Cheers for Fears

As the line between euphoria and arrogance fades in Sri Lanka, there are indications of tough times ahead for the Tamils


Sri Lanka is like Kosovo of February 2008. And Colombo like Pristina. It is as if the nation has just achieved independence. Prabhakaran is dead for weeks now. But the jubilation is far from over in Sri Lanka.

The streets in Colombo are lined with Lankan national flags. They are everywhere. On top of balustrades. Outside booze shops. Over security barricades. Inside broiler chicken shops. “When I saw all the flags and people, my first reaction was: Sri Lanka must have won a Cricket world cup or something,” said a western tourist.

And then there are hundreds of leviathan billboards, featuring the ‘three musketeers’ – President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his two brothers. The most popular of them is of the President hugging his brother, the defence secretary, Gotabhaya Rajpaksa, and for a moment you would think that he will cry any time, overcome with emotion. Every vehicle has a picture of the President, and, of course, the flag. An autorickshaw driver who didn’t have one said a soldier had stopped him the other day, admonishing him for not being patriotic.

In the morning when the Sri Lankans go to work, they all sing the national anthem. In the evening, they do it again, also observing a two-minute silence for the martyred soldiers. Near the foreign ministry in Colombo, the entire staff of a software company is out, holding Sri Lanka’s national flower, the blue water lily, in their hands. “Sri Lanka is freedom,” said a man among them, struggling with his English.

There is palpable relief on the roads. In a city where life is governed by checkpoints and barricades, the prospect of their disappearance seems unreal. The Sri Lankans, particularly its government servants are basking in the glory of post-LTTE attention they are receiving. A publicity officer, who looks after the accreditation issues of foreign journalists, holds a magazine in his hands, and marks some lines of a report on the Lankan crisis. “This line shows how immature reporters are when it comes to our country,” he remarks with a look on his face which could pass off as glee.

The press accreditation card meant for foreign journalists looks like the most important document in Sri Lanka. As a friend working for a French newspaper quipped, “You cannot even piss without that card in your pocket.” The card enables you to roam around Colombo, take pictures if you like, park your vehicle at hotels in the high-security zone. But that is it. The card is of no use when you want to go to the north. That is where the IDP camps are, home to almost 3 lakh Tamil refugees. North is where the Tamils – even those who are not in camps – have been held up in an area 180 kilometres long, from south to north. They cannot come out. Nobody, particularly a Tamil, cannot go in. Repeated requests for access to one of the IDP camps is met with a poker-faced No.

The last hope for those who are denied access is the Media Centre for National Security, set up in a portion of the Colombo swimming club. Like any other colonial-era building, its wooden stairs creak every time somebody climbs up or down. These days they have been creaking too much. A horde of officers are monitoring television channels all across world, and, after every minute or so, they rush upstairs to the director’s office to update him.

Laxman Hullugalle sits in his office, his chair facing a huge Lankan map. The northern areas are pinned by miniature national flags. Some sections of western media had recently been given access to one of the IDP sites. The reports are damning. “The President has asked us to immediately halt permission to journalists. He has been particularly angry about the BBC report,” he says. “We are not from the BBC,” I tell him. “But that BBC reporter was an Indian,” he replies.

We travel to Vavuniya in northern Sri Lanka anyway without the security clearance. This government has been threatening to prosecute journalists who attempt visiting the northern areas. The Army chief said all foreign journalists are working “against his homeland”. A stringer for Reuters news agency was arrested from one of the refugee camps, and his camera confiscated. Another was brutally beaten up, and his beard and hair shorn.

Even aid agency workers are frustrated. Sarasi Wijeratne, an official with the Red Cross said the clear procedures of access were still lacking. Doctors without Borders says that at the Vavuniya hospital, nearly 2,000 patients are packed into a space meant for not more than 400. UK’s Christian Aid has forewarned that the camps are an epidemic waiting to happen. The agency’s Sajid Mohammed, who visited some of the camps said that there are 30 people living in a tent meant for five. “Some of them looked like as if they had not eaten for days,” he said. There are concerns about children, with a survey revelaing that 25 percent of children in some camps suffered from global acute malnutrition. Aid agencies fear the number could be significantly higher now. The camps are believed to be infested with intelligence sleuths who keep an eye on information leaking out.

