with poori, samosas, chhole and sweets. Her entire day is spent over the stove in front of her shrine of gods and goddesses, the secrets of her wishes for my father’s health and happiness hidden in the upward spirals of her prayers. More:
It started broadcasting in 1923, began a Hindi service in 1950s, and earned millions of rupees as advertising revenue (in those days All India Radio had banned film music). Old-timers would remember it as the station that played the popular Binaca Geetmala. Even today, Radio Ceylon’s Hindi service that goes on air at the crack of dawn for just three hours every day has a million listeners. From the Indian Express:
AS Jyoti Parmar plays a devotional song for her listeners in a small room of Radio Ceylon (now Sri Lankan Broadcasting Corporation) in the early hours, she continues her father Digvijay Parmar’s legacy, who spent 30 years at Asia’s oldest radio station in Colombo. Jyoti hails from Uttarakhand. She was a child when her father got a job with Radio Ceylon in 1967. The station featured top radio announcers of that time like Gopal Sharma, Vijay Kishore Dubey and Ameen Sayani. She first stood in front of the mike 20 years ago, taking people’s requests. The listeners were from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
As she continues playing old melodies from this heritage building, she realises that the world back home has changed. The famous segments, Binaca Geetmala and Lipton ke Sitaare, are now part of history and have been replaced by Bhoole Bisre, Purani filmon ka sangeet, Ek hi film ke geet. More:
The young mother was standing by the side of the road, clutching her baby. The baby was dead.
Damilvany Gnanakumar watched as she tried to make a decision. Around them, thousands of people were picking their way between bodies strewn across the road, desperate to escape the fighting all around them.
“The mother couldn’t bring the dead body and she doesn’t want to leave it as well. She was standing … holding the baby. She didn’t know what to do … At the end, because of the shell bombing and people rushing – there were thousands and thousands of people, they were rushing in and pushing everyone – she just had to leave the baby at the side of the road, she had to leave the body there and come, she had no choice. And I was thinking in my mind ‘What have the people done wrong? Why are they going through this, why is the international government not speaking up for them? I’m still asking.”
Four months later and Gnanakumar is sitting on a cream leather sofa in the living room of the family home in Chingford, Essex, reliving the final days of Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war.
For most of those four months, the 25-year-old British graduate was imprisoned behind razor wire inside the country’s grim internment camps, home to nearly 300,000 people. She was released last week, partly as a result of pressure from this newspaper, and flew back into London on Sunday. More:
A Sri Lankan reporter, recently named by US President Barack Obama as an example of the way journalists are persecuted around the world, has been sentenced to 20 years in jail for writing articles critical of the government’s military operations.
In a case that campaigners say highlights a campaign of intimidation against the country’s independent media, JS Tissainayagam was jailed after a court decided he had breached harsh anti-terror laws. He is the first journalist to be convicted under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.
Mr Tissainayagam, an experienced columnist who wrote for several publications including the now defunct Northeastern Monthly magazine, had written several articles in 2006 and 2007 in which he accused the government of withholding food and other essentials from Tamil-majority areas as a weapon of war. The court decided that his articles broke the law because they were designed to create agitation between the Tamil minority and the Sinhala majority. “The constitution guarantees media freedom, but no one has a right to deliberately publish false reports that would lead to communal violence,” said the government prosecutor Sudarshana de Silva. More:
Also from the Independent:
Totalitarian leader
Mahinda Rajapaksa
The year was 1989. A violent youth insurrection that had terrorised the Sri Lankan populace was being brutally quelled by the state establishment. Bodies were burned on rubber tyres and the charred remains were left on every street corner. Hundreds of corpses were polluting the major rivers of the island’s south-west. Disappearances, arbitrary detention and revenge killings were the order of the day. With a government at the zenith of its power determined to crush the insurgency through force, leaving a trail of innocent victims in its wake, a young Sri Lankan opposition parliamentarian from the rural south decided to take a stand against the country’s deteriorating human rights situation and the state terror being unleashed upon his fellow citizens.
