Colombo

‘For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them illuminate them, own them, and make them a conscious part of our spirit and our writing.’ -Orhan Pamuk
colombo
There are trips where I find it impossible to write. This is not one of them.
17 May 2007
When I punctured my ear drum in on a beach in Kenya a few weeks ago I got something from the pharmacy to help me sleep. I was afraid that the pain might keep me awake. The doctor said he was out of the valium that I asked for, so he offered something else; Rohypnol. I had neither seen nor heard of it before, and I took it only that night. I was out like a light; I didn’t feel the pain, and had a perfect, dreamless sleep.
Yesterday I was on my last leg of the flight to Colombo, having started in Copenhagen that morning with transfers in Munich and Doha, Qatar. It was to be six hours until Colombo, and I was arriving at 7 am local time. I figured that I had better try to get some sleep if I was going to do any work at all that day, so I took a couple of the Rohypnol, just as I had the night my ear drum burst. That stuff could have knocked out a horse. I arrived in Colombo before I knew it. When I got there, I was still nearly unconscious. I managed to make it through baggage claim and customs and find my driver outside, but I don’t remember it very well. Nor do I remember much of the ride from the airport to the office, as I slept almost the whole way. After the office they dropped me at the apartment of a colleague who was out of town, and I crashed again until 2 in the afternoon.
Even when awake I wandered in a space somewhere on the edge of consciousness. The tube of Colgate shaving cream that I had purchased in Beirut was a dead ringer for tooth paste, and sitting on the edge of the sink I made the mistake not once, but twice, and the soapy taste lingered in my mouth long after I had tried to correct the mistake with the correct tube of aqua fresh. The second time was worse; my mouth’s memory was faster to resurrect that awful taste. Stupid enough not to have moved the tube after the first time, I put it into my dob kit and haven’t shaved since.
It’s hot, but not crazy hot. I had been told to anticipate a wall of heat and humidity – that’s how everyone I spoke to put it, without exception: a wall – that would slam into me the moment that the door of the plane opened. It was humid, and it was warm, but not uncomfortably so. I remember getting off the helicopter in Sierra Leone and feeling the sweat instantly bursting from every pore, rolling down one’s back, and the prickly heat erupting in my hair follicles. This is nothing like that. There is a breeze here, and the air is humid, but not impossibly close. I am told that it is rainy season, and low, puffy white clouds are low against a pale blue sky, but it has yet to rain since I’ve arrived.
I spent a few short hours at the office. The driver picked me up and we got some rice on the street. The driver, Mohan, bought it from a woman on the street in neat little packages. When I opened it on the desk in the office it was in a wrapped paper stamped with in small letters with the word, ‘red,’ itself wrapped in a plastic shopping bag. It contained a generous heap of rice, some dried fish, small pieces of plantain, some unidentified vegetables, and more hot pepper than a reasonable man could tolerate. It took me four glasses of water to get through the meal.
In the evening I dropped my stuff off at Carsten’s empty apartment and went looking for food. It’s an odd place, the tallest building on Duplication road, so called because it duplicates, or runs parallel to, Galle road, the other main drag in this part of town. There is a DeliFrance fast food café with café lattés, brie, and stuff like that on the ground floor facing the street, and inside the atrium of the building are the remains of what used to be, or the empty shell of what is going to be, a shopping center; it’s unclear. The whole place is gutted, a construction zone, and the only thing finished is the escalator running up through the empty floors. Passing through a passage to the left, and another unfinished hallway underneath fluorescent lights, and you emerge into the only finished part of the ground floor, a small foyer with two elevators. There the finished part of the building begins, and the sixth floor apartment is spotless: cold tile floors, air conditioners in every room.
+ + +
I went out in the evening and went to the first place that had been recommended to me, a place called paradise gallery just down duplication road. The place was gorgeous. Inside an open tiled courtyard was on oblong coy pond. Soft lighting revealed passageways into a bar and a restaurant, and behind me there was the gift shop that I had come looking for. Everything was beautiful, and everything was polished and perfect; pottery, stone buddhas, candles, carvings, paintings, picture frames, silk pashminas and on and on and on. But when I saw the panama hats from Ecuador and the afghan kilims, I got suspicious. This place was only slightly closer to Sri Lanka than IKEA. I stepped outside of all of that luxury so pristine it felt almost synthetic and almost stumbled over a woman and her child sitting on a piece of cardboard against a wall. They didn’t ask for any money when I passed by.
