Hard not to laugh, for a brief second, when you’re told about Claymore landmines. I am being told of them by a helpful young Sri Lankan near a military checkpoint, who is making a fairly compelling case not to be stupid by waiting till dark and dancing off around the guns and into the jungle. But I’m quietly laughing because I have just learned that the Claymore — shaped like a fat, convex, olive-green laptop with little legs to bury in the ground — has embossed writing on the business end. What the writing says is: ”Front towards Enemy.”
Even the arms industry, apparently, can’t help but pap-feed us with health and safety disclaimers. And one of the most effective counters to tripwires, it turns out, is Silly String, which lands on the wires in all its gaudy, giveaway colours, without detonating them. The most inhuman, anonymous, cowardly, deadly weasels of modern warfare, and they come with safety warnings, and they’re battled by streamers designed more normally for parties featuring jelly. Hard not to laugh. Briefly.
Not much laughter, though. Not here, not today. This is a foul place to die, this inner country. Food rots at an awful rate. Vines and creepers twist around any dead animal or abandoned house, pulling them back to an ancient green. Wooden shacks tick, at night, in the heat; and in the morning, thin, young, scared soldiers, many disastrously untrained, will smell of fear as they check bags and trucks, and channel their panic to the country’s many innocents. ”Their mothers will get 200 000 rupees [about $6 000] when they are killed,” explains Pearl Thevanayagan, a now-exiled Tamil, ”so it is, if you like, a good career move to join. At least for the family.”
The contrast is odious. This is one of the kindest countries on earth. Smiles, genuine, empathetic, as natural as a waterfall. Even when I was here following the tsunami, I was struck repeatedly by the welcomes from those who had nothing, both the majority Sinhalese and the Tamils. And, still, you can head south from Colombo without a care in the world, take a breezy taxi to the beaches and beauty of Galle.
Vicious little war
And then you try to go north. Here are the landmines. Here is one of the world’s most vicious little wars, long-running, near-forgotten, but bursting back. Here are not only the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) but their offshoot, the Black Tigers, the suicide squads. According to Jane’s Information Group, between 1980 and 2000 the Tigers had carried out a total of 168 suicide attacks on civilians and military targets, easily exceeding those in the same period by Hezbollah and Hamas combined. And, now, today, thwarted in their attacks on the government and military, they’re going for the softest targets of all, the impoverished working people of Sri Lanka. The gloves came off again at the start of 2008, with the government vowing to break the Tigers within a year, and there is now a palpable fear among travellers, in markets, at any public event, increasing by the week.
For all those decades of suicide practice, you’d think they might be getting the hang of it by now. But in Colombo’s Fort Railway Station, a few weeks before my visit, it all went wrong again. A female suicide bomber, coming off a train from the south, was spotted acting oddly by police — too many clothes for the cloying heat — and fled from the turnstile back into the station. By platform three she sat down and exploded. She took 11 others with her.
It is a miserable station, the ground dank with old fruit and poverty, but travel must go on. ”I remember the smell, mainly,” says Neel, a well-groomed local man who heard the explosion. ”I couldn’t get in to do anything, but I remember the smell from just outside. It was like a… fish market.” The 11 dead included half a high school baseball team, and 92 were injured.
A similar rank odour hangs over Mount Lavinia, a suburb to the south of the capital, when I get there just after hearing of a bus bomb. They’re still mopping up. Outsiders are not welcomed by the authorities, but the shopkeepers are as exuberantly friendly as most on this blessed, unhappy island.
This time, the smell of burning is just kippered metal, not flesh: one passenger, Indrani Fernando, saw a suspicious bag left under a seat near the back.
”When no one claimed it I told the crew and shouted at people to get off,” she says. The bus halted in the middle of a junction and everyone filed off and began walking away, rather quickly, and the police were called. Twenty seconds after the driver and conductor had climbed off, the bomb exploded: 10 passers-by were injured, among them children. Indrani later took a congratulatory call from the President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, thanking her for her vigilance. I go to see the bus, towed three kilometres away. The carcass is eviscerated, skeletal: no one would have survived.
