Michael Roberts, 10 June 2011
Preamble: The seeds of this essay lodged in my mind in early March 2009 when still in Lanka after an email exchange with CMJ; but I was too busy to develop the idea till May. The first draft was prepared then. That set me on a course that led to an essay I considered vital to be a backdrop, namely, “The Landscape of the LTTE’s Last Redoubt, May 2009,” which can be read at http://thuppahi. wordpress.com/2011/06/07/the-landscape-of-the-ltte%e2%80%99s-last-redoubt-may-2009/. Invariably, there is some overlap in the two articles and both require further context via reference to more images in “Pictorial Images” within the thuppahi site.
All wars involve devastation. The atom bombs onHiroshima and Nagasaki represent the ultimate in scale of destruction. The carpet bombing of Dresden in World War Two provided a lower but nevertheless horrific level of damage to the urban landscape and its people. The critical point is that in visual impact the destruction of packed urban environments invariably generates massive damage and immediately draws exclamation.
When Ian Botham visited the former war zone of the Northern Vanni on 27 March 2011 by helicopter some two years after Eelam War IV had come to an end and spoke of the utter desolation and devastation, I was surprised and thought he went over the top. I was also reminded of the phrase “complete devastation” deployed by Ban Ki-Moon (UN Secretary-General) when he flew over the region by helicopter in late May 2009.[i]
FIGURE 1. Kushil Gunasekera addresses audience at Laureus media event, 3 March 2011. Botham is on the extreme left and Christopher-Martin Jenkins (president of the MCC) on Kushil’s left and extreme right of the podium — Pic provided by FOG (though I have photographs myself)
Botham presented his verdict during a media event sponsored by the Laureus Sports Foundation as a platform for a community aid project being mounted in the small town of Mankulam in the north-east by the Foundation of Goodness headed by Kushil Gunasekera. The audience at the Taj Samudra Hotel was small, but included worldwide media personnel, while the podium of spokesmen was shared by an illustrious cluster involving Botham, Michael Vaughan, Kumar Sangakkara, Muttiah Muralitharan, Kushil Gunasekera and Christopher Martin-Jenkins (see Figure 1).
I did not challenge Botham on this issue,[ii] but will do so in the course of this essay. My doubts were based on two sets of experiences.
FIGURE 2. Scene from Italy during WW II circa 1944
As a teenager at St. Aloysius College I had poured over the pictures of World War II in the London Illustrated News. I still retain vivid images of the destruction wrought on the towns and villages of Sicily and mainland Italy, Normandy, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany during the Allied advances against the Axis powers in 1943/44/45 (Figures 2, 3). Having touredTuscany andSicily recently in 2007 and observed the scenes of jam-packed and picturesque little towns that had since been rebuilt on their old sites on the spurs and highlands of rolling valleys, it is not difficult for me to imagine what would happen again if armies rolled over such territory and sought to dominate the high ground.
