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BOOK
REVIEW
Conflict kaleidoscope
Sri Lanka: Voices From a War
Zone by Nirupama Subramanian
Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia
It is not unbecoming to call
Sri Lanka a state and society in permanent crisis
with a few interludes of hope thrown in. As the
juggernaut of violence etches deeper spirals, just
how precarious is precarious enough for the
current ceasefire to melt into full-blooded war,
time alone can tell. Indian journalist Nirupama
Subramanian's bunch of human interest stories
vivifies the horror and intense suffering that war
has wrought on ordinary and 
extraordinary Sri Lankans. A touching
testimony against warfare as a solution to
problems, its "little histories" are products of
seven years (1995-2002) spent in the field by the
author as a foreign correspondent.
Subramanian kicks off with the grave tale
of a 77-year-old father whose daughter fell victim
to a LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam)
suicide bomb attack on Sri Lanka's Central Bank in
1996. His shell-shocked wife stopped talking,
progressively lost her memory and died from a
stroke. From 1995, the war came to Colombo city
with unimaginable terror. At the Independence
Square bombing site, Subramanian saw bewildered
people crying and feeling overwhelmed by the
losses.
As the Tigers turned the heat on
Colombo, it was the minority Tamils who bore the
brunt of new government security rigmaroles -
police registrations, detentions,
cordon-and-searches and officially endorsed
Sinhalese vigilantism. Caught in the "Tamil equals
Tamil Tiger equation", even anti-LTTE Tamils were
harassed. Subramanian herself, being a Tamil from
India, was accused by soldiers as a "terrorist".
Accountability from the LTTE or the army was a
chimera.
The next story is about the mass
exodus of Tamils from Jaffna in 1995, whose
magnitude was unknown to journalists until much
later. This catastrophe was ordered by the LTTE to
deprive the government an all-out victory. Those
who held out in Jaffna were warned by Tigers with
death threats, shots in the air and legs. The
evacuated town looked like a graveyard. To force
civilians further south into the Wanni, the LTTE
arranged free transportation, tea and bread to the
internally displaced persons (IDPs) and restricted
"exit passes". By 1996, many IDPs returned,
defying LTTE diktats, but found Jaffna occupied by
the army and haunted by evil spirits. In one man's
words, "We carry a double burden. Sinhalese racism
and tyranny of the Tigers." (p 37)
Subramanian's kaleidoscope travels to
Vavuniya, a popular destination for the IDPs
fleeing the north. Fearful of "Tiger sleepers",
the government implemented a draconian pass system
in the town comparable to apartheid. Tamils had to
get passes from the police to leave camps or go to
work. Anyone without the permit could be jailed
for 18 months without charges. Even influential
Tamils with emergencies failed to get passes in
time. Curbs on movement and mangy food rations
turned Vavuniya into "a vast open-air prison." (p
44) Visiting presspersons had to apply for a
"white pass" to enter this jail. The inhuman
system which had no basis in law alienated Tamils
from President Chandrika Kumaratunga, who once
intended to win their hearts. One returning
refugee from India said it all: "Instead of peace,
we discovered the pass." (p 54)
In 1997,
the Sri Lankan army launched Operation Jaya
Sekurui to wrest a portion of the LTTE-controlled
north. Before the rebel counter-attack, soldiers
in the tactical headquarters at Thandikulam had a
sixth sense of being sitting ducks. One senior
officer admitted, "If you were not scared at that
time, there had to be something abnormal about
you." (p 57) Renegade cries of "We don't want to
die" and "Please don't let us die" rang the air
around the trench lines. The military's
recruitment drive had few takers, unlike back in
1990 when Sinhalese youth joined in droves.
Pathetic attempts to censor news about battlefront
casualties had failed and the grim tragedy of war
widows enveloped Sinhalese villages. Thousands of
troop desertions occurred, causing law-and-order
quandaries. In 1996-7, to pay for armament imports
and improve its parlous foreign exchange reserves,
the government trained and encouraged a record
number of poor citizens to emigrate to the Middle
East as housemaids and au pairs. Several were
cheated by greedy employers out of salaries,
physically assaulted and stranded without means of
getting back to Sri Lanka. While they were away,
families often broke down. Defending the callous
trade slammed by rights advocates as "selling of
women abroad as slaves", the Minister for Labor
claimed that Sri Lanka had no choice.
Subramanian moves on to the canker of
missing army men. Using technical fig leaves, the
government played down debacles at the front,
inviting false hopes and frustration among
relatives who waged lone and collective struggles
to trace their loved ones. More than the LTTE,
they had bitter feelings toward the government.