Just before I arrived in Sri Lanka, another bus had been blown up a couple of kilometres outside Dambulla, an ancient holy rest-stop on the journey to the east. The 18 killed were almost all pilgrims, and included children. In the remote southern town of Buttala the rebels had recently failed to kill most of the passengers on a bus with a simple bomb; so they gunned down 32 of them as they fled, in flames.
Desperate tactics have been adopted by the Tigers, but there are increasing signs that by targeting innocent civilians they are fast losing whatever sympathies they once had within the majority Sinhalese population.
It was in January that the government ended a six-year official ceasefire. It had been something of a flimsy confection anyway, but it was at least nominally policed by outside observers. The problem with Sri Lanka is the impossibility of access: it is, literally, a jungle out there. The government will give very little access north other than to carefully approved agencies, and it only allows them to see what it wants them to: journalists and aid workers alike have been targeted and ”disappeared” by both sides.
For years, we do definitely know, there had been skirmishing, and quiet rearming, on both sides, and the gathering of funds, not least from North London. An estimated 150 000 Tamils live in Britain, and there has long been fundraising here for the LTTE; the Sri Lankan government estimates $140-million is raised annually in Britain, despite the Tigers being a proscribed organisation.
Open war
There was a brief rapport, and even cooperation with the military, in the wake of the 2004 tsunami. But open war erupted in January this year. President Mahinda Rajapaksa was elected last year on a tough anti-Tiger ticket, and is apparently winning more public sympathy, at home at least, for the stance than he had expected. (The Western world still frowns on Rajapaksa, so the arms now come from China.) The United Nations’s Norwegian observers and peace-brokers, who’d been urging a political rather than military solution, have left in disgust.
So, now, the army, its numbers boosted to more than 150 000, has been waging open war in the north. Even though government figures are notoriously spun — if you count the number of rebels claimed triumphantly by government press releases to have been killed down the years, there would hardly be a Sri Lankan standing on the island — and the national press based in the capital are known to be hopelessly spoon-fed, everyone I spoke to seemed to agree there had been vital ground taken since the start of the year, in the north-west, towards Mannar, where artillery battle still rages, and on the north-east coast. Over 1 500 rebels have died since the start of the year, according to the government, and although the Tigers dispute the figures they don’t do so with much enthusiasm.
And the rebels, essentially pinned down in two territories, have taken to bombs, on trains and on buses. In Colombo, around the presidential palace, and the army HQ, the security is absurdly fierce. The main roads in the city begin to close shortly after sundown. For three kilometres along the waterfront, just north and yet a million miles from the tourist hotels, there is a sentry every 10 metres. Gunboats growl offshore. There are, away from the hotels, checkpoints everywhere: you can expect your tuk-tuk driver to be pulled over at least three times in any 10-minute journey. The rebels, therefore, have had to go for soft targets.
We are stopped four times on the way to Colombo 13, a predominantly Tamil area, one night. After a while it becomes a simple nuisance, although some police are more pleasant than others. Many are, like the Tamils, simply boys with guns.
The Voeni Bar, dirty velvet drapes and wary eyes, is not exactly an unwelcoming place, but grows subtly more quiet on our entry. It’s only after two hours, when most drinkers have got through a bottle or two of Arrack, the fierce local coconut liquor, that they will talk to me. Or not.
‘I’m not going to start talking now’
”I have kept my mouth shut for 20 years,” whispers one bewhiskered Tamil, leaning across conspiratorially between coconut belches. ”I’m not going to start talking now.” This, I will find again and again, in the cities and on the east coast, is the story of their lives: Tamils are incredibly wary of speaking either for or against the Tigers. Both the government and the Tigers are notorious for making people ”disappear”. The UN Working Group on enforced and involuntary disappearances last year noted 317 in Sri Lanka, the highest number in the world. ”Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa, once a rights advocate, has now led his government to become one of the world’s worst perpetrators of forced disappearances,” says Elaine Pearson, Human Rights Watch’s deputy director for Asia. The security services repeatedly deny involvement; the LTTE deny, as always, everything.
