Tamil Tigers, northern Sri Lanka, 2002 (© Reuters)
As I enter Jaffna, the cement dust makes me cough. The city at the northern tip of Sri Lanka, cultural heartland of the Tamil minority, is being rebuilt after 30 years of war.
The city’s houses were beautiful, once. There used to be stone elephants on the pillars of gates, delicate latticework shutters, perhaps a dancing Krishna painted on the front wall. The poorer homes had roofs thatched with palm leaves and verandas in the shade of fruit trees. The new houses look more like concrete boxes. Corrugated iron has replaced palm thatch. After years of trauma, people are rebuilding with grim determination, but without poetry.
I left Jaffna in 1983 when Sri Lanka’s civil war began, to live with my parents in England. In the early 1980s, inside the terraced houses in Wembley, East Ham, or in our case Cardiff, the radiators were turned up high, as the scent of cumin and onions fried in smoking hot oil filled the air, and children scuttled along the linoleum while the adults talked in Tamil of a place called Eelam.
Eelam was a country that didn’t exist; the Tamil name for an independent homeland carved out of Sri Lanka’s northeast. The civil war pitted the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a separatist movement who claimed to represent the island’s Tamil-speaking Hindu minority, just over a 10th of the population, against a government dominated by the Sinhala-speaking Buddhist majority, roughly three-quarters of the nation’s 20m citizens.
I have come back to Sri Lanka for the first time since the conflict ended, with my husband and our young son and daughter, to see if I can find the house my grandfather built, where I spent the happiest years of my childhood. Above all, I want to see whether national peace, bought at such cost to the Tamil minority, will hold good—and whether it should.
The war officially began when hundreds of Tamil civilians were killed in riots in Colombo, the capital, after the Tamil Tigers had murdered 13 soldiers. But the outbreak was not sudden. The decades following independence in 1948 had brought mounting tension between the Tamils and Sinhalese, which often erupted in bloody anti-Tamil riots and reprisals by Tamil militants.
The tension was the result of a vigorous Sinhalese nationalism, of a kind mirrored in other Asian and African nations emerging from colonial rule, expressed in laws which, for example, enshrined Sinhala as the official language of the state and restricted Tamil admission to university. For Sinhalese patriots, the elevation of their language and distinctive Buddhist culture restored the pride sapped by centuries of foreign domination. But for the minority, the years after independence were uncomfortable. It was like a competition to establish who had the oldest claim to the soil, with rival religious shrines planted like flags. The war dragged on for 25 years. The fighting focused mainly on the Tamil north, leaving around 80,000 dead, according to UN estimates. An article published in the New Yorker in January 2011 said that about half of all casualties were Tamil civilians and a quarter were members of Sri Lanka’s armed forces. For three decades, each side gained and lost territory, with the Tamil Tigers fighting the government’s superior military strength through a campaign of terror, massacring Sinhalese and Muslim villagers and planting bombs on buses and planes. The conflict ended in 2009 with the government’s all-out assault on the Tigers, which left many thousands of Tamil civilians dead (see Marc Weller).
Ordinary Sinhalese are relieved that they can now get on a bus, go to work in central Colombo or take their children to the zoo without risk of being blown up. But many Tamils believed that the government’s fear of the Tigers was their only bargaining chip in arguing for more rights. The dream of Eelam, bankrolled and enthusiastically supported by many in the Tamil diaspora for a generation, is dead. In its place is an uneasy peace.
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As a child, I often visited my grandfather’s bungalow in Jaffna and came to think of it as my home. After he died, my mother kept the house, ready for the day the war would end and we could move back. But when the war was finally over, she sold it. For her, the dream of returning had vanished.
Jaffna lies on a peninsula in Sri Lanka’s far north, and the only way to reach it from abroad is to fly to Colombo. My husband and I have hired a car with a driver who is Sinhalese and curious about Jaffna, a city he has never visited. In Sri Lanka, identities are often fluid. While the languages are derived from different roots and written in different scripts, people eat the same food regardless of their race: rice and fish curry, stringhoppers—noodles fashioned from steamed rice flour—with fiercely spiced sambal. And their clothes are similar; as we drive through the streets of southern, Sinhalese towns, I see men in chequered sarongs, dressing just like my father.