We managed to speak to some Tamil families near Vavuniya. The meeting was secretly arranged amidst fear of government spies keeping a watch over Tamil-inhabited areas. One Tamil woman said that they were living in difficult conditions since the Sinhalese neighbours looked at them with suspicion. Breaking into tears, another woman said that some of her relatives were living in one of the IDP camps and she had not heard from them.

Getting into Trincomalee, one of the former LTTE bastions in the eastern region is extremely difficult. The media is discouraged from going there. “We don’t allow western journalists at all,” said an army officer at one of the check points.As one enters the main town, the ravages of the war are distinct. Skeletons of buildings riddled with bullets stand as stark reminder of the last days of the battle.

61-year-old Maruthamuthu Sinniah has come back from India after 24 years. He had left with his family in 1985 when the war between LTTE and the Lankan forces was raging on. One night, eighteen of his relatives were killed by unidentified men. Now, he has returned with his wife to a land where his house stood, razed by the Lankan army after they left. They live under a tattered United Nations tarpaulin. Another Tamil man who also returned from India said that he could notice a number of Sinhalese families who did not live there before.

In fact, one major fear is that the government will bring about a massive change in demographics of the Tamil-majority areas, particularly in the north, by providing incentives to Sinhalese. There are fears of settlements on the Israeli model. The army has already declared that it plans to increase its 2 lakh strong force by about 50 percent. “This helps prop up domestic consumption, and it provides a huge force to control the north, and to help impose the government’s political and development plans in the north,” says Alan Keenan of the International Crisis Group.

In Trincomalee, a Tamil man spoke to us about living there. His business (he wished it not to be identified) was gutted down in the riots against Tamils engineered in 1983 by the Sri Lankan navy. “You don’t know what kind of discrimination we are facing,” he said. “Please don’t quote me, they might just kill me,” he said.

Some Tamil families in Trincomalee were bashed up and some even forced to contribute money for a celebration feast. Fingers have been pointed at a new road being built from a Sinhalese village to a Tamil village, with a number of Sinhalese families being settled on both sides of it.

In the Trincomalee town, right in front of a cinema hall owned by a Tamil, the government has all of a sudden declared four ancient banyan trees as protected monument site. The cinema hall owner was scared of speaking to us, but another Tamil man said that the notice board was just a ploy to usurp the cinema hall.

“They will take away everything,” he said. The cinema man wept behind him.

(This report first appeared in the June 19 issue of the OPEN magazine - page 26 and 27.)

The boy with the bomb

The leader hugged him.

With his military fatigues weighing on him, Dayalan could feel the metal buckle of the leader’s belt press against his waist. The leader looked at him for a moment, his hands still resting on Dayalan’s shoulders, and then he said, “Go and destroy the target.”

Almost five months later, Dayalan saw the images of Prabhakaran on TV, his eyes open, as if to convey another message to Dayalan. But the dead don’t speak, and Dayalan knew it only too well; at 17, he had seen enough death. Now the leader himself was dead, a clean bullet hole above his forehead. He wore the same uniform. As for the belt, Dayalan couldn’t see it. But the feel of that buckle returned to him, that haunting symbol of authority against his waist.

It was on 22 December 2008 that soldiers of the Sri Lankan army pounced on Dayalan in Kilinochchi, located in the northern bastion of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). He was on a mission with a clear brief: he was to mingle with the crowd and get them accustomed to seeing him around. And then he would have received specific instructions – a message to identify his target for him. He would have eased his way towards his target, his finger near a button on his belly bulge. The finger would have pressed the button. And then, there would be a void.

