Uprooted lives, transient existence, unending war. The civilians of Sri Lanka’s north wait for the day when they can once again call a place home.
The pictures on government television show rice sprouting green in newly made fields and classrooms crowded with eager students. Unofficial visitors and travellers from Jaffna descnbe another reality: a city devastated by years of bombardment, houses plundered first by the retreating Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE), then looted by the occupying army. “Here is your house,” announces one official to a woman returnee, and she breaks down in tears. All that remains is a pile of rubble.
The Sri Lankan Army, fearing mines and booby traps in the abandoned buildings, chose rather to shell and bomb what was left behind by the LTTE and to bulldoze new roads for their vehicles. Much of the landscape is unrecognisable.
During the final assault on Jaffna in November 1995, many old people were abandoned in their sick beds as their families fled across the lagoon; some— dying of shock in the shelling—were buned hastily by the few who remained.
Now, a plan is mooted to rebuild the Jaffna library as a gesture of reconciliation and respect for Tamil culture, but how do you replace the 95,000 volumes lost in the fire? In this devastated land, it is not only the physical landmarks that have been obliterated.
The troops now squat in guarded compounds and larger buildings, but the government’s new peace hardly rests secure. A devolution package, lost in political wrangling, satisfies neither the extremist advocates of a unitary Sinhalese state nor those Tamil separatists proposing an independent Elam in the north and east. More immediately, the government’s credibility with the Tamil people rests on rehabilitating the Jaffna peninsula and feeding the 400,000 who have returned there since the army regained effective control three months ago: with no land route open and access by sea vulnerable to attacks, the logistics of reconstruction are massive.
Never mind the politics of instability. The government survives on a narrow parliamentary majority. Elected representatives of the legalised Tamil parties join the negotiations and build their political bases, but the Tigers lurk untamed and excluded in the jungles, their plans and military strength a source of endless speculation. Growing disenchantment among unemployed young Sinhalese in the south threatens a resurgence of the JVP movement, which was repressed with such savagery in the 1980s. Meanwhile, sporadic fighting continues in government-controlled areas of the north and east— an ambush here, a mine blast there, a “terrorist” disappeared by the security forces, an “informer” or rival politician executed by the Tigers—and all wonder how long the army can maintain its best behaviour before more reprisals occur.
Already, patterns of persecution familiar from other parts of the country stamp the life of returnees in Jaffna: young Tamil men detained in security sweeps and held in detention under the anti-terrorism laws. The propaganda battle is far from over. How long before the next offensive in this long-running and bitter struggle?
Facing Forward, Looking Back
The soldier on the roadside billboard looks resolutely forward, gun held steadily. A dove with outstretched wings perches uncertainly on his shoulder. For this is the “war for peace”. After a run of victories over the LTTE, the main Tamil militant group, the Sri Lankan army is not about to stop. The code names for its major operations—Sunrise and Tidal Wave—offer a promise and a threat. And, while it is urged to treat the Tamils not as a conquered people, there is no easing either its vigilance or its recruitment campaign.
In the logic of war, there is cause enough for both. The Tigers have lost their symbolic heartland and the lion emblem now flutters over Jaffna town for the first time in 12 years, but large areas of the north and east remain under LTTE control. Outside of Mannar island in the west, the Jaffna peninsula, and the east coast cities of Trincomalee and Batticaloa, travel is hazardous without LTTE permission, and much of the civil administration answers to Mr Prabakharan, not Ms Kumaratunga.
From their hideouts in the Vanni district and their jungle camps in the east, the Tigers attack police posts and road clearing parties in contested regions, even banks and power plants in the big cities. The government responds with pass laws, checkpoints and a whole routine of security measures that harasses the civilian population, especially young Tamil males.
For those living under LTTE control, the regime is hardly more benign. The mode of the LITE withdrawal from Jaffna betrayed the hopes of many: the Tiger cadres, secretly forewarned that they would not be defending the city, withdrew in good order with requisitioned supplies to prearranged safe havens, the civilians were told to evacuate only at the last moment.
Fleeing with what they could grab and who they could find, several hundred thousand crossed the Kilali lagoon in one day to join the growing mass of internally displaced. Now, as they move out of LTTE-controlled areas the people speak more plainly of the high taxes and extortion practised by the Tigers to finance the war, the repression of dissent, the forced conscription of children into the ranks. And the Colombo papers enthusiastically carry this news of the Tamil people’s growing disaffection with the Tigers.
