War and Pieces

Sri Lankans live in a country at war with itself. If President Rajapaksa sees reason, peace and an economic boom await India’s island neighbour

Sri Lankans live in a country at war with itself. If President Rajapaksa sees reason, peace and an economic boom await India’s island neighbour

THE ‘BATTLE of the Maroons’ is on, an annual cricket match that features two of Colombo’s best-known Buddhist schools, Ananda and Nalanda. Lanka-style brass bands, the delirious, irresistible ‘papare’, carry on, encouraged by alumni taken with 3 Coin beer and exhilaration as they cheer every run, a stop, a wicket. In a nondescript meeting room in the clubhouse enclosure is a treasure trove of trophies, including the 1996 World Cup that morphed the cricketing cubs of South Asia into tigers, and provided balm to war wounds.

Outside, Colombo is Baghdad-on-Sea. Checkpoints at every turn urge you with nothing gentler than an AK-47. Air Force helicopters knit the capital. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have over the years killed one president, Ranasinghe Premadasa, and maimed another, Chandrika Kumaratunge. A light Tigers aircraft was shot down into the Inland Revenue building near the Colombo Hilton one night this past February. It could have been heading for the current president’s house, or naval headquarters.

And elsewhere, to the northeast, the country’s surging army battles the Tigers and their wily chief Velupillai Pirabakaran in a last-ditch action, the outcome of which can make—or continue to break—Sri Lanka. The war with the Tigers—really Sri Lanka’s war with itself—has killed nearly 75,000 Sinhala and Tamil combatants and civilians, the aged and infant. It’s a shocking figure in a country of 21 million that, north to south, is little more than a half-hour as the jet plane flies; east to west, if security barriers permit, a day’s drive.

The Tigers also killed in revenge a sometime Indian ally, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, for his folly to fight them with the Indian Peace Keeping Force. More than 1,000 of India’s misled soldiers died, too. A more amenable, present-day Indian intervention is in the form of a medical team to run a hospital for civilians escaping the war in Pulmoddai, up from the strategic eastern harbour town of Trincomalee.

The fear isn’t over. The dying isn’t done yet in this achingly beautiful land. Meanwhile, there’s a game on. “Hell,” I marvel, as Nalanda cheer equalling the first inning score of Ananda, a modest 140. “Who’d think there’s a war out there?”

“Yeah,” smiles Sukitha Senaratne, a 22 year-old sometime treasury assistant with Citibank in Colombo, and cricket player. At work for a local sports website, papare.com, he turns from his video camera. “Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

The war’s been around longer than Senaratne, when anti-Tamil riots in 1983, riding on the deaths of some soldiers, sparked separatism. What will you do if it all settles, I ask. Banking?

“Something to do with cricket. Whatever happens here, cricket works.”

Sri Lanka’s president is wagering the entire country to offer more options. From all the propaganda, he could be Rambo. He is Rajapaksa.

Nearly every street in Colombo has a poster, banner or cutout of the president talking to Sri Lankan troops with war paint on their grim but determined faces, brandishing machine guns, wearing garlands of ammunition.

He is there, Mahinda Rajapaksa, when schoolchildren leave for home in Yakkala, an hour southeast of Colombo, fronting a new marble statue of a serene Buddha. He is there with me at the gates of the holiest Buddhist shrine, in Kandy, the spiritual and geographical centre of the island, watching several thousand white-clad men, women and children as they patiently wind their way to an exposition of the holy relic, the Buddha’s tooth, in sapping pre-monsoon heat.

Where his predecessors dithered, Rajapaksa opted for a go-for-broke slam into the Tigers when a ceasefire agreement fell decisively apart in 2008. The wily Tigers had, in the intervening six years of patchy ceasefire, regrouped, rearmed, and reclaimed territory in the north and east, the traditional Sri Lankan Tamil ‘homeland’.

Government forces regrouped, too, fortified with new weaponry and attitude. Tiger territory is down to a 30 square kilometre patch of jungle, beachhead and lagoon near Mullaittivu on the northeastern coast, about halfway between the political holy grail of the Jaffna Peninsula and Trincomalee. As you read this, that landholding could be reduced, and Tiger leader Pirabakaran closer to being history.