More than slipping towards his target, Dayalan was keen to slip into this void.

The message was still hours away, or maybe a few minutes, he couldn’t tell, when Dayalan found himself surrounded by the army soldiers. He could have bitten his cyanide capsule; like the rest of his militant cadres, he carried one slung around his neck. It was another way to the same void. But when the time finally came, he had that one moment of hesitation. Dayalan’s courage failed him. As he was taken prisoner, he knew reclaiming that courage would be of no help.

At the age of ten, Dayalan became a ‘Black Tiger’ – a member, that is, of the LTTE’s suicide squad. Within the ranks, it’s an honour, they’re told. These are the brave ones, the truly ferocious who have mounted numerous deadly attacks against the LTTE’s enemies, including a former Indian Prime Minister.

On a hill overlooking rubber plantations, Dayalan is now being kept in a camp alongwith 94 other LTTE child soldiers. On one side flows a river. Ringed in by barbed wire, the camp is guarded round-the-clock by the army.

The militant outfit has had a history of recruiting children as a part of its fighting force. According to an estimate, between 1983 and 2002, about 60 per cent of the 14,000 LTTE cadre were children. From 2002 onwards, about 7,000 children had been recruited as soldiers. According to Unicef, 44 per cent of these were girls. Most of these children would volunteer themselves to avenge the death of their parents or escape a life of poverty. Some of them were even abducted by the LTTE and forcibly made to join their ranks.

The LTTE has used child soldiers in carrying out some of the deadliest attacks on the Sri Lankan forces. In 1993 and 1996, it used them along with elite militia forces to overrun two Lankan security complexes, where they seized arms and ammunition worth millions. In 1996, in another attack on a military complex in Mullativu, underage soldiers are believed to have shot dead some 300 Lankan troops after they were disarmed. Child soldiers have also suffered heavy casualties in various offensives. In an attack described as their worst-ever setback, some 3,000 LTTE cadres, most of them children and women, were killed during an attack on a military complex in October 1995.

More than the bloody mound of bodies, how young they were was an outrage at the time. The Sri Lankan government placed the onus of the horror squarely on the LTTE. The authorities in Colombo have always used such underage recruitment as a potent propaganda tool against the outfit. Today, the government has a distinct we-told-you-so air about it, as it showcases camps holding these child soldiers for the global media and aid agencies to ascertain these claims. The bigger plan, of course, is rehabilitation. The children are being given vocational training. “It is important that these children are helped to forget their past,” says Dr Hiranti Wijermanne, a former Unicef consultant who helps the government with child rehabilitation programmes, “and then trained to get employment.”

Dayalan is training to become a tailor. He was one year old when his parents were killed in a bombing by the Sri Lankan Air Force. Brought up in an orphanage run by the LTTE, he was inducted into its suicide squad when he turned ten in 2002. As part of the regimen, he was taught how to use hand-grenades and fire-arms such as the T-56 Chinese rifle. With the infantry, he took an active part in LTTE’s counter-offensive against the army in the Mannar area of the northwest region, where he received severe shrapnel injuries. For training as a suicide bomber, he got the personal attention of Prabhakaran’s son, Charles Antony.

Antony is dead now, and so is his father. And every other LTTE leader Nayakan knew. When he is not at the sewing machine, Nayakan spends time in his bunker bed, staring at two words inscribed in bold letters over a wall at the foot of his bed: ‘Amma, Appa’. Why didn’t he bite that cyanide capsule when surrounded by the army? There is a pause, and then he replies, “I wanted to live.”

Among the children in the camp is a young girl, 15-year-old Aruna. She was abducted by the LTTE in 2009 after it faced a severe crunch of soldiers fighting the war. She is from Jaffna, and was being brought up by her mother after her fisherman father died in a boat accident. As she was being taken away, she remembers clutching her mother’s sleeves, frantic for her to save her. But there was not much she could do. Offering one child ensured her own safety, and more importantly, the safety of the other two children younger than Aruna.