Youngsters at the same table are a little less reticent. ”It is difficult to talk. Whatever you say, one side will see you as a traitor,” says the more confident of the three. ”But I think things have changed, a little. A lot. LTTE used to have support from many people who were not Tamil. Here, in the cities, within the Sinhalese. These people are still our friends, my friends, we move freely. The man you are with…” He breaks off to nod to and take a cigarette from the taxi driver who had joined me inside; we are far from hotels, and white faces, and the times grow daily more laden with distrust. ”He is Sinhalese, and welcome. But most of them have fallen out with the LTTE now and do not like them. This business of bombing buses. It is the poorest people they get. It seems a mad thing to do.” The exchanges have been hurried, drink-fuelled and wary, free of smiles, and my companions are eager to leave. We get stopped four more times on the way back to the hotel. It is infuriating, but good practice for the next day.
Checkpoints
The drive to Trincomalee, on the far east coast, should take about eight hours from Colombo, there and back. It takes 16. There are, at a rough count, 70 checkpoints. Each police or military commander is made to answer for any mistakes, so each of the few lonely half-beaten tracks down from far-off Tamil territory has a hot and worried crew manning dugouts. Papers are checked four times, at heavy gunpoint. There are no computers, just pencils, and triplicate, and barked queries. There is much frustration. A quiet fear, beating away softly. Fruit stalls have sprung up.
The impenetrable nature of the forest beyond, the wilds of the Huluru reserve, where elephants still roam — we almost hit two of them, grey boulders swinging suddenly into the jeep-lights — lasts for hundreds of kilometres north, to the Tamil enclaves. No one wants to go. The early tracks have all been mined, by both sides; according to a couple of soldiers they have singularly lost count of where they lie, as have the rebels. And beyond that lie few villages, and days of walking, until the northern provinces. No one wants to go, I say, apart from a party of Buddhist pilgrims, trying to get to Tamil territory to visit a shrine, a few weeks ago. They were bombed at Dambulla for their trouble.
The soldiers, strangely, are among the most talkative, after cigarettes are passed. They say little, however, that you couldn’t read in the Colombo papers: we are winning, Tigers are dying, it will be over by the end of the year. It’s getting others to talk which is excruciating, especially the further east you go. This coast was ”cleared” of rebels two years ago, but the memories are strong. ”I know who you are, but I do not know who you may be talking to,” says one young woman, watching a stall near Kantale. ”Trust is not good here. You say the wrong thing and the wrong side hears … children have disappeared. Families have disappeared. Both sides have had these … tactics.”
‘When the going get tough, the tough get going’
It’s the same when we finally get to Trincomalee, once a winningly popular coastal hideaway for tourists. Today, few hotels are open, alcohol licences have been revoked, there are no tourists at all. Fort Frederick, a thrillingly picturesque castle on the headland, has become once more a garrison. Troops march and strut and sweat and shout: a huge official daub of black paint on white wall reads, ”When the going get tough, the tough get going.”
Back in Colombo, the Hilton is at 40% occupancy, the ritzier Galadari at 25%. Visitors still sun themselves, inured by money. Half a kilometre away, life for the local Sinhalese has not been this hard for years. Inflation is racing. Rice has trebled in price within four weeks. Everywhere, the checkpoints. Everywhere, far more than I had noticed on my last trip here, there are signs of hapless poverty.
Rubbish lies burning on every corner at night. Most of it; some is simply left to rot. I step, more than once, on a fish, which explodes. Old women drag themselves through the detritus of markets, seeking scraps. There is an improbable number of men with one leg: landmines. It is into these parts, the poorest parts, that the Tigers have taken their battle, and you can feel former sympathies evaporate like spit on a hot plate.
It is not, I am told, by both moderate Tamils and worried Sinhalese, that it has been a mad cause, some crazed jihad. Historically, Tamils were mainly brought over from India by, of course, Britain, to help run the plantations in what was then Ceylon: they were schooled in governance, bookkeeping, administration, better than the locals. After independence, however, there was resentment from the Sinhalese majority, now at 80%. Tamils were effectively exiled to the north, around Jaffna, yet given little say in their own affairs; hence the liberation fight. And 80 000 dead, about 6 000 in the past two years alone; and today again, far to the north-west, another pitched battle is breaking out on the Mannar peninsula. The Tiger cadres are formed mainly of women and, reportedly, heavily defeated: there is scepticism at government reports, but not too much.