Travelling to Switzerland without a penny in his pocket and on an air ticket purchased for him by a friend, the young politician entered the building of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) in Geneva and parked himself in the lobby. Over several days, he waylaid every delegation passing through those halls, using each opportunity to tell members of the world community about the tragedy that was unfolding in Sri Lanka. So eager and relentless was the young man that he was finally given a special meeting at the UNCHR to present his case. Back in Sri Lanka he organised anti-government campaigns and founded organisations that looked into disappearances. He was, if anything, the face of the agitation campaign against the regime of the day, the street fighter determined to secure the rights of the oppressed and release them from the brutal grip of state terror.
That man is now Sri Lanka’s fifth executive President, elected to office in 2005 and credited with having achieved the impossible by defeating the world’s most ruthless terrorist organisation that was fighting for a separate homeland in the island’s north-east. With his government being accused of gross human rights violations and heavy-handed tactics in the name of quashing terrorism, the President calls rights campaigners ‘traitors’ if they are Sri Lankans and ‘terrorists’ or ‘terrorist agents’ if they happen to be foreigners. And so, beyond the signature moustache and the shawl he still wears around his neck, there is no resemblance between the starry-eyed Mahinda Rajapaksa from Hambantota, fighting for the rights of his citizens in Geneva and the corpulent, shrewd politician occupying the premier seat of power in Sri Lanka today. More:
The naked man, his hands bound behind his back, is pushed to the ground. Then a man in military uniform delivers a forceful kick to the back of the prisoner’s head with the heel of his boot. As the prisoner slumps forward, another soldier points his automatic weapon and fires a single shot. The man’s body jolts. “It’s like he jumped,” laughs one of the giggling soldiers.
As gunfire rattles, the camera pans left to reveal a further seven bloodstained bodies, all handcuffed and bound, and – with one exception – similarly naked, strewn on the ground. The camera then pans right again, as another naked man is forced to the ground and shot in the back of the head. This time the body falls backwards.
These scenes, captured on video, allegedly show extra-judicial killings of Tamils by Sri Lankan troops earlier this year in the bitter and bloody endgame of the country’s civil war. As government forces made a decisive thrust into the stronghold of rebel forces to end the decades-long conflict, a Sri Lankan soldier apparently took this footage, which was then smuggled out of the country by activists. It may constitute the first hard evidence for those who believe war crimes were committed in the effort to crush the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The significance of this footage – particularly shocking for the seemingly casual way in which the killings were carried out – is even greater given the way that journalists and independent observers were prevented by the government from reaching the war zone. The UN has estimated that 10,000 civilians were killed in what was, in effect, a war with no outside witnesses. More:
A relic containing a tooth of Buddha, Kandy, Sri Lanka. Photo Travir / cc
I had always wanted to go to Kandy, for no other reason than that I was in love with the name: so airy, fanciful, and obviously suggestive of sweet things. I first found Kandy on a map of what was then called Ceylon, decades ago as a young man. Little did I know that it would one day have urgent revelations for me, more dark and poignant than sweet.
My journey began at Colombo’s crumbling train station, with its white facade like a cake about to melt. The first-class ticket cost a little more than $3 for the three-hour journey from Sri Lanka’s steamy Indian Ocean capital, through deep forest, to an altitude of 1,650 feet. The rusted railway car rattled and groaned its way uphill. Soon banana leaves were slapping against the train as we entered a relentless tangle of greenery.
The forest thickened with the crazy chaos of dark hardwood foliage. Vines choked every tree. The torrential rain of the southwest monsoon invigorated the pageant, shrieking and beating against the leaves as sheets of mist moved across the jungle. Then came swollen brown rivers, with water buffalo half sunk in mud near the pottery-red banks. Here and there the forest would break to reveal a shiny, rectilinear carpet of paddy fields, only to close in again, denser than before. I saw scrap-iron hutments and tiled rooftops the color of autumn leaves, and smoky blue hillsides creased by waterfalls and half-eaten by gray monsoon clouds. Other breaks in the forest revealed the occasional bell-shaped Buddhist dagoba, or stupa, with its soaring-to-heaven whiteness against the otherwise fungal-green tableau. As we drew near to Kandy, we passed through several narrow tunnels. In the pitch black, the creak of the train reverberated against the rock walls. More:
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse talks to The Hindu’sN Ram about the condition of Tamils in Vayuniya camps, the future of Tamil leadership in his country and the possibility of a long-term political solution.