But the heat and the scent of the flowers was delicious and overwhelming. I went further down the road and ended up in another expat hangout, a British pub called the cricket club, a place devoted to a cricket theme and loaded with flat screens on every wall showing several different test matches at once. I had a few beers and a snack, and then I went back to the apartment til morning.
I ate breakfast ate a local place on Galle road. I reckoned that if I ate food that was hot enough, fresh of the stove, that any bacteria in the food would be dead. I had no idea what anything on the menu was, and I ended up with a chipati filled with egg, accompanied by three different types of sauce, which I only tasted, since they didn’t pass the ‘steaming hot’ test. I noticed a two inch long cockroach scuttling across the floor behind the stove while I was eating, and quickly finished my meal. It was a little over a dollar.
Galle road and Duplication road are lined with gem shops selling the precious rubies, sapphires, and emeralds that Sri Lanka is famous for, as well as one posh furniture store after another, as well as beggars and Tuk Tuk drivers getting by on a few bucks a day. Ask the locals if there’s any justice in this, and regardless of their social and economic status, they shrug it off with a fatalism that any muslim would easily recognize; it’s just the way god wants it. Kierkegaard might dress it up with a polysyllabic moniker – the teleological suspension of the ethical – but it is the same comforting, specious theology that makes sense of an otherwise scandalously senseless existence. When the tsunami hit the west coast, the survivors were unanimous in their analysis of the cause; their collective sin brought god’s wrath upon them. I suppose that even a guilt so overwhelming, an ignominy for unnamed and perhaps even unknown sins so awful that they could somehow, in one’s own cosmology, legitimately justify the violent death of one’s own child, even a guilt so heavy as this is less bleak than a world where that child’s death has no meaning at all.
The next night I was invited to dinner at the Regional Representative’s with her family. It’s a bit of a mixed blessing; though I don’t like to eat dinner alone, eating with people with whom I have little in common, particularly those that I work with, is only slight less – and sometimes a little bit more – tolerable. She had a two story house with a roof terrace where we started with a few beers while her 6 year old boy and her one and a half year old adopted Sri Lankan girl played alongside. Countless birds flocked to and from the trees singing dozens of unfamiliar songs until the sun sets and several species of bats silently take their place. The scent of the flowers on the air was overpowering. The house was nice but the air was as cloying as the company; when we moved downstairs they kept the windows shut and the fans did little but shift the stifling air slowly around the room. I left at the first opportunity. On the way home I asked the tuk tuk driver to stop for five minutes at the casino, which, I had been told, was full of hookers. I walked in and made a bee line for the roulette table, and threw three thousand rupees – about 30 dollars – down on the table, and got back three large stack of chips, all of which I slid over to black. The move drew oohs and ahhs from every woman around the table, but the dispassionate male gamblers didn’t even seem to notice. The croupier spun the wheel, and it came up red. I found my tuk tuk driver outside and continued home.
A few hours later and I was hungry again. I took a walk down the darkened streets without fear; the military and security forces have so saturated Colombo that street crime is virtually unknown. With a loaded Kalshnikov or two on literally every corner, no one dares. Even at 10:30 the street was still alive with shadows; the red glow of a lurking beggar’s cigarette, commuters boarding late night buses home, men and women, young and old, still moving about the city. I found another local eatery, though I was still no wiser about the menu. I asked for something fresh, and I got a hot chipati filled with some kind potato sauce concoction, and three little bags of sauce, tied up like a kid’s goldfish won at the fair. I applied the steaming hot rule and didn’t touch the sauces, but the chipati – or rotti, as now think that they are called – was tasty.
