Four years ago in May 2009, Sri Lanka’s 26 year war ended. Years after the Sri Lanka government declared victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the north and east, home to large swaths of Tamil population, the military still maintains a modus operandi of relentless repression and violence. Many victims are far from prominent. They are everyday people, like the slight-statured 33 year old Palani.
His story is in some way the story of every civilian in Sri Lanka who paid the heaviest cost of a long and bloody war.
On a muggy mid-morning on February 4, 2009, Palani was at the well drawing water when he heard sounds everyone in the village had come to recognize only too well. An explosion got him before he could make his way out and run into a shallow bunker. You see, he explains, the war-head from the artillery travels faster than the speed of sound, so you can’t trust what you hear.
Sometimes, in the scrum, it confuses you and people run in the wrong direction. 15 meters away from the well, artillery had ecimated his home, a mud hut, fatally killing his wife. He found out only a day later.
At this time, aeroplanes were bombing the two hospitals - Puthukudieruppu government hospital and Ponnampalam private hospital – near his village, the last strong hold of the LTTE. By May 2009, as many as 65 similar attacks had been carried out on hospitals. Lack of medicines and equipment caused many preventable deaths.
That evening, aid workers like those from the Tamil Rehabilitation Organisation picked their way through the dead and injured strew of bodies, doling out Kanji to the ones still found alive.
Just a few months ago, at the end of 2008; international agencies including the United Nations and all its related relief agencies had left. A UN report in 2011 would late criticize this move.
With no one to bear witness, it hadn’t taken the Sri Lankan army long to swoop down on the Tamil controlled areas in north and east. In January 2009, the capital city Kilinochi of the LTTE controlled area fell.
“As a UN spokesperson at the time, I operated with limitations,” said Gordon Weiss who until 2009 was the UN spokesperson in Sri Lanka. “My first response was professional and then personal to the ongoing crisis - Night after night, I would return home, having received calls from doctors, pleading with us to do more, get them more medicine.” Weiss chronicles the war in his book ‘The Cage - The fight for Sri Lanka & the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers.
Weiss was speaking recently in Auckland, where a smattering of people gathered at the Mount Albert memorial on a rainy day that carried a hint of winter to mark the 4th anniversary. Some voiced their fear for loved ones back home lest they say anything perceived to be anti-government.
The Sri Lankan government faces allegations and mounting evidence of committing crimes under international law as per the Amnesty International report ‘Sri Lanka’s Assault on Dissent’.
Violence significantly escalated in the last few days of the conflict when Palani was amongst the over 300,000 trapped in the cross-fire and herded into the ‘no-fire zones’, only to become easy targets.
“We all felt forgotten… orphaned and never thought that the situation would deteriorate like this. They didn’t care who they were hitting or missing,” remembers Palani. He has lost a cousin in another attack similar to one in his village and a total of five family members to the war. If the other countries, international agencies and the army had let them down, by some accounts, so had the LTTE who used the civilian population as camouflage and human shields.
The army’s advancing line of fire hunted a fearful, injured and cowering population further and further into desperation and smaller patches of land. In May 2009, Palani fled with the exodus of over 300,000 civilians.
He is stoic, unflinching as he recounts what happened next.
(Read part 2 in the next issue of the Indian Weekender. Some names have been changed to protect identities)