After being put up in a camp, where she refused to speak at first, Aruna remembers being hit brutally by one of her trainers. The trainer also ordered her hair cut short. “I cried a lot when they did that,” she recalls. But before she could be properly trained, the war entered its final phase, and her militant captors were overthrown. Her mother managed to pull her out of the LTTE barracks. Then, along with her mother and two siblings, Aruna made it to a refugee camp. From there, she was made to surrender to the army by her mother. All Aruna wants now is to rejoin her family and “continue my studies”. Did she ever meet Prabhakaran? “I don’t know who he is,” she says.

Unlike Aruna, Mary did get to meet Prabhakaran. “I was very happy when I saw him,” she says. From a fisherman’s family in the Mullativu region, Mary says she joined the LTTE in 2007 and was trained by senior women cadres. Three months ago, she was put on frontline duty. “I was very scared as there were bullets flying all around,” she says, “We could hear explosions as well.” As the Lankan army advanced, she slipped away, blending in with other people, and then she surrendered to the army. “I threw away my rifle and just ran away,” she says. Mary was fortunate she was not caught fleeing by the LTTE; girls who were caught ‘deserting’ would have their hair shaven off and be sent back to the frontline. As for the boys, they would be severely beaten.

Vijayan is a soldier who got away – in a sense. His story is not any less horrifying, though. As the LTTE’s death toll rose, it became more and more desperate for recruits. Thus it was that senior cadres of the LTTE dragged 17-year-old Vijayan out of his home in Mullativu on 29 March. The no-fire zone had been shrinking around them, and Vijayan was hiding in a bunker with his family when he was abducted. His parents tried to stop the militants, but all they got for their efforts was the hard end of the rifle butt; a few warning shots fired in the air put an end to the last wisps of resistance.

Vijayan was taken to a training camp with dozens of other children, where they were taught how to handle a rifle and stage an attack. Five days later, he escaped along with few other boys. They were fired at from behind. Many boys died. Vijayan was lucky to get away with bullet injuries on his arm. “But I kept moving in the jungle till I saw the Lankan army,” he says, relieved. His parents are also in a refugee camp, and there’s family life to look forward to. “I want to study further,” he adds.

It was in this camp that another young girl was reunited with her brother after a year. The girl was taken for arms training in June 2008. She was trained with a mortar unit. During the final offensive, she was captured by the Lankan army. Her brother was inducted into the LTTE in February this year, and he spent a few weeks with them before surrendering. The girl was talking to a friend when her brother was brought in. “I cried with joy,” she says. “We want to go back to our mother; we will never leave her again,” says the brother.

It may be a while before these children are reunited with their families. International human rights groups are investigating reported cases of disappearances in at least one refugee camp. All’s not well, they say. “A number of pro-government Tamil paramilitary groups have unhindered access to the refugee camps,” says Charu Lata Hogg of The Coalition to Stop the use of Child Soldiers. Human rights activists also question the legality of camps such as the one where Dayalan and others are interned.

“Let us be clear about one thing: rehabilitation camps, as the government calls them, cannot be run by the military,” says Hogg. “No matter what the government says, these camps are, after all, military-run establishments.”

At least the bullets have stopped flying, some camp inmates would say. It is evening, and all former LTTE child soldiers are to report at the drill ground. A female lieutenant from the Lankan army is in charge. After attendance, the children stand in attention in front of the Sri Lankan national flag – a flag they were once trained to bring down. From the tiger on the LTTE flag to the lion on the Lankan flag, it’s a change they may only faintly grasp the symbolism of. But maybe the real difficulty will be in trying to lead a normal life. Despite all the rehab efforts, their future looks grey. Like the overcast sky above the fluttering flag.

(Photo courtesy: David White)

(Some names have been changed to protect their identities. The report appeared first in the June 12 issue of the Open magazine. You can see pics on the page 30 of the June 12 issue at http://www.openthemagazine.com/)