The amount of new information that I absorb just by being here, the amount of new smells and sights and sounds I’m exposed to, are too many to count, impossible to describe. The traffic is mad. The tuk tuks leave less than inches between their little vehicles and the other cars. Mufflers on buses are considered totally passé, but the louder your horn is, the better. The Karuna breakaway faction of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have now themselves split into two, which is much to the government’s liking. The east is now ‘cleared’ of tigers, and Karuna’s boys have allied themselves with the government. Not officially, but everybody knows it’s true. The Buddhists monks are some of the most rabidly violent pro-Sinhala, anti-Tamil people on the island, and many say that they take on robes just to be able to get away with murder, despite that Buddhism’s central tenet is respect for all life. There are jackfruits the size of a small child. There are monkeys on leashes being led by the side of the road. There are elephants for the riding. There is a national obsession with cricket. There is a lottery that’s run every day, and everyone knows it’s rigged, and everyone plays anyway. The Indian ocean outside of Colombo is dirty and wild and so violent that not only do people not swim, I haven’t seen a single boat on the sea outside our 4th floor office balcony. There is a white Buddhist temple on every corner. There is far, far too much to describe. To try to weave this into a coherent narrative is to recognize that it will remain nothing more than a collage of impressions, at the heart of which is failure.
I went to two meetings, one slightly pointless, the other utterly so. The first was a UNHCR protection meeting, I scanned the email distribution list on the top of the agenda and found Joanna Van Gerpen’s name, who used to be head of Unicef in Sierra Leone. There was a debrief from UNHCR on the planned resettlement of IDPs from the camps in Trincomalee and Batticaloa in the recently cleared east back to their home villages: The subtext of their debrief revealed that the resettlement is basically a coerced return in violation of the UN guiding principles on internal displacement and the spirit if not the letter of international law, and HCR was trying to whitewash it. There was a debrief from a food security assessment in the North from WFP.
The next meeting was convened by the consortium of humanitarian agencies, a coordination meeting that lacked only coordination. There were two key note speeches, one from a speaker of parliament who was evidently convinced that he had single handedly invented and given birth to micro credit, and another by a Rwandan Anglican priest who had lived through the genocide and thought that all Sri Lanka needed was a positive attitude and good round of hugs, neglecting to remember that the pivotal event that stopped the genocide in his own country was the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s military victory over Hutu power. His speech could have been subtitled, ‘what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding.’
The last rice pack was the one that killed me. That was the fatal rice pack, the one that did me in. I ate only half of it, but half was enough. Afterward I had a piece of cake, and it felt all afternoon like the cake sat like a rock in my stomach, so after I went shopping at a tourist shop I came home and stuck my finger down my throat. It helped a bit, but not much, and it still felt like I was kid who had just been punched in the stomach. Then the fever came on, and the aches all over my body, and the headache. Shortly after that, I threw up some more, and then I entered a world of pain. A trip to the bathroom was like an expedition across the desert; I conceived it a long time before it began, I prepared myself mentally and physically, I resolved to go, I ran in fear from the mere thought of going, I returned to the inevitability of the journey, I watched my body rise from the bed as if in slow motion, as if from afar, and make my way the seven meters around the bed and through the door to the toilet as if it were moving through molasses, I witnessed the exquisite agony as my guts heaved every last bit of murky brown and sour acid into the toilet, the drool dripping from my open lips to the puddle of murk in the bowl, my diaphragm exploding in involuntary paroxysms until nothing more came out. I collapsed on the cold tiles, the pale saffron sheet wrapped around my naked chest, preparing myself for the journey home, to bed.
I stayed in that terrible country for two days, wandering in and out of consciousness. I was prone for so long that my lower back developed a chronic, dull ache, while my stomach remained tightened in an ever present fist of pain. Food had no appeal whatsoever. On the second day I somehow managed to get some clothes on and I wandered outside looking for a pharmacy. I sat down on one of two chairs in the tiny place and pleaded for anything they would give me, but they gave me antibiotics without a prescription, but not the valium I was hoping for. I wanted to be able to sleep without knocking myself completely out, like the XX had done. I washed down the antibiotics with some flat sprite that I bought on the way back and collapsed on the bed until 7 pm. I woke for a few hours, then I slept a tortured night through, writhing in stomach pain, feverish and achy.
+ + +
Sometimes a fever breaks as abruptly as upon waking from a powerful nightmare; one moment you are in the grips of a monster, gasping for air as its fingers tighten around you neck, the next moment you are wide awake, thrown back into your own skin, and the monster exists only in your memory, your imagination. Other times the sickness will abate in waves, as a storm at sea gradually lulls away, the swell falling, the rain lightening, the wind dying down until finally the sun breaks through the clouds and the you find you have made it to the other side alive. On fell sick on Friday night, and on Sunday morning I watched from the deck as the bow still pitched and heaved and sent spray crashing over the deck, but I could tell that the worst was already over. I was strong enough to make it to the office, though as soon as I got there my body still felt the magnetic pull of the coach and immediately found the horizontal as surely as a spirit level. I was able to make it to the car and travel across the country to the other side of the island, though I still had no appetite for food.
