Murdered, missing, imprisoned in camps...The guns may be silent in
Sri Lanka for the first time in 26 years, but the price of peace for
the innocent Tamils caught up in the fighting could not be higher
... Dan McDougall travels from the Tamils' UK protest in Parliament
Square to the killing fields of Sri Lanka
A foul-smelling monsoon closes in from the north, carrying dark
clouds of ash from the Hindu funeral pyres burning along the
"Highway for Peace and Unity". At the roadside, translucent
glasswing butterflies flutter and dance in the charred iron shell of
an old British Leyland bus, its undercarriage ripped apart and
shredded like paper by a Claymore landmine.
Little more than a cratered strip of asphalt running 100 miles due
north from the ancient city of Anuradhapura to Jaffna, the road's
grandiose Marxist title is typically deceptive: today it bisects a
dramatically transformed landscape - the broken heart of Sri Lanka's
former Tamil Tiger country, a battle-scarred route lined with
thousands of shallow graves, unexploded landmines and the rotting
stumps of palmyra trees blackened by the rain.
Here, sheltering from the darkening skies at a remote army
checkpoint, a group of weary teenage soldiers gather around an old
Russian television impassively watching the capital, Colombo,
celebrate the end of the war.
Dressed in messianic white, the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda
Rajapaksa, is walking through the streets of the capital as
followers shower him with pink flower petals. At each street corner
he is offered traditional kiribath (milk rice) and kavung (oil
cakes). Crudely dubbed over the footage, hastily assembled songs
declare "Our King Rajapaksa", wishing him "Ayubowewa" - a long life.
"We won the war, we won, OK!" shouts an army NCO in coarse
Sinhalese, breaking the silence and ordering the young soldiers on
to a personnel carrier heading north. "Now get back to work."
At their journey's end, no more than 30 miles north along the
single-track road, the conscripts will be brutally confronted with
more than a quarter of a million personal hells - Tamil refugees who
have fled the Sri Lankan civil war in recent days and weeks, as the
secessionist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fought and lost
a brutal endgame for a separate Tamil state in the country's
northeast. Malnourished and traumatised, the displaced stare out
from behind the barbed wire of internment camps erected by the Sri
Lankan government.
Elderly grandmothers, infants, pregnant women, wounded fathers,
their faces as twisted and contorted as the razorwire that imprisons
them, trapped in a state of incarceration the Colombo authorities
claim is necessary for the refugees' own "safety". Further into the
bush are the field hospitals, hidden from the eyes of the world yet
overflowing with civilian victims of the war. Beyond the medical
camps, according to eyewitnesses, are thousands of freshly dug
graves. Six thousand miles away in London, a growing body of
UK-based campaigners are calling it quite simply "The War Without
Witness".
"The British government doesn't give a fuck about Sri Lanka, they
just don't give a fuck, nobody here does." The British Tamil
student's anger peaks as he is marched across Parliament Square in
central London by his girlfriend, his fists, his entire body shaking
with grief and loss as he waves a photograph of a bloodied child,
much of her stomach missing. "Is it a relative?" I ask. Nobody seems
to know. In his fury the young man lets go of the deathly image, and
is forced to chase it down in the breeze.
Another Tamil woman, middle-aged, an NHS nurse in faux ruby
earrings, holds up a photocopied print of her missing sister for the
photographer, pauses, and breaks down, lost in chest-racking sobs.
Nobody consoles her. Everyone stands back. Blinking in the sunshine,
the others are drowning in their own private grief. Most of them
wait patiently, portraits of their loved ones in their hands, their
own stories of horror at the forefront of their minds. Behind them a
crowd is gathering, their number is growing. To reach our impromptu
studio, each has passed by a wooden hut erected in the heart of the
square where hundreds of passport photographs of the dead and the
missing have been posted. Some are gory. Bodies decapitated, dead
eyes staring out. Beneath each photograph are contact numbers for
concerned relatives.
It had started as a simple idea in the dreary hotel room in Colombo
that I was sharing with photographer Robin Hammond. As the lights of
the old port twinkled below and Sri Lanka heralded a new beginning,
I read an Amnesty report that ranked Sri Lanka second in terms of
numbers seeking asylum in the UK. Tamils in Britain, largely thanks
to a mass exodus in the 1980s, now number approximately 200,000,
mostly in south and west London.