Whoever may claim to protect them and act for them, many of the ordinary people are tired of this war and its waste of resources and energy. The checkpoint on the southern outskirts of Vavuniya town could symbolise the futility of it all. Forty lorries stationary on the roadside, 40 drivers chatting or playing cards in the shade, further down the road, another 25 trucks waiting to join the queue. The procedures may take days before these relief supplies, paid for by the government, clear a series of government checkpoints to be delivered to the boundary of the LITE area on the northern edge of town. There they will be dumped on the road in no-man’s land to be re-loaded into other lorries for the journey north, for the transport concession is as important as political control. Those entering or leaving the town also must disembark the buses at this point, trudge through the barriers, endure the checking of passes and the questioning, then re-board the buses and go on to the next checkpoint. The police seem weary in their duties, the travellers familiar with these routinised humiliations.
Indeed, in the people’s endurance, the visitor senses both strength and resignation. The moderate politicians are gone, the rhetoric shrill and virulent, the pain so deep and bitter on many sides, yet we can hope that exhaustion alone will bring this brutal conflict to a close. Will a partial military victory be turned to a just and lasting political solution? Will the fluttering dove ever fold its wings and settle down to roost?
No Go Zone
Government figures show that 45,000 internally displaced people were receiving dry rations and other food assistance in the district at the end of May. On the edge of Vavuniya town, on the Mannar road, a few concrete warehouses and a sprawl of thatch huts house a mass of people, newly crossed over from LTTE territory, who seek permission to move further south. Formerly, it was a UNHCR transit camp for those Sri Lankan refugees returning from India to the promised peace. That seems a long time ago.
Another large camp nearby is home to thousands of other returnees whose resettlement plans have also been stalled by the ongoing conflict. On its outer boundaries and adjoining plots some have received land and are building simple houses: not where they intended, but where it is safe and possible to do so. Others wait, dispirited and dependent, for peace to return to their own preferred sites or their former lands. They have waited many years.
At another transit camp people make their choices: some can work in Vavuniya town, others are taking land across the road. Many wonder if they made the right choice in coming back from Tamil Nadu: is it better to be homeless and dependent in your own land or in another’s? One man came here just over a year ago, before the peace talks broke down, to get established before bringing the rest of his family. Should he wait now and hope, or rejoin his family in India?
However, not all are in the camps. Southwest of Vavuniya town, near Cheddikulam, a new Tamil community has been establishing itself since 1993: building houses, churches and shops, planting gardens. With resettlement assistance, hope and a touch of peace they might make it, for the site is promising and fertile. Just beyond the new gardens lies the “no go” zone.
Before the encroaching jungle, the previous village lies unrecognised. The original inhabitants fled this heavily contested area in 1990. The army moved in, took thatch and timber for their barracks, built the bunker which now sits stolid and incongruous in the school yard. Adding to the irony, the sign declares a high-fenced building down the road to be a “Displaced Peoples Rehabilitation Centre”. It is not clear whether they forgot to change the name or the policy, for this small and crowded prison holds LTTE defectors and others who have crossed unauthorised at this part of the border, pending their clearance by the authorities.
Not a kilometre away lies a Muslim village, 87 families welcoming and well-organised. These people, expelled by the LTTE during one of their communal purges of Tamil areas, set up here three years ago. They seem established and happy, keen to be left alone so they can get on with their lives. Yet the layout and buildings resemble a camp rather than a village, as if they are not yet sure how to live, or have forgotten. South of the Mannar road a Catholic Tamil village is growing up at Ilupaikulam. The people are busy with their work, heartened by the visit of their pastor and his friends, proud of the Church they are building, wary of stirring ill-feeling among the Sinhalese villagers who live nearby.
Surely the feeling is mutual. Several kilometres away another settlement hosts a mix of people: returnees from India as well as people displaced from Jaffna, and parts of Vavuniya and Mannar districts. Their thatch houses are as spare as the terrain, but the fish are plentiful in the tank, they say, and they will grow something here. One of the men started moving in 1985: from his home in a village a short distance away he fled to Tamil Nadu in India, then returned to the transit camp in Vavuniya town hoping to resettle, then to Madhu camp (a Catholic shrine and internally displaced persons settlement 30 kilometres away), then to this place. Having made his fourth move, how long would he like to stay here? “Ten years,” he answers. It doesn’t sound unreasonable.