We went to a village where there were Muslims, Tamils, and Singhalese Buddhists living peacefully together, a rare anomaly in a land where animosity amongst the three groups is the debt of generations, and actively encouraged by their leaders. They were dirt poor, but all is relative, I suppose. They had tile roofs, protected wells, and some even had brick houses. There was quite a bit of concrete patios here and there. There were proper roads, there was a bit of livestock. It’s either a curse or a blessing in my job that I started at the bottom, in Mali, where I saw true poverty, that it makes a place like Sri Lanka seem rich by comparison. Anywhere without mud walls and thatch roofs, in fact, can seem rich by comparison, anywhere where they eat fish more than once a week, where they can eat at least 2 meals a day. Nevertheless, these people were dirt poor, and they knew it. We talked to them about their water, sanitation, and hygiene, about the new pit latrines being dug, about the old wells that had already been dug. Their biggest problem is that they are landless; having developed enough to be able to work for a living instead of living on subsistence farming, they are now at the whims of the capital holders in the area, if there are any around. They scratch a few rupees together from day to day. They might be able to afford a few more goods than the Malians can, but if they go without work for a few weeks, they’ll have nothing to feed themselves, whereas the subsistence farmers, relatively poor by comparison, will at least be able to open his grain store, and finally eat his seed, before he needs charity to survive.
We stuck our heads inside a couple of houses to look at the household water storage. They had beds, concrete floors, a few pictures on the walls, shutters and bars on the glassless windows. Is this the measure of luxury?
By the evening, when we checked into our beach front hotel, my guts had healed to the point where I was ready for a swim. We go and listen to people talk about their abject poverty all day, we listen and commiserate, we shake our heads in dismay and promise we’ll try to get more assistance, we say we’ll do the best we can. We get into our cars and drive an hour down the road, and head to a gorgeous 4 star hotel right on the beach.
The parking lot was filled with the four wheel drive vehicles of aid agencies; IFRC, FSD, CESVI, and about three or four others. A dozen white people – one of them red as a lobster – played volleyball on the beach as the sun went down over a perfectly glassy 3 mile bay, frame on either side by a twenty meter high promontory of palm-studded rocks. Neat little waves rolled slowly, ceaselessly in.
At this stage in my career, I tend not to ask too many questions any more. I wish I could say that it broke my heart. I wish I could say that I was a better person, that it really mattered to me, that the enormous, gaping hypocrisy of the aid business was what really made my stomach turn, and not just a bad rice packet from the streets of Colombo. I wish I could say that I was such a deeply committed man, but if I did I’d be lying. The fact is, my problem is not really an ethical one, nor even a moral one, it’s more of a rational problem. When the stated business of the NGOs is poverty eradication, how can we claim to stand for justice and change when we reinforce the poverty gap with every move we make? I fail to see one good reason why we couldn’t simply have pitched up in the village we’d visited, in tents if we had to, and given all the money that we spent on the hotel and the dinner to the villagers. The reason of course is our own discomfort. The four of us spent more last night than an average family will see in a year. But it’s just not the way things done. We say that we stand for redressing social inequity, but when we rock up to the hotel, we give the driver a room in the ‘driver’s quarters,’ or in a cheaper hotel in town. How can we possibly justify so much waste?
But it doesn’t break my heart. I wish it did, but it doesn’t. I don’t know if it ever did, if this cynicism is the byproduct of a career in the aid business, or if I was just never cut out for it in the first place – though in fact, it doesn’t seem to bother anybody else I work with it, all. My problem is more of a logical one. I can’t stand the hypocrisy because it just doesn’t follow its own internal logical. It’s not even consistent with itself, with the tenets inherent to its own value system. My problem is a logical one. If I move on from this job with an NGO that claims to be fighting for a revolution, I’ll likely move on to a developmental consulting firm or to the UN, where the salaries are higher and the problem is even worse. But the hypocrisy, at least, isn’t there. This is the price of sanctimony; those organizations never claim to want to change the world, only to make a profit, or to exist in it. Whether or not I am kidding myself that this will somehow be more acceptable to me or not, time will tell.