The highway veers inland and cuts into the Vanni, the vast zone of dense jungle and scrub south of Jaffna that bore the brunt of the fighting. Here, the scars are barely scabbed over. Houses are in ruins or dotted with bullet holes. Women and men in helmets and armoured jackets gather a harvest of mines. A giant concrete water tower toppled in the fighting in Kilinochchi—once the capital of the Tigers’ statelet —lies like a broken wine glass on its side. The shops and hotels and Hindu temples are all shabby and broken. The only things that look new are the war memorials.
The army is everywhere, silent and watchful. Under the peace established by President Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2009, the north is covered by a dense military network. Every few miles along the road, there is an army encampment with sentries in grassy dugouts. Dotted around the city are concrete guardposts, while small shops and stretches of farmland have been converted into bases. When I was in Jaffna during a brief ceasefire in 2003, I recall the nervous, wide-eyed troopers, fingers tightly clutching their guns, surrounded by a populace who spoke Tamil, a language they did not know. Now the troops are at ease, bicycling among the locals or lounging in shopfronts. There is just one army checkpoint as we head in to Jaffna; the soldiers check our passports and wave us through.
A Sinhalese man whose wife is a government employee in Kilinochchi tells me that Sri Lanka should have a federal system—“like in India, where every state has a chief minister.” But that prospect is growing fainter. In the absence of a threat from the Tigers, the government has dismissed the need for further power sharing. Defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the president’s brother, has said that “the existing constitution is more than enough for us to live together. Now the LTTE is gone, I don’t think there is any requirement… Devolution-wise I think we have done enough.” We stop at a roadside temple to pray and our Sinhalese driver dips his finger in holy ash and smears his forehead, as I do.
Everywhere, from roadside billboards, the president beams down. Recent print runs of the 1,000-rupee note have him on one side, hands aloft in victory salute, while soldiers raise the Sri Lankan flag in Iwo Jima style on the other side. There is a large poster of him outside Jaffna’s grand temple. “We wish you a long life!” declares the slogan in Tamil beneath.
We drive towards my grandfather’s address on one of the main thoroughfares that stretches for miles from the city centre out to the coastal villages, roads that were mined and sealed off during the war. I finally spot the familiar wrought iron gates, opposite a shack selling chocolates; my grandmother would take me there in the evening, when it was lit up with candles and looked like a treasure-filled cavern. The bungalow is a rectangle of concrete, with a flat roof and even from the road I can see it is well cared for. The walls are freshly painted and an extension is being built. Much of Jaffna looks dishevelled these days, but this house sparkles, a sign of its new owners’ pride in it. I stand in the front garden, remembering the years when the war took hold.
Staying with my grandfather in Jaffna in 1982, the country had been tense, but normal life still seemed possible. Then the mood turned darker. I noticed my grandparents getting jittery whenever police or soldiers patrolled our street. My grandfather started to encourage his remaining children to leave, and they went one by one to the US and Australia.
One evening during that time, just as we were about to have dinner, a shadowy figure vaulted a fence and dashed through our back garden. Instinctively, my grandfather switched off the lights and told us to gather in a bedroom. He suspected the man was a Tiger fleeing army soldiers, who would soon follow. Tamils had no faith at all in Sri Lanka’s military and my grandfather worried that we would be wrongly accused of harbouring an insurgent. We spent the whole night awake, sitting in darkness, as soldiers walked around the house. We watched their silhouettes in the moonlight, looming tall against the windows.
When war officially broke out a few weeks later, my grandfather’s house was suddenly full of relatives who had fled Colombo, and my parents ordered me back to England.
As the Tigers paralysed Sri Lanka with ruthless suicide bombings and an efficient military force, I was growing up in Britain, where my family would get the occasional letter with stories of power cuts and medicine shortages. I would overhear conversations about the Tigers—always “the boys”—in which the older generation would lament that the militants had stopped listening to them.