N. Ram: Mr. President, are you satisfied with conditions in the Vavuniya IDP camps where close to 300,000 Tamils are housed?
President: I sent some people close to me to the camps. They went and stayed for several days. They spoke to the girls, the Tamil children, and others. And they came and reported to me. I don’t rely on information only from the officials. We released people over 60. You know, a 74-year-old man, when he was released he immediately came here and went to Singapore. He was the man who had the money list, the other list. [Velupillai] Prabakaran had given lists to many, not to just one person. This man escaped; he was one of the leaders.
I would say the condition in our camps is the best any country has. We supply water. There is a problem with lavatories. That is not because of our fault. The money that comes from the EU and others, it goes to the NGOs and the U.N. They are very slow; disbursing money is very slow. We supply the water tanks; we have spent over [Sri Lankan] Rs. 2 billion. Giving electricity, giving water, now we are giving televisions to them. They have telephone facilities. Schools have been established. Some of the leaders are using mobile phones.
Ambepussa, Sri Lanka: Suresh has a sweet face and gentle manner. His skinny body and the downy fuzz on his upper lip mark him out as boy who is still a couple of years away from becoming a man.
But in January, that transformation was brutally accelerated.
As fighting between Sri Lanka’s army and the Tamil Tigers intensified in what would turn out to be the final stages of a 26-year-long civil war, the rebels once again turned to a demographic they have long exploited to replenish their ranks: children
At the time, Suresh was 15. Despite the escalating war, he was attending school and dreamt of one day becoming a teacher.
All that was to change, however, when his family took the decision to flee their village near the northern city of Killinochchi and to make for the government-controlled areas to the south.
At a chaotic roadblock, Suresh became separated from his family and as he waited to get through, the Tigers abducted him, he said.
“They told me they would kill my family if I didn’t stay and fight with them,” Suresh said, speaking in the Ambepussa rehabilitation camp. More:
Shekhar Gupta walks the talk on Prabhakaran, the war with the LTTE and the way forward with Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa in The Indian Express:
SG: Hello and welcome to Walk the Talk. I am Shekhar Gupta in Colombo’s Presidential Palace and my guest once again President Mahinda Rajapaksa.
MR: My pleasure
Welcome to Walk the Talk and very different circumstances from our last conversation.
MR: Quite. Yes, because when you came last time, I think it was about two years…two years ago.
SG: Less than, Less than one-and-a-half years ago.
MR: Less than one-and-a-half years ago.
SG: and I will tell you why I say one-and-a-half years.
MR: Yes, then of course we were not a, I would say a, united…unitary country now it its because earlier, when you came last time, North was…North and East I think was controlled by the LTTE terrorist. Now, we are free of terrorism.
SG: You said you are a unitary country, but a federal unitary country I hope.Because last time in fact, when we had a conversation you said that in one-and-a-half years you said there will be peace and there will be no LTTE.
MR: Yes.
SG: I said in one-and-a-half years, I reminded you, because it is still two months to one-and-a-half years.
MR: Yes
SG: That situation has come about even faster than you had…even you had imagined.
MR: That’s right. Yes, because of our…armed forces were so committed for the fight.
SG: Tell us a little bit about the final phases of the battle.
MR: Yes.
SG: How did it progress? What happened? When did the breakthrough come?
MR: No, from the time after we walked into Madhu , that is the, North-West of the…
SG: Right…island.
MR: Island. We were stuck there for about eight to nine months. Then we… it was a, just a, walk-over, I would say. But we knew after we went to Killinochi, I mean, we were, you know, through.
SG: what is the biggest mistake that Prabhakaran made in this.
More than 20,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the final throes of the Sri Lankan civil war, most as a result of government shelling, an investigation by The Times has revealed.
The number of casualties is three times the official figure.
The Sri Lankan authorities have insisted that their forces stopped using heavy weapons on April 27 and observed the no-fire zone where 100,000 Tamil men, women and children were sheltering. They have blamed all civilian casualties on Tamil Tiger rebels concealed among the civilians. More:
[Visit the Times page for the photographs.]