When the tsunami hit the hotel the water reached about six feet high, but by chance or the grace of god, not a single guest or staff member was lost. All of the rooms were on the first floor, and it took the staff a mere five days to clean out all of the damage and the mess from the reception and the kitchen. Then the second tsunami came in, that of the aid agencies. The hotel remained fully booked, every single room solid, for a whole year. Agencies bought blocks of rooms by the month and paid in advance. Even now they are doing a stiff business, and the Norwegian peace monitors assigned to the Trincomalee district have rented a whole wing for the year.
Ironically, there is a camp for internally displaced persons just next door. They have the same beach front view, but no AC, no buffet, no satellite TV, no ayurvedic massage. They waited in vain for a school for their children for years, but then the tsunami came, and the NGOs had so much money they didn’t know what to do with it, so soon the people who had been suffering from war for years found themselves the beneficiaries of a shiny new three story school building. Their fishing boats are just in front of the camp. They are likely to be forcibly repatriated soon, as are all of the IDPs on the recently ‘cleared’ eastern coast of the island. Every group of IDPs we visited yesterday and today had the same visits as the ones we heard about in the UNHCR protection meeting in Colombo: you’re going back ‘home,’ whether you like it or not. The time will be of our choosing, and it’s likely to be within the next two weeks. The assistance you receive upon arriving, luxuries such as food, shelter, water, etc., will be made clear to you when you arrive. Though you may have been displace as many as ten times by fighting since you left your home area as long as ten years ago, though you may have been a fisherman, returning to a fishing community with no opportunity to farm and no boat to fish with and no promise of other food, you have no choice. You go, because we say you go.
+ + +
At first I thought it was a luxury when I heard about how little under 5 mortality there was, but then I learned that the number one cause of death, bar none, is murder, and it changed my perspective a bit. The disappearances are too numerous to count. After nightfall the streets are empty, because this is when they come to take you. It could be the LTTE, it could be Karuna’s breakaway faction, the TMVP, it could be the government. Often, your family won’t know who it was that took you; popular wisdom will come with different endings to the story, none of which can be verified. It doesn’t matter really, who did it. What matters is the simple irretrievable fact of your death.
+ + +
We drive around in our air conditioned four wheel drive Toyota Prado, visiting camps and villages, talking to the people who have received wells, latrines, shelter, food, and grants from our projects. We ask them what we did wrong, what we could do better. We go through countless checkpoints, where soldiers wear four different colors of uniform, though all carry the ubiquitous Kalashnikov, courtesy of Pakistan. We arrive in a village to hold another discussion, and the downcast project officer tells us that the beneficiaries have not yet arrived, as the army camp adjacent to the village is shelling the Tiger positions not far away, and people are afraid to come. We sit and wait, and about five minutes later a round of outgoing artillery sounds a thunderous ‘boom!’ about 300 meters away. More follow. But eventually the beneficiaries trickle in anyway, and we hold our discussion group. Then we get back in the car for another, and yet another. Everywhere we go there are groups of people waiting for us, and children place hand woven leis of flowers over our heads, thick and heavy with frangipani, hibiscus, and jasmine. By the early afternoon they are piled high in the car.
At one place outside a school we talk to a women’s cooperative that has pooled their common savings into a bank account. They show us the bank book and the balance of 7,000 rupees, or about 70 dollars. Thirty women have taken several months to save less than what I spent on gift shop trinkets in Colombo in a single shopping trip. I am overcome by the futility of this enterprise. I want desperately to give them everything I have, and have to ask my colleagues to convince me not to do so. I know I shouldn’t. I know that it’s bad practice, that I will only encourage other groups to beg, that they have to earn it, that it will increase infighting, and, and, and still I have to beg them to hold me back. I don’t give them any money. Instead they give us soft drinks, which we gracefully accept in the shimmering heat, before we get back in our air conditioned Prado, put on another CD, and spend the evening in a stunning hotel overlooking a lake on the edge of the national park. Sometimes the elephants can be seen drinking at the shore. There is a cascade of water running forever down the wall behind the reception, where the ceiling reaches to twenty meters, and gives on to the lake view pool patio without the barrier of windows. There is giant coy pond in the shape of a lotus flower with an elephant-sized frangipani growing in the middle. Hindu artifacts in brass and stone pepper the walls and surfaces, and framed cases of gems are on offer for sale. There is a juice bar, and an Ayurvedic spa. We are the only guests. I go for a swim at sunset. While giving money to the women’s group was decidedly not kosher – and I knew that it wasn’t, I’ve been in the business long enough to know that I wasn’t supposed to do this, though I may have misplaced the reason why – this is somehow deemed to make sense.