Slender threads bound us to the old country. At a coming of age ceremony, just after my 11th birthday, I wore a sari for the first time, my mother pinning me into the heavy fabric. The war rumbled in the background; there were hopeful moments, when India intervened or Norway sought to broker a peace deal, but the hope was always dashed. And there were moments when a Tiger assault would be so audacious that it would make international headlines—the destruction of planes at the international airport in 2001 was one. For many in the diaspora, such attacks fed the false hope that the Tigers could achieve their aims by force of arms alone. The Tigers raised funds from the Tamil community worldwide, as well as from investments in restaurants and other small businesses abroad. By the last year of the war, in 2009, estimates of the number of Tamils in Britain ranged from 110,00 to 150,000. The diaspora preferred to dwell on the rebellion’s successes in conventional battle with the Sri Lankan army, but the LTTE also assassinated Tamil moderates and killed civilians. My grandparents left in the 1980s, their nerves shredded by explosions, and began a new life in the US, where four of their children had gone.
The seeds of the Tigers’ downfall were there even a decade ago. Their attacks on civilians led to the US listing the LTTE as a terrorist organisation in 1997. Other countries followed suit, choking off the Tigers’ finances. In 2001, the UK joined in, forcing the LTTE to shut down one of its most lucrative offices. The war ended in 2009 with the government launching a decisive attack to destroy the Tigers. According to a UN report leaked to the press in November 2012, around 30,000 Tamil civilians died during this final stage of the war, caught between government forces and the last stand of the Tigers on a narrow strip of beach in the north-east. A UN inquiry accused the military of indiscriminate shelling of civilians and hospitals; it also accused the LTTE of using civilians as human shields. Despite the dreadful toll in human life at the end of the war, the peace has earned President Rajapaksa approval among the Sinhalese majority. He won a landslide victory in the 2010 elections. His popularity is understandable. There has been an end to the random violence that plagued everyday life here for a generation. But the results of post-war elections have highlighted how divided the island remains. While the president enjoys immense popularity in the south, Tamil parties allied to the government have fared poorly in the north and east.
The defeat of the LTTE creates the opportunity for a new political dispensation. The Tigers silenced all rival voices; their demise allows the rebirth of more moderate politics. But that is unlikely to happen without any concession from the government. Despite assurances to the UN and foreign governments, including the US and India, the president has failed to offer any devolution of power to the north and east.
The government says it has invested at least $1.1bn in the north since the end of the war. Speaking in Tamil at the UN general assembly before the war’s end, President Rajapaksa said bonds between the two people would grow, as they marched towards a “richer freedom.” However, the International Crisis Group, a respected think tank, warns that the development of the north is biased against the local Tamil population. Many businesses are run by the military, or Sinhalese families, while many local officials are drawn from the Buddhist majority, the organisation said in a November 2012 report.
I speak to a former LTTE cadre, recruited under the bleakest of circumstances: “The Tigers asked for me or one of my children, so I went.” He speaks quietly of losing many relatives in the final days, killed by government forces, the bodies disappearing into a mass grave. He adds: “Their [Sri Lankan government’s] development is just for their people [the Sinhalese]. The money that foreign governments give, like Japan, we don’t see.”
Even remembrance of those killed has become a criminal act in Jaffna. After victory, the government bulldozed the cemeteries where Tamil fighters were buried, denying their families a place to grieve.
In November, the army stormed the university campus, arresting students for lighting lamps to commemorate the war dead. An article in the Island, a Colombo-based English language newspaper that strives to be bipartisan, describes the army’s intervention as a demonstration that “the Sinhalese will decide who and what the Tamils are allowed to commemorate or celebrate.” Posters near the campus advertise escape routes: “Study in Malaysia,” says one; another offers to arrange migration to Canada, New Zealand, Finland—“all fees paid after visa.” In the 1970s, the creation of a pool of disenfranchised youth was one of the seeds of war. I think of Britain, which has wrestled with its own national identity in recent decades. From Northern Ireland to multicultural London, my adopted home has painfully reshaped itself. I long for a similar, peaceful refashioning of Sri Lanka’s identity. For too long, politics in Sri Lanka has been a zero-sum game in which the victorious ethnic group stands to claim the lion’s share of civil service jobs or university places.
To be prosperous and peaceful, the country needs a political settlement flexible enough for its mix of ethnicities, with the Tamil-majority provinces allowed autonomy in exchange for recognising Colombo as sovereign.
Embers of the civil war still glow. In Jaffna, a Tamil man who guides us around the city tells us that the fight is over and the LTTE has been wiped out. “But people still play the songs of the struggle,” he says.