Emotion is at fever-pitch. At Odel, Colombo’s hippest store, a mannequin wears a hot-selling T-shirt with the message: ‘I love my Sri Lankan Army.’ In my travels here since the early 1990s, I haven’t seen so many national flags, fluttering from rows of shops and houses in Negombo to the north of the capital, to tin shanties in the slums of Colombo, to elegant Galle in the far south of the island. Limousines and autorickshaws alike display the flag. There is jubilation that after 22 years of LTTE blockade that choked the key A-9 Highway from the northernmost provincial capital, Jaffna, to Kandy, trucks are finally bringing in more than body bags, refugees of war (internally displaced persons, in NGO jargon) and grief: prized Jaffna red onions, vegetables, and seafood.

MR, as Saman Kelegama, executive director of the influential Institute of Policy Studies sometimes refers to Rajapaksa in conversation with me, has impressed even sceptics, he says, with the assertion: “I am not going to keep Sri Lanka’s problems for the next generation to solve.”

“He is very popular, there’s no getting away from that,” admits a top South Asian diplomat in Colombo, requesting anonymity. Like several observers I spoke to, he believes Rajapaksa will win any near-future elections. Not yet elections to the all-powerful executive presidency, which still has three years to run its term, but where his Sri Lanka Freedom Party could assert itself, like the one this month to elect councillors in the Western Province, or to parliament, due 2010.

“For him to be effective, though,” adds the diplomat, “Sri Lanka will need to be a work-in-progress, not more of the hard digging in of positions that has characterised politics.”

This last will be decisive. “So far,” says IPS’ Kelegama, “the president has handled the military aspect. We need to see what he does with the economic and political aspects.” Rajapaksa will need to confront the ugliest truth in Sri Lanka. Since the 1950s, the state has sponsored schisms when sharing would have done. That Tigers were created because the state, always controlled by the Sinhala Buddhist majority that comprises nearly 75 per cent of the population, didn’t bother to make the country’s Tamils feel at home, repeatedly denying them the right to language, and many the legitimate right to citizenship. (Sri Lankan Tamils, who began a migration more than 1,000 years ago, are about 5 per cent, concentrated in the north and east; ‘Indian’ Tamils, brought by the British to work plantations in the central part, are nearly 4 per cent; ‘Moors’, or Muslims, a little over 7 per cent).

A document titled ‘Mahinda Chintanaya’ (Mahinda’s Vision), a statement of purpose made by Rajapaksa in 2005, the year he became president, claimed: “I will not permit any separatism.” He had added, “I will also not permit anyone to destroy democracy in our country.” The second assertion has come unstuck, says Lal Wickrematunge, chairman of Leader Publications, a maverick house at the receiving end of state ire since its founding in 1994. He believes Rajapaksa himself is a conspirator in undermining the spirit of democracy.

The Tigers have for long been among the most vicious freedom fighters-turned-terrorists in the world; they force conscription of Tamil civilians, even children, to replenish warriors. There are banners across the island showing a young boy holding an automatic rifle with a morph, in the middle, of a bat. The message is heartbreaking: ‘He wants to be a cricketer, not a child soldier.’

Tigers are shooting as traitors Tamil civilians fleeing their territory, people for whom they claimed to be fighting a war of freedom. But the state and its agencies have let loose, too, insists Wickrematunge. “The mood is dangerous,” he warns. “It has become, ‘We’re finally beating the shit out of the Tamils’.”

He isn’t the only one concerned. The EU has threatened to stall preferential treatment for the country’s crucial garments and textile exports unless the government stops treating the mostly ethnic-Tamil refugees of war, caught in the crossfire, as acceptable collateral damage. Estimates suggest 200,000 trapped people. Human rights observers like the Centre for Policy Analysis’ executive director Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, who calls the Tigers’ behaviour “despicable”, puts the state’s behaviour in the same bracket. Human Rights Watch, reviled by state propaganda, has noted the mistreatment of Tamils by the forces. Alongside, media has either been suppressed, or suborned, like in the 1980s and 1990s, when it has questioned the state’s approach to war, or the rule of Rajapaksa and his cohorts.