We drive through village after village, checkpoint after checkpoint. The AC is comfortably chilly, and outside the car the heat is stifling. Everywhere we go, in every village and every camp, there is no shortage of barbed wire. There is barbed wire everywhere, generous, double loops of barbed wire, long straight rows of barbed wire strung just inches apart from trees and posts to create a killing wall, back by loops of barbed wire, then another wall of barbed wire parallel to the first, creating a ten meter space into which no living thing will pass. There are sandbagged machine gun posts every 500 meters or so, and the men who patrol the streets do so spread out with five meters between each of them, on either side of the street, so as to avoid being mowed down in an ambush or from a lobbed hand grenade.
The checkpoints are so numerous, and have become such a feature of the landscape, that many small businesses have sprung up around many of them, selling drinks or snacks to the people and vehicles waiting in line to pass through. At one such place I get out of the Prado and bargain briefly with a wood carver. He’s got tobacco spilling out of his lip. His ten year old son follows us around as he shows me his work. I am doubtless the first customer he’s had stop at his roadside workshop all day. The craftsmanship on his work – carved Buddhas, Ganeshas, boxes, and the odd Jesus bust in mahogany, teak, and ebony – is OK; nothing spectacular, but still I want desperately to give him every penny I have. But nobody wants to be a sucker, either. When he offers me a price two and a half times what I thought I’d have to pay, twenty five dollars for a little carving of Shiva in teak, the best piece of his I could find, I balk. I join the others in the waiting Prado, which has already negotiated the complicated permit process and is waiting for me on the other side of the checkpoint.
We pass from government held Trincomalee district into the Batticaloa area held by Karuna’s breakaway TMVP faction, the former Tamil Tigers who are now siding with the government. Their logo suddenly appears on walls and signposts here and there, and it’s strange to see the Tiger insignia leaping out without fear. One is accustomed to knowing that the Tiger eyes and ears are ever present, and yet also knowing that they will never be seen. Here the boys of the TMVP stroll in open daylight with weapons and ammunition on their shoulders over civilian clothing. We stopped at an IDP camp a few hundred meters from the sea in Batti and held a discussion group. Suddenly hundreds of people showed up, as the following day was a food distribution day, and they saw our vehicles and thought that our arrival had something to do with that. About a half hour later two young guys rolled up on a 100 cc motorbike with Kalshnikovs over their backs. A small portion of the crowd broke off and ran over to them, surrounded the boys as they handed out pink leaflets to the crowd. On the leaflets was a message in Tamil saying that any TMVP members who drink alcohol and cause problems for the community could be reported to the following telephone numbers.
But nobody I spoke to took the leaflets at face value, and everyone agreed that anyone who would call such a number would be courting death. One of the young men who rushed to grab a leaflet tore it by accident. The boy on the motorbike thought that the man was tearing the leaflet on purpose. ‘I’ll be coming for you tonight,’ the boy on the motorbike said. Should he call the number and complain?
On the way from village to village I hear innumerable stories of disappearances, murders, attacks, and battles, whole epochs of history in this long and forgotten war, too many to keep track of, so that in the end only the stories of murder which are either iconic or bizarre remain in memory, like the story of elephant pass, where a notorious government army base was torturing the surrounding Tamil community for months on end. The surrounding Tigers gained strength, and gained ground, and were able to cut the army base off, leave them surrounded. Unable to mount an assault on the base, they simply cut off the water, and over a thousand of the soldiers died of dehydration in a matter of days. Or Rajiv Ghandi’s assassination by a Tamil Tiger in India, the 20th anniversary of which was yesterday, when a female suicide bomber approached him to place a flower lei over his head, before killing them both.