Also read Emily Wax report in the Washington Post:
The strip of beach where tens of thousands of civilians huddled during the Sri Lankan military’s decisive assault against the Tamil Tiger rebels this month shows clear signs of heavy artillery shelling, according to a helicopter inspection of the site by independent journalists, interviews with eyewitnesses, and specialists who have studied high-resolution satellite imagery from the war zone.
That evidence contradicts government assertions that areas of heavy civilian populations were no-fire zones that were deliberately spared during the final weeks of military assault that ended this island nation’s quarter-century of civil war.
“We see a lot of images of destroyed structures and what look like circular shell craters and also, frankly, very large holes in the ground. If it was a shell, it must be a very large one to make 24-feet-wide craters,” said Lars Bromley, director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Geospatial Technologies and Human Rights project, which was asked by human rights groups to study the satellite images. More:
On Wednesday evening the Sri Lankan delegation at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva was celebrating after its victory in fending off an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by its army.
Sri Lanka’s Government has consistently denied killing civilians in the battle to wipe out the Tamil Tigers and blamed the rebels for any deaths. It hailed the vote by the council as a vindication of its action.
An investigation by The Times into Sri Lanka’s civilian casualties, however -- which was conducted in a week-long visit to Sri Lanka -- has found evidence of a civilian death toll of 20,000, almost three times that cited previously. The majority perished under government guns. More:
A reporter’s story
Catherine Philp in the Times:
It was four years since I had been to Sri Lanka and everything had changed. The shaky ceasefire, which was collapsing even then, had imploded with an all-out military offensive to drive out the Tamil Tigers.
At a distance I was not necessarily opposed. In five years of covering South Asia I had travelled several times to “Tigerland” and was in no doubt of the rebels’ capacity for brutality. More:
The English newspaper’s estimate, which it said was based on an analysis of “aerial photographs, official documents, witness accounts and expert testimony,” relied in part on an anonymous United Nations source and what the paper called “confidential United Nations documents.” But Sri Lankan officials heaped scorn on the report and U.N. officials told The New York Times, The Guardian and The BBC that they have no good estimate of the number of civilians killed in the final weeks of fighting and questioned the methodology.
On The Times of London Web site, the newspaper’s foreign editor, Richard Beeston, narrates a video analysis of aerial photographs of the beach where Tamil Tiger separatists made their last stand, surrounded by thousands of civilians. The photographs appear to have been taken after the fighting ceased, and The Times says that they show evidence of shelling and of a large number of graves for both militants and civilians. More:
THE body of the young man lay on a scarlet bier. He was in his colonel’s uniform and beret, with white gloves that made his hands seem enormous beside his emaciated body. His face was set in a rictus of death that was somewhat like a smile. But the portly, mustachioed man who stood looking at him, in a short-sleeved white shirt and blue trousers, hands clasped awkwardly in front of him, was not smiling.
Velupillai Prabhakaran always said this was the moment, four years into the war in September 1987, when he gave up any faith in non-violence. The young man before him, Thileepan, had fasted to death to highlight the plight of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority and their demands for independence. The Sinhalese majority had paid no attention. So Prabhakaran pledged himself and his Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam to a path of unremitting carnage. More:
As the Sri Lankan army closed in, rebels made a desperate plea to a Sunday Times correspondent to help stave off annihilation:
IT was a desperate last phone call but it did not sound like a man who would be dead within hours. Balasingham Nadesan, political leader of the Tamil Tigers, had nowhere to turn, it seemed.
“We are putting down our arms,” he told me late last Sunday night by satellite phone from the tiny slip of jungle and beach on the northeast coast of Sri Lanka where the Tigers had been making their last stand.
I could hear machinegun fire in the background as he continued coolly: “We are looking for a guarantee of security from the Obama administration and the British government. Is there a guarantee of security?”
He was well aware that surrendering to the victorious Sri Lankan army would be the most dangerous moment in the 26-year civil war between the Tigers and Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority. More:
Sri Lanka’s former war zone is a wasteland, its earth scorched and pocked by craters. Cars and trucks lie overturned near bunkers beside clusters of battered tents.
The government has denied firing heavy weapons into what had been a battlefield densely populated with civilians. But the helicopter tour the military gave the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and a group of journalists yesterday revealed widespread devastation.