Wickeramtunge knows this well. His brother Lasantha, editor of Sunday Leader, was shot on his way to work in January by people Lal believes were spurred on by the Rajapaksa conglomerate, stung by criticism of corruption. The gang includes the president’s brothers, the feared Gotabhaya, Secretary of Defence, and Public Security, Law and Order—in effect, controller of the defence forces, police and intelligence apparatus—and Basil, the president’s advisor. Lasantha was publicly called a “traitor” by Gotabhaya, not long before his death. Several media persons are in jail, or have left the country.

“You feel pity for those who think they have a bigger job than God,” says Wickrematunge, who for inspiration wears his younger brother’s shoes to work and keeps the clothes he wore that fatal day.

It all depends on Mahinda, maintain even his critics. In a heartbeat he can signal a great, benevolent presidency, and resurgence for Sri Lanka. Or, he can invite chaos.

Does Mahinda have what it takes, this president who also presides over a centre-left coalition, the United People’s Freedom Alliance that controls parliament against the conservative United National Party? Can he convince the Tamil diaspora, an estimated one-fifth of a million settled in the West and rest in India and elsewhere, to ride the wave of a renewed Sri Lanka? Can he reach out to the Sinhala Buddhist majority and the clergy, both for long against devolving any meaningful federalism to the north and east in general and to Tamils in particular, and urge them to buy into the idea of a lasting, constitutionally mandated peace? Failure could yield another cycle of minority repression—and conflict.

“The president is trusted by the majority,” says IPS’ Kelegama. “He’s about the only one who can sell a political deal at this time.” He and others point to some significant moves. A former key lieutenant of Pirabakaran, Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, or Colonel Karuna, broke from Pirabakaran in 2004—a major blow to the Tigers. Soon after taking office, the president wooed him. On 11 March, just days after giving up arms and disbanding his faction, Karuna was formally inducted into the SLFP and given the new post of Minister of National Integration and Rebuilding. He will have as a colleague the Minister of Nation Building and Development. But these are times of desperate expediency, not overlap.

If an honourable political deal does emerge, it will have arrived not a moment too soon. Mauled by conflict, Sri Lanka’s GDP, at $32 billion, is just $2.5 billion more than the combined recession-struck net worth of the Ambani brothers, as recently recorded by Forbes. A crippling 5 per cent of it feeds the war machine, and public debt hobbles nearly 90 per cent of the rest. The economy is growing at 4.5 per cent a year and slowing. Inflation is 20 per cent plus. Foreign exchange reserves are down to a few days’ worth of imports. The currency is close to free-fall. Desperate, bereft of donors like those that flocked in 2003 to aid a previous peace process, Rajapaksa is pursuing a $1.9 billion bailout from the IMF.

Just stopping the war would spur economic growth by 2 per cent a year, as economists said at a conference in March, on a revival in the north and east. Such prospects make Duleep N Daluwatte, joint managing director of George Steuart & Co, one of Sri Lanka’s oldest private firms, sigh in anticipation. He wants a sort of Marshall Plan for the region that will trigger massive investment in infrastructure, besides sparking a consumer boom, and freeing literate manpower. Private investment will follow. “There is news of oil exploration, of natural gas reserves,” Daluwatte says.

“We are watching, we are waiting for things to stabilise,” says Krishnendu Sanyal, representative of Tata Steel in Sri Lanka. India’s National Thermal Power Corp has signed a deal for a 500 MW power plant in Trincomalee, he says, and the Chinese have invested in a port at Hambantota, in the south. “The way to look ahead from here is the way of Singapore and Hong Kong.”

The world won’t buy it till it happens. “We have had false dawns with the peace dividend in the past,” cautions Prasenjit K Basu, chief economist, Daiwa Securities. “Genuine peace will require a constitutional accommodation with the Tamils.”

It will be a tough road. For starters, the LTTE aren’t known to give up easily. There is talk of terror cells having secreted themselves across the island and beyond, ready to cause chaos at the slightest opportunity. Like the one that came on 10 March, at Akuressa in southern Matara district. A suicide bomber exploded a device placed on a cycle, as a procession to mark the Prophet Mohammad’s birthday came by. Fourteen died, a minister was injured, along with 60 others.

Of course, there’s always the hope that the dead will speak, and show a way to the living.

There’s only one way, the dead would urge: Let peace break out.

Sudeep Chakravarti is an author and columnist based in Goa. He first visited Sri Lanka in 1994, and has since returned several times

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