‘War on terror’
A swift drive from the crippled men and women and I am in the high, cool, finely furnished offices of the governor of the national bank, the Bank of Ceylon. Ajith Nivard Cabril is one of the president’s closest advisers. Welcoming and articulate, he exudes reasonableness, speaks of the many great plans for highways, docks, a revitalisation of the economy. He grows most passionate, however, when talking of the Tigers. ”You have to remember that the LTTE is the most ruthless terrorist organisation you can think of. Look at that bus yesterday. You saw the bus? You went to see the bus? There would have been 30 bodies. What was left of them. And the LTTE is certainly not, you must understand, the Tamil people. The moderates do not have a voice. I want them to have that voice, as does the president, all of us.” I ask him to explain one puzzle: the government’s apparent promise to the world to resolve things politically while, in its own country, boasting daily of new victories and promising a rout within a year.
”The government is trying to work out a political solution with the Tamils, but not with the LTTE,” says Cabril. ”I was part of the 2006 delegation to talks in Geneva and met these people, heard what they had to say — quite unrepentant … It is a war on terror. The LTTE will have to change, stop, come to the table or… be reduced. They said for a long time this war was unwinnable. Well, we are winning now.” The smile above his crisp shirt fades only when I point out that the UN, Unicef and countless other human rights organisations have pointed fingers not simply at the Tigers but at his government for illegal abductions, detentions, threats and violations ranging from the heavy-handed to downright illegal. ”In a warlike situation, mistakes are made. Look at that man shot in London, that de Menezes.”
It is an unhappy walk, that dusk, the kilometre back to a tourist hotel. Soldiers bristle throughout this fortified zone. The streets are quiet but for the fires; a population cowed, both by the threat from the north and the overwhelming security measures which have kept the government and military terribly safe but thus shifted the war to hungry shoppers, school sports teams, sweating innocents on their way home with a repaired Hoover. It is a subtly changed country. Guns on the streets to the east; artillery bombardments on the Tigers’ foxholes far to the north; machine-pistols in the hands of uniformed teenagers in Colombo, and Semtex in the stations. A changed country, and an increasingly hard one, rank with propaganda on both sides, in which to catch absolute truth; most aid and observational organisations have been banned from observation in the north, or have chosen to stay clear. But one thing is indisputable: unless the Tigers radically change tactics soon they will have lost all support in the main south of the country. ”There has to, must be, international intervention,” I am told later, passionately, by Pearl Thevanayagan, who is now acting at times as an expert witness at Westminster to stop refugees being repatriated to a jail cell or, these days, almost definitely worse. ”But it has to be neutral. Not India. Our duty, as exiles, is to hold meetings, do anything, somehow, to simply tell the world this can’t go on. I am a Tamil, yes, but look at what is happening to the whole country. The Sinhalese are not exactly having a good time.”
The night before I fly out I wander down to the beach at Colombo. Within a couple of weeks, it turns out, this unconscionable little war will have erupted ever faster. A suicide bomber exploded successfully at the start of a marathon just outside Colombo, killing 13 (including a government minister). Then a parcel was left on the overhead rack of a bus leaving the depot at Piliyandala, just south of the capital: the fireball killed 24 and injured scores. The local hospital had to close its doors. The bloodiest ”proper” encounter, near the Tigers’ Jaffna strongholds, claimed the lives of 52 rebels and 38 soldiers, despite the army’s gunships. Just over two weeks ago the rebels made it into central Colombo, killing six with a bomb close to the Hilton. Bus bombs have gone off on the road to Kandy, which is tourist central. Things are coming closer; speeding up.
Down to the beach. The last time I was here, two days after the tsunami, crowds wandered together, gathered themselves organically, by the sea every sunset, to look at the ocean: to stare with something like awe. Some would climb up a disused watchtower the better to see the darkling horizon: there was a feeling something could happen again, and a few hasty warnings were shouted at shadows. Today the pool is busy again; yet just as busy is the watchtower. Two mounted guns and a bristle of rifles. They are pointed directly away from the sea, pointed down into their own people, the enemy within. – guardian.co.uk