The sandy coastal strip where the final battles of the 25-year civil war were fought was dotted with patches of charred earth and dark craters were visible amid the greyish earth. One area was thick with endless rows of tents, many flattened and damaged. Abandoned vehicles were overturned, some reduced to burnt skeletons. Some huts with thatched roofs were destroyed, others had no roofs at all.
After touring the area, Mr Ban said the trapped civilians must have undergone “most inhumane suffering”. More:
Tamils have been emailing pictures to each other which purportedly show Vellupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the Tamil Tigers, alive and safe.
The picture (right) had him reading a Tamil paper and watching the news of his reported death.
Well here is the original pic (left) which (I think) shows him meeting Anton Balasingham, the LTTE’s chief negotiator who really did die in 2006. More:
I don’t know who Gomin Dayasri is, or whether he even exists, but there’s a remarkable piece of writing under his byline posted on the website of the Sri Lankan defence ministry. I recommend that readers should look at his piece in its entirety and not rely on what I say, for it needs to be read in full. According to Mr Dayasri, us foreign correspondents in Sri Lanka are having a hell of a time being wined and dined, while “the girls in the NGO circuit provide the information and entertainment”. He says that the journalists who come here want the war to carry on so that we continue to get the assignment and to indulge in the “fun around-sun and surf, safaris and misty mountains within easy reach” (sic). He then says there is no danger here apart from the “cancellation of the visa and a deportation order”, which is actually quite a telling remark. I cannot help thinking that Mr Dayasri, or whoever he is, may be a little jealous of us foreign reporters. But I can perhaps put his worries at ease. Not once during my first visit to Sri Lanka last month or on my current visit has anyone bought me as much as a cup of tea. As for the entertainment provided by the NGO girls, I’ve clearly yet to receive that invitation. More:
And below, the piece headlined “Foreign Correspondent” by Gomin Dayasri on the Sri Lanka defence ministry website:
It’s a stopover in paradise for a Foreign Correspondent to live majestically on his overseas allowance. Such comfortable digs are not in the market in the recession stung home country. There is exotic food and groovy watering holes at affordable prices. NGOs’ provide the freebies and rolls the red carpet.
Evenings may be dull but there is fun around-sun and surf, safaris and misty mountains within easy reach. Surroundings are ideal to prop a savings account for a rainy day. It’s an earn to save assignment; where on most days the drink and dinner is free with invitations galore. Many sophisticated hostesses desire to declare that they call the local BBC /CNN man by the first name. They pass unquoted quotes, to display their importance.
It’s a comfortable station to report a war with no hazard to life or limb-the possible menace being the cancellation of the visa and a deportation order. Foreign correspondents live in Iraq or Afghanistan, Sudan or Somalia with death beckoning.
English is understood by those who matter and the girls in the NGO circuit provide the information and entertainment. News is at the door step with LTTE agents in attendance. Cultivation of news sources is not a requirement as there is a free flow. More:
The Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, on Tuesday savored a victory that had eluded every Sri Lankan head of state before him: he declared on television that after more than 25 years, his troops had defeated one of the world’s most enduring guerrilla armies on the battlefield.
Behind that victory speech was a historic and bloody family triumph, guided by two of the president’s brothers: Gotabaya, the influential secretary of defense, and Basil, a so-called special adviser who devised the political strategy around the war effort.
Together, the brothers Rajapaksa defied international pressure to stanch civilian casualties, squelched dissent, blocked independent reporting of the war and achieved what many had thought all but impossible: they vanquished the Tamil Tigers, who had waged a pitiless war of terror and once ruled swaths of Sri Lankan territory as a de facto state. More:
Tiger by the tail
James Ross, legal and policy director at Human Rights Watch, in the New York Times:
Unfortunately, the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa treated the Tigers’ atrocities as a license for its own abuses. Instead of taking the high ground – morally, politically, and militarily – Rajapaksa used the war to solidify his support among ultra-nationalist Sinhalese. The government appears to view all Tamils as presumptive Tiger supporters and has locked up in camps all who have fled the fighting but the elderly – now some 300,000 people. Sri Lankan army forces indiscriminately shelled and starved the Tamil civilians trapped by the Tigers, causing several thousand civilian deaths and massive suffering. And in its plans for the future, the administration has favored Tamil leaders with poor rights records and given short shrift to the Tamil population’s legitimate political concerns. More:
