Kate Mayberry for Al-Jazeera, 29 August 2011, with different title = In Sri Lanka, a ‘negative peace’ prevails
Seriously injured in a shell attack, his Tamil Tiger comrades dead, Mano (pseudonym) tried to end his own life by biting on the cyanide pill that, like all hardened fighters, he wore around his neck. But an elderly woman nearby rushed to give him water and he survived. Alone, he languished on the sand for six days, surrounded by the bodies of his friends and the ruins of war. “There wasn’t anybody there, not a drop of water. I was just lying there in the sun,” he said as he recalled the final days of the fighting between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sri Lankan military. “Then I heard voices and, 200m away, saw soldiers advancing. They took me away.”
More than 11,000 people were detained [1] by the Sri Lankan authorities at the end of the war on suspicion of being members of the Tamil Tigers, who fought a 26-year battle for an independent Tamil homeland. Some gave themselves up, but no detainees have access to lawyers and few are charged, their families left to find out for themselves the location of their loved ones. More than two-thirds have now been released, but amid a pervasive military presence many struggle to resume a normal life. “A sense of impunity and that the worst can happen is still prevalent,” said Jehan Perera, Executive Director of the National Peace Council in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo. “There’s been no break with the past.” : Mano spent nearly a year in a government-run rehabilitation camp and has been living with his family in the northern town ofVavuniya since his release in April 2010. The rehabilitation programme includes psychological counselling as well as skills training. Although some former LTTE members have found good jobs in government-run reconstruction projects, many find it hard to get regular work. Mano occasionally works in a shop but relies mainly on his family for support.
With a continuous military presence in the former conflict zone, few are prepared to risk association with former LTTE members, and LTTE families don’t advertise their past. There are numerous bases along the A9 road north to Jaffnaand smaller camps spread among civilian villages across the Vanni. Military approval is required for large gatherings, and soldiers will often enquire about smaller meetings. Few of those interviewed for this story wanted to reveal their identities and would meet only at a “safe” house.
Markandu Arulananthan is an exception. He’s been displaced numerous times in the course of the Sri Lankan conflict and now lives with his wife, daughter and two sons in a rented house in Jaffna. But his eldest son, Ayengaran, who was taken by the Tigers in 2002, is missing and Arulananthan’s search for him has yielded little but a growing record of his fruitless search.
He’s alerted the ICRC and the Human Rights Commission, visited known detention centres, army camps and police stations, noting diligently the details of every meeting in a small Red Cross notebook. Arulananthan is convinced Ayengaran is still alive but the search and the uncertainty has exhausted him, and his family.
No safety in peace: Having lost a son and her husband – both members of the Tigers – to the fighting and with another son in detention, Mathi is searching desperately for her remaining son who went missing in the final stages of the conflict. It happened in Mullivaikal, a village squeezed onto a narrow spit of sand between the Nandikadal lagoon and theIndian Ocean on the island’s northeastern coast, a place declared a civilian “safe zone” by the government. As the Sri Lankan army advanced, the coconut husks and palmyra leaves littering the ground caught fire. It was in what Mathi describes as an “inferno” and under almost constant bombardment, that her son disappeared. Like Arulananthan, she has kept a file of her increasingly desperate search. “It’s important that we should be told where he is,” Mathi said. “Whether he’s injured or whether he’s dead he would ultimately be with the military because there was nobody else there. They must know.”
But even those who’ve found their family members still struggle. Few can afford the cost of travelling to detention centres for visits or the costs of legal advice. In their desperation, some find themselves cheated. Vidhya (pseudonym) lives with her sister and brother-in-law in the village where she was born. Her family and her lawyer are the only ones who know that her husband was a Sea Tiger and surrendered to the army at the end of the war. It took Vidhya two months to find out where he was but she’s now heavily in debt, having borrowed 500,000 rupees and pawned her sister’s jewellery to pay people who convinced her they could get her husband freed. The jewellery will be forfeited if Vidhya, who has no income, doesn’t pay by the end of this month.
“Without him, I don’t have anyone to talk to, anyone to share my problems with,” she says. Her four-year-old son, sitting on her lap, gently wipes the tears from her face as she speaks.
“People say we have peace but the peace we have is a negative peace – the absence of war and violence,” said Perera. “We don’t have a peace where there’s reconciliation and trust. That’s what we need to work towards.”
The Tamil National Alliance, which swept recent local elections in the Northeast, has asked the government to release the names of all those in custody and their place of detention, but it has yet to do so.
In some ways, Mano’s family was lucky. Their son was returned to them.
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1] Of the 11,000 odd detained as “rehabilatees” [in govt terminology] some 2500 who are deemed hardline Tigers still remain in custody — Email note from Dr Safras of the Governments’s Rehabilitation Department under Brigadier Sudantha Ranasinghe, 28 August 2011.
“Although some former LTTE members have found good jobs in government-run reconstruction projects, many find it hard to get regular work. Mano occasionally works in a shop but relies mainly on his family for support.”
In the village where I live, that is the situation for most people be they Sinhalese, Muslim or Tamil. As a former rebel against the government, Mano has been receiving special attention. Most people have to fend for themselves.
http://www.nation.lk/2011/08/28/inter.htm
The widow of the late LTTE political wing leader S. P. Thamilselvan, was interviewed in The Nation. She said:
“No one carried white flags and came to surrender to the army. The story that some LTTE leaders came with white flags is not at all true. When we reached the side controlled by the army they did not harass us and we felt secure from the way they treated us but before that we were living between life and death. The Sri Lanka armed forces have treated us very well and afforded us all the facilities we never had before that. Today we are living happily with my children who are continuing their education well. My parents are also living with me.
The story about certain LTTE leaders coming to surrender raising white flags is a fairy tale. None came to surrender with white flags. Today as a Tamil I have to say that we don’t need any conflict with the others in Sri Lanka and I would like to tell the Tamil diaspora that their activities will not benefit the Sri Lankan Tamil people. The diaspora by their activities is trying to destroy the Tamil people and I also would like to tell them that we do not need a war.
We are being looked after well by the government and the armed forces of Sri Lanka but the diaspora who are living abroad do not know that the Sri Lankan Tamil people do not need any further armed conflicts. I have deep faith in my religion Hinduism and I would continue to live with my children according to the tenets of my religion and I would like to tell the Tamil diaspora that their efforts to mislead our people will not succeed.”