One woman whose husband was declared missing in
action for two years was in uncontrollable tears,
remarking, "The ones who support this war are
those whose sons have not gone to fight." (p 99)
Jaffna under army rule had a checkpoint
proliferation, where scores of Tamil civilians
were detained, subsequently tortured and
unceremoniously buried. Meant to nab Tigers, the
heavily fortified roadblocks became stops for
"picking up" innocents for questioning and
disappearance. In 1998, 400 bodies were exhumed
from the Chemmani mass grave following magisterial
orders. Although senior army officers were
involved in the killings and cover-up, families of
the victims got no clear answers or justice. All
indicted security personnel were released on bail.
Subramanian met Razeek, a notorious
counter-insurgent in Batticaloa, two days before
he was murdered by a Black Tiger. His
army-assisted group of 150 men had killed 30
LTTErs, taking 21 casualties. A Tamil who belonged
to a rival Eelam outfit, Razeek assisted Indian
and Sri Lankan intelligence agencies as a "Tiger
spotter". Disguises, machine guns and automatic
weapons were a way of life for him and a means of
self-protection. In his opinion, eliminating the
LTTE would end Sri Lanka's conflict. Armed with
the military's carte blanche, his men taxed local
traders and bullied civilians. Not many in
Batticaloa mourned his assassination.
In
2000, Subramanian saw the stupefying destruction
of Chavakachcheri and Colombothurai when the guns
fell silent briefly. Returnees had "nothing to
return to" in the concrete rubbles that were once
thriving small towns. One IDP lamented, "We have
been through this every few years. We barely
finish repairing the house when it is destroyed
again." The manager of a news stand wondered at
his fragmentation, "What sort of life is this? We
are in one place, our children are somewhere else,
our things are in a third." (p 143) Stress,
depression, trauma and suicides were endemic and
individuals were under strain to cope. The sense
of community was totally shattered.
In
2001, Sri Lanka's prime minister declared a
"conspiracy against Buddhism" and ordered mass
ordinations of a thousand new monks immediately.
In a theocratic country vested with paradoxical
"militant Buddhism", this was a twin to the
recruitment of impoverished Sinhalese as soldiers.
Influential monks held that the "Tamil problem"
would disappear once the LTTE was defeated.
Political concessions to minorities were
considered deathblows to Buddhism and steps to the
breakup of the country. Kumaratunga's new
constitution with federal provisions was
stonewalled by these "warrior-monks". Near
Kathankudy, Subramanian met an escaped Tamil child
soldier from the LTTE after the ceasefire
agreement (CFA) was signed in 2002. His helpless
but defiant mother had only one protection
mechanism left: "They have to shoot me before they
take him away again." (p 170) Post-CFA Batticaloa
was "only afraid of the Tigers, not the army".
People were too petrified to protest the LTTE's
"one family one child" conscription rule in
eastern Sri Lanka. A typically cynical area
commander of the rebels brushed aside this burning
misfortune as propaganda "spread by our enemies".
In 2002, Subramanian left for the Wanni to
attend LTTE helmsman Prabhakaran's press
conference. The long drive up the A9 "highway of
blood" had nothing but ravaged houses, ripped tree
stumps and landmines. The security checks for
journalists in Kilinochchi "would put any
post-9/11 airport check to shame". (p 193)
Prabhakaran's guards took up positions like the US
presidential security service. He was essentially
a "prisoner for life, locked in a cage of his own
making", unable to ever embrace democratic
politics.
In 2003, the author visited
Mutur (Trincomalee district) where Tamil-Muslim
tensions were strong since the LTTE was allowed to
open political offices in government-controlled
areas. Muslim rejection of the Tigers as sole
spokesmen for "Tamil-speaking people" made Mutur a
flashpoint for tit-for-tat incidents and
land-taxation disputes. The father of a Tamil boy
who disappeared in revenge for the killing of two
Muslim men cut a sorry figure. The war took his
first three sons, and now the CFA had snatched his
last issue.
This book shines with a rare
compassion for human grief that only the best
journalists can summon to their writings.
Subramanian has fathomed the ugliness of war and
challenged the national security narratives which
glorify it.
Sri Lanka: Voices From a
War Zone by Nirupama Subramanian. Penguin
Books, New Delhi, 2005. ISBN: 0-67-005828-9.
Price: US$8.15, 230 pages.
(Copyright 2005
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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