So I sent an email home, asking a few London-based Tamils I knew had
been affected by the war if they would pose for portraits when we
returned. The replies, within 24 hours, were staggering. "We have 50
and can get you 500 more," said one source. "More can come at short
notice," said another campaigner. "How many do you need? We have
thousands of photographs, missing, dead, children, grandmothers,
this is a genocide, what do you expect?"
I shouldn't have been surprised. An organised and galvanised
diaspora, who haven't slept in two months, as the battle to end all
battles raged on the island that bore them - all of the UK's Tamils
have been affected by the war.
While the expenses scandal has gripped British political life in
recent weeks, Britain's Tamils have taken over Parliament Square.
Over a month ago, one of the protestors, Prarameswaran Subramaniam,
lay down on a fetid mattress opposite parliament and went on hunger
strike. His ultimatum was simple:
"I will stay here until either my body can continue no longer or the
British government persuades the Sri Lankan government to stop
shelling my people," he said. Subramaniam began his protest at the
end of April after discovering that his mother and several siblings
had been killed in Sri Lankan military attacks. He is now recovering
in hospital.
Other UK-based Tamils threatened to throw themselves off the top of
Big Ben or drown themselves in the Thames; two actually made it into
the water but were rescued by a police boat patrol. In response to
the Tamil takeover of Parliament Square, Westminster council
complained about their numbers and moved to protect the grass, which
they claimed was going through an "urgent reseeding". The Times
accused the Tamils of turning Parliament Square into a "shanty
town", a banner headline that particularly irked the Tamil diaspora
- professors, doctors, school teachers, engineers and architects
among their number.
In the Commons, the Speaker of the House, Michael Martin, condemned
the actions of some Tamil protesters, who, he claimed, put young
children "in the way" of police officers. Conservative MP Gerald
Howarth raised a point of order to ask what powers the Speaker had
to order the Metropolitan Police to secure "free access to
Parliament" for MPs. He said: "It is completely outrageous that
members of this House have been subjected to this inconvenience,
that the people of London have been subjected to this inconvenience.
The situation in Sri Lanka is nothing to do with this House. Surely
law and order has broken down outside the Houses of Parliament." Not
surprisingly, Howarth's stance provoked fury among the new occupants
of Parliament Square.
As he unfurled a peace banner in Parliament Square, Tamil campaigner
Prakesh Mano, 36, told me: "Britain is to blame for this; like
Palestine, like Zimbabwe, your history has a hand in the death of
innocents in 2009, and the British government should stand up and
take ownership of it - and you are more worried about some overpaid
politicians not being able to get to work?" It is a view of history
held by most Tamils, who believe that Sri Lanka's substantial Tamil
minority once had their own autonomy in the north before the British
Empire turned the whole island into the colony of Ceylon. Britain,
they claim, then handed Ceylon's Sinhalese majority rule and
independence in 1948 as a single entity, without enshrining the
rights of the Tamils to their own land and language.
Krishna Ruban, another protester, said: "This is a war without
witness. The media is cut off from what is really happening in Sri
Lanka. A genocide is being hidden from the world." He then added:
"London-born teenagers who have never even been to Sri Lanka are
marching with their grandparents. This is about brothers and fathers
and sisters being killed. I know people who have lost 15 members of
their family. It is not just here - there are demonstrations in
France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, America and Canada. It is
literally everywhere."
According to the UN, more than 8,000 civilian refugees were killed
on the Sri Lankan battlefield this year, mostly in the past three
months in a government-designated "no-fire zone". There is also
mounting evidence, including testimony from those who escaped it, to
suggest that army bombardments were mostly to blame for this. Some,
although fewer in number, have also accused the LTTE of shooting at
them to try to prevent their escape.
On 25 May, the United Nations Human Rights Council convened a
special session on Sri Lanka, following a request submitted by
Germany on behalf of 17 mostly European countries. Its members
proceeded to vote down a proposed resolution decrying the Sri Lankan
government's disregard for civilian life. But another draft
resolution tabled by the Sri Lankan government itself, praising its
own commitment to human rights, was passed by a vote of 29 to 16.
