SL: WILL THIS ATTITUDE CHANGE???

Tamil Tigers face defeat, but peace remains elusive
SRI LANKA: Battle ahead to bring lasting ethnic harmony to island
By Anuj Chopra in Jaffna/ courtesy: sundayherald.com

SUITCASES IN hand, heaving and sweating for hours under the blistering sun, passengers endure a gauntlet of checkpoints. They are repeatedly stopped, questioned, frisked and hassled. Those without the required paperwork are turned back.

From Colombo's Ratmalana Airport, it is only an hour's flight to Jaffna, a battle-scarred peninsula in the north of Sri Lanka. But getting there is a miserable ordeal that can kill nearly half a day.

Most of the travellers are ethnic Tamils, a minority group in this tear-shaped island; but the overwhelming majority in Jaffna. No-one dares to protest. The slightest disruption can halt the air service at any time. After five sweltering hours of queuing, one passenger sighs, and mutters: "This is how you're treated when you're taken to a prison camp."


For two years, Jaffna has been cut off from overland access to the rest of Sri Lanka by a war zone in the swampy jungles of the Wanni region just south of the peninsula. The A9 highway, once a lifeline connecting the Tamil heartland to the Sinhala-speaking south, runs right through the middle of Wanni, where the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have dug in as they continue to wage one of the world's oldest-running insurgencies. Now, however, the Sri Lankan army has advanced along the A9 to within a mile of the insurgents' capital, Kilinochchi.

For Jaffna's Tamils, the army's imminent victory offers some hope the A9 will reopen, freeing the peninsula from years of repressive isolation and economic stagnation. Jaffna would no longer be plagued by shortages of fuel, food and electricity. The price of essential goods, all soaring because of the high cost of air and sea transport, might fall. Restrictions on fishing, the traditional occupation, will be lifted.

Locals hope peace will return to a land that was once a cradle of Tamil culture but has become a battlefield of bullet-pocked homes and shrapnel-scarred temples. Its people have endured massacres and forced displacement.

The fanatically cultist Tigers, the first to use suicide bomb vests, established a de facto separatist state in Jaffna in the early 1990s. Government forces recaptured the city 13 years ago and have held an iron grip on it ever since. Today, 40,000 government soldiers guard over the peninsula's 600,000 Tamils. Crowds in the markets pay little attention to the occasional thud of artillery fire in the distance. Troops wielding Chinese-made T-56 assault rifles man checkpoints at almost every street corner.

Nights in Jaffna are surreal. The streets empty at sundown, and a curfew is strictly enforced during the night. In the last two years, a wave of night-time civilian disappearances and killings has gripped the city. Corpses sometimes turn up on the streets in the mornings, but most victims are never seen again. Townspeople say most of the killings and disappearances happen during the curfew hours, cautiously referring to the perpetrators as "armed groups".

People who fear for their lives can seek aid from the Human Rights Commission, but according to the Centre for Policy Alternatives, a Colombo-based think-tank, "surrendees" are sent to Jaffna's squalid prison to be placed in protective custody, sometimes alongside convicted criminals because it is so overcrowded.

Flyers regularly appear on the Jaffna University campus, says a 20-year-old student, too scared to give his name - hit lists of supposed LTTE sympathisers. Most are young people, between 18 and 35, he says, adding that he has known several people who have vanished. "If you are Tamil, you are always under pressure to prove you are not LTTE," he says. "We live in an open prison."

Human rights groups say that, in 2007, Jaffna accounted for half of Sri Lanka's disappearances and more than a quarter of its extra-judicial killings.

Jaffna's Army commander, Major General GA Chandrasiri, blames LTTE infiltrators for the killings, but doesn't deny the possibility some of his soldiers might also be involved. Anyway, buoyed by the recent victories in the Wanni, Chandrasiri is confident the killings in Jaffna will stop once the war is over.

"We are determined to eradicate terrorists," he says. "There will be no mercy for the LTTE."

Sri Lanka's government has promised to transform the country into a peaceful land of ethnic harmony after the military crushes the LTTE and gains control of all rebel-controlled areas. But after 13 years of government control in Jaffna, peace is still an elusive dream.

For decades the Tigers have fought ruthlessly to become the sole representatives of the Tamils, and for many Tamils in Jaffna, their imminent defeat brings not relief, but foreboding. Many fear that, without the Tigers, Sinhalese hegemony will become more entrenched.

An elderly Tamil man from Jaffna negotiates a labyrinth of checkpoints on his drive to work every day. A soldier sticks his gun through the car window and barks at him in the Sinhala language, demanding a response, not seeming to care that Jaffna's inhabitants are Tamil speakers. "Will this attitude change, once the fighting ends?" the old man asks.

Comment
Posted by: shan nalliah ganghiyist, norway on 9:03am today
Thank you all for focusing the truth to the world!
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