Its supporters included China, Cuba, India, Russia, Pakistan and
Egypt.
By effectively welcoming the "liberation" of tens of thousands of
the island's citizens from the grip of the Tamil Tigers, the UN made
no mention of the shelling of civilians and kept silent on the
desperate need to allow the Red Cross and other humanitarian groups
into the camps where some 300,000 Tamil civilians have been
interned.
Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, insisted
that there still needed to be an inquiry into "very serious abuses",
yet Sureen Surendiram, of the British Tamils Forum, said that the UN
was paying lip service to the civilised world, again. Human Rights
Watch and leaked UN documents recently suggested the death toll was
closer to 20,000, with many of the dead women and children, he said.
"And now the Sri Lankan government is holding our loved ones in
massive internment camps, the likes of which we haven't seen since
the Second World War." He added: "The fighting may be over, but
retribution killings are being carried out in the camps. Our people
are also starving and dying from lack of medical help."
The Lonely Planet guidebook says the beach at Uppuveli is the most
beautiful on Sri Lanka's east coast. As the sun sets it certainly
looks like an island paradise, a curve of white sand with palm trees
and deep emerald water. If you drive through the jungle in the east,
you can see errant herds of wild elephants crossing the road.
Long-tailed monkeys watch nervously from the trees. At night,
fireflies hang by the roadside. This is the Sri Lanka tourists flock
from around the world to see, but along the road to the town,
hundreds of soldiers line the road, looking nervously into the
jungle. Despite the war coming to an end, fear of last-gasp Tamil
Tiger suicide attacks cuts to the core of every soldier here in the
northeast. On closer inspection, Uppuveli's beach is littered with
sewage and rubbish, its hotels boarded up. No tourists come here any
more. The jungle, long burned by government soldiers trying to clear
the roads of hiding places for Tamil Tiger guerrillas, is a twisted
and charred wasteland.
Here in the Sivananda Thaovanam Orphanage, more than 100 children
huddle together against the pounding rain outside. The children's
eyes betray the tragedies they could not easily put into words. Each
child has his or her own story, but they all have one thing in
common: their parents were killed in the war. Four-year-old
Mohanapriya's eyes light up as she speaks about her parents, telling
us how she is waiting for them to come and take her home. "She is
too young to understand they are gone," says one of the orphanage
directors. "What can we say to her?"
The orphanage is threadbare, like its inhabitants. The room which
serves as their bedroom, a communal hall with peeling paint and a
few lockers with broken locks, overflows with second-hand clothes
and toys that have seen better days. The only bed is piled high with
mats, sheets and pillows. Despite its woeful lack of facilities,
Sivananda Thaovanam has been a safe haven for 240 children for four
years. Twelve-year-old Theverajah Kajenthini cries as she remembers
the day she lost her mother. Trapped on the frontline of the war, a
Sri Lankan government shell ripped through their home, killing her
sister, her aunt and her mother. Several months later her father,
accused of being a Tamil Tiger sympathiser, was executed by "unknown
forces". "I don't understand what has happened to me," she says.
"Like the other children in here we don't talk about the past. I am
old enough to know my parents are gone but the younger children
laugh and play and tell us their mums and dads are coming back. Many
of the children in my village became orphans during the fighting. I
can't deny what happened to me. I saw my mother's body. She was on
fire after the shelling and died of burns to her face and neck. Her
head was black, it was the last I saw of her."
Across the north of Sri Lanka, hundreds of orphanages such as this
house are the legacy of Sri Lanka's 30-year civil war, the orphans
cast adrift like flotsam. Most remain traumatised. With no funding
for rehabilitation or counselling, their fates seem to be sealed at
a tragically young age. Most are introverted and prone to intense
periods of grief and depression. They all live a bleak and meagre
existence.
"The camps to the north of here are full of children like me, I am
told," says 11-year-old Mahetevan Suganya. "Tamil boys and girls
like me who cannot escape. At least I have my friends here in the
orphanage and I can walk in the garden and play with my toys. The
director tells us all we are fortunate to be here and to be
protected from the war. I don't feel particularly lucky. I feel
angry and upset at what is happening to me."
In the corridors of power in Colombo, the hard-won victory over the
Tamil Tigers would have been savoured by one family above all: that
of the Sri Lankan president, Percy Mahinda Rajapaksa, who carved out
victory with the help of his brothers, Gotabaya, the defence
secretary, and Basil, who largely masterminded the political and
diplomatic strategies that accompanied the war effort. The brothers,
members of a prominent political family of Sri Lanka's Buddhist
Sinhalese majority, won through utter ruthlessness. In contrast to
previous Oxbridge-educated leaders, they had no links to the
English-speaking elite of Colombo and showed few qualms in severing
Sri Lanka's ties with the west in favour of strengthening relations
with China and Russia - countries that supplied sophisticated
military hardware and diplomatic muscle.
In giving the cold shoulder to Britain and the United States, the
president also won the approval of ultra-nationalist Buddhist monk
MPs, who had demanded victory at any cost over the Tigers and on
whom Rajapaksa depends for his parliamentary majority. In 2006, a
year after he became president, air, sea and ground assaults were
launched against rebel strongholds in the north and east. The army
nearly doubled in size to 180,000 men in two years and began to
adopt guerrilla tactics, using the Tigers' own methods - sending in
death squads to kill rebel leaders. Now the president, a lawyer who
worked as a film actor and library clerk before entering politics,
enjoys messianic-like status in the country he rules with an iron
fist. Many Sri Lankans feel he has deliberately blurred the genuine
grievances of the Tamil minority - a community that has been
oppressed since it lost its favoured status with the end of British
rule - with the atrocities carried out by the terrorist Tigers over
26 years. They also suspect that a new period of persecution and
oppression of the Tamils will emerge with a victorious Sinhalese
government.
As I travelled across Sri Lanka, President Rajapaksa, basking in
victory, declared the final defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam (LTTE) in a speech to his parliament on 19 May. But more than
30 opposition chairs in the 225-seat chamber were vacant. Members of
the Tamil National Alliance, the largest group of parties
representing the Tamil minority in the north and east of the island,
had refused to take their seats. It was a reminder of an unhappy and
uncomfortable truth: the Tamil Tigers may be finished as a fighting
force, but the bitter ethnic divisions that fuelled the 26-year war
live on.
Some hours later, as I walked the streets of the Sri Lankan capital,
state television aired footage of the dead Tamil Tiger supremo,
Velupillai Prabhakaran, the back of his head missing from what was
undeniably a summary execution, a cloth covering the top of his
skull, which appeared to have been blown off. Prabhakaran's Tamil
Eelam once existed as an unofficial nation within a nation, a state
that ran on a different time zone (Indian time), had its own police
force, jails, judicial system, and semi-extortionate system of tax
collection. Everywhere across Tamil Elam flew the Tamil Tiger flag:
a roaring tiger backed by a pair of crossed Kalashnikovs, pouncing
with claws bared from a cartoonish explosion. Walking through
Wellawetta, a predominately Tamil district of Colombo, nationalist
Sinhalese flags flutter from every Tamil home for fear of Government
reprisals. In a dark corner of the slum suburb a scrawl of graffiti
quotes an adapted Indian proverb: "Do not blame God for having
created the tiger, thank him for not giving it wings."
"You can't go down that road. You shouldn't have come this way," the
soldier bellows, first in Sinhalese and then in English, his hand
menacingly stroking the nuzzle of the rifle splayed across his
chest. I look at his bony black fingers - he is pointing east
towards the coastal town of Pulmoddai and the road we have just
travelled down.
"How did you get here from there? It is a dangerous route and you
are a target for terrorists." Behind our interrogator I recognise a
parked Alvis Saracen personnel carrier, its adapted gun turret
trained on our minivan. As we speak three other soldiers come out of
a small hut. The tallest flourishes a revolver and demands we hand
over our passports. He then disappears to make a call. I'm convinced
after a series of close shaves we will finally be arrested, possibly
beaten, certainly deported.
"We are tourists and we are lost," I explain, without prompting. In
the back of the van, in the stitching of the carpet, we have hidden
digital memory cards and a small notebook, the only record we have
of a refugee camp we stumbled across 20 miles to the north. Our
presence there, to witness the incarceration of around 6,000 Sri
Lankan refugees, had sent the camp directors running for their
satellite phones. On Sri Lankan radio, government-sponsored adverts
have called on the nation to effectively "finger" foreigners trying
to head north.
Behind the barbed-wire fence at the Pulmoddai camp, tiny children
had stared out at us, open-mouthed, their eyes sunken and hollow,
the first signs of malnutrition. Around the camps, scarcely
functioning mothers and grandmothers waited patiently for brown
trickles of water to emerge from the earth. The inmates were
surrounded by a cordon of steel: dozens of Sri Lankan soldiers
sitting at 10-yard intervals around the perimeter of the compound,
their weapons cocked and trained on their captives.
It had taken a 13-hour drive along dangerous roads and past a dozen
heavily militarised checkpoints to get this far. At every corner the
Sri Lankan military, which has effectively created a border across
the entire country, cutting off the north of the island to
foreigners, tried to intimidate and stop us, brandishing weapons and
forcing us back at each turn.
Brought down by ship from the frontline 50 miles to the north, the
Pulmoddai refugees before us are effectively prisoners of war -
their plight among the first evidence of an attempt by the Sri
Lankan authorities to inter stricken refugees in dozens of camps
across the north of the island. To the north, hundreds of thousands
more share a similar fate, and the looming threat of deadly disease
and malnutrition.
Along the hard road to the Pulmoddai refugee camp is heard the sound
of hammering and the clink of metal. Before our eyes Sri Lankan
soldiers hammer huge wooden stakes into the ground to create another
perimeter fence to "imprison more refugees". Beside the road lies
thousands of yards of razorwire fencing. "More are coming," says a
locally recruited engineer drafted in to help build an access road.
"They are coming from the front, perhaps tens of thousands more, for
the long term. Each hole in the ground stretching into the far
distance over there is another stake to imprison them."
It is closing in on midnight. A police siren breaks the stillness of
the summer evening as a handful of weary Tamil protesters begin
packing up for the night, folding banners and neatly packing flyers
and posters with red elastic bands. Their organisation and attention
to detail is meticulous; there is little money for more flyers, and
those they have left over for another day are precious - each thin
piece of paper a witness statement from their families and loved
ones.
A young Tamil student returns to the square after scouring the bins
in the streets around Westminster, retrieving the crumpled and
folded flyers nonchalantly discarded by passers-by. "Did they stop
to look at these?" he cries, pointing to a crudely photocopied
photograph of a dead child cradled in his father's arms.
Some of the protesters will take the trundling night bus to Neasden
and Wembley, and home to their extended families. Others, who have
come down from the Midlands, will share hostel rooms or sleep rough
in the backstreets sweeping down towards the Embankment, avoiding
CCTV cameras and police patrols, before returning to their placards
and rainbow banners at dawn, tramping bleary-eyed over the grassy
heart of democratic Britain.
Many of the Tamils here have abandoned their jobs to make their
stand. Karunakaran, 28, files through a shoe box of belongings and
pulls out a dog-eared passport photo of his younger brother. He
nervously fingers the Kavala, the sacred Hindu red string wrapped
twice around his wrist.
"He is dead, my brother; this is what my head says, but there is
still hope in me that he is lying in a hospital somewhere, fighting
for his life, making it through for me and my mother. There are so
many trapped in the camps and they are unable to get messages to the
outside world. People are scouring websites and the news for a
glimpse of their parents or their brothers. It's the uncertainty
that kills you slowly. You see their faces in your sleep, you wake
up at night and cry, wondering where they are, if they are
suffering, if they are starving to death, if they are in prison
being tortured or cast out to sea in a boat."
As he speaks Karunakaran produces a pile of paperwork from a file.
At the head of the most recent document from Eaton House Immigration
Service in London the words "Liability to Detention" glare out
bleakly from the page. "I've been in Britain for 10 years but the
immigration authorities are now telling me it is safe for me to go
back to Sri Lanka," he says. "My sister was killed, my brother and
cousin are missing. They are telling me to go back, and I'm not the
only one. Your country gives me the right to protest here on
Parliament Square, but your government is also intent on sending me
back to a land where those same protests will lead to my death."