The island is shaped roughly like a teardrop. The rebels have long held the narrow, northern part of the tear, as well as a narrow band on the eastern edge, which was held until a few months ago by Karuna’s wing of the LTTE. Now it is the recently ‘cleared’ east – cleared of the LTTE, the Tamil Tigers – and the government has started to forcefully resettle IDPs. In one case they dumped the returnees off, people who had fled from their villages years before and were returning to nothing, and then brought the journalists in, encouraged the people to line the streets to see the president arrive and welcome them home. He bent down to kiss a child, and this moment, of the president kissing the child, was on the front page of the newspaper the next morning. The journalist made his deadline. What the caption of the photograph did not report was that the child’s father was murdered that night in his home, after the president had gone. In this case public opinion was unanimous; it was the LTTE. They killed the boy’s father as retribution for his having let his son be kissed by the enemy, to show that they hadn’t been ‘cleared,’ after all. They killed him to have the last word. I wonder about that little boy, yet another tragedy who has indelibly entered the collective memory through the ephemeral front page of the newspaper and the notorious story of the murder that followed and who, in receiving the kiss, through sheer fate and circumstance has become the instrument of his father’s own death. It is a reality which will likely change the course of his life. The loss of his father will forever loom in massive disproportion to the act that bore it – how could he have known? The impossible, hopeless yearning to take it back. The seed of his understanding of that morning, of that kiss, and its relationship to his father’s death, will only grow as he does.
How did they know which man was the boy’s father? How many eyes had they in the crowd, that day? They have a thousand eyes. They are quite literally everywhere. Who, you may ask, are ‘they?’ It is a question I posed myself today. It is an oddity of the Tamil language that when Tamil speakers translate their thoughts to English, the placeholder for the third person plural gets lost; Tamils are often recounting the story of ‘them’ attacking or ‘them’ being abducted, and you have no idea who they are talking about. But on the other hand, it doesn’t really matter; they are vicious murderers, everyone. And everyone has spies, and everyone has two identities, or more, and no one has the courage to speak. To discuss the war, or the various factions or their interests, in public, is dangerous. When they do, people will always, always, turn and look around to see who is within earshot, and lower their voices before continuing. And often, people are listening, though you’ll never know if it’s from dumb curiosity or an ulterior motive. A woman may show up at your door and say that she is LTTE, and she is hungry, so please feed her. Terrified to offend a Tiger, you shuffle to the kitchen to fetch her a plate of rice. When you return, she tells you that in fact she is a representative of the government Security Task Force, and who are you, giving aid to LTTE?
The answer to every questions leads to a long and convoluted narrative, with many tangents and subplots, so that the answer itself is always incomplete, and you are left to wonder what image was left outside of the frame. I wanted to record everything. I wanted to be able to say, that’s the way it was. But in the end I am reconciled to the knowledge that these are pictures without captions.
+ + +
It was called Ceylon by the Portuguese but the ruling party changed the name to Sri Lanka, a Singhalese word, upon independence. According to the Tamils, this was done expressly to piss them off and marginalize them, and make them aware of the fact that now that the British were gone, the positions of power in the civil administration that they had been disproportionately rewarded would soon be taken from them, along with everything else. The Hindu and Christian Tamils make up 17 percent of the population, a minority of just enough size to be problematic for generations to come. The Muslims make up another 7 percent, and though they speak Tamil, having originally migrated from the neighboring Indian state of Tamil Nadu (as did all the Tamils, originally) in the seventeenth century, they nevertheless intermarried with the Singhalese upon arrival, and therefore typically identify with the Singhalese majority. The Singhala are Buddhist, and though Buddhism is supposed to have non-violence and respect for all life, as well as meditation and a life of contemplative awareness, at its core where it’s practiced elsewhere, here they have no problem with a very violent version of the philosophy. They even have a party of extreme nationalist, extremely violent Buddhists, the JVP, who have sometimes called for the extermination of all Tamils. The ruling Singhalese government doesn’t usually go that far, content to assert the simple fact that Sri Lanka is a nation of the Singhala, by the Singhala, and for the Singhala, and therefore the Tamils really have not right to be there, and should all migrate to India, despite having been in Sri Lanka for over a thousand years.
There were a number of different Tamil movements in the early 70’s, but the LTTE quickly took out the competition and its leader, Prabaharan, established his rule through a cult of personality that was both effective and ruthless. It is a well disciplined movement, and Tamil women living in LTTE areas have in some ways less to fear than in government controlled ones, as there is no fear of rape or robbery in the Tiger villages.
While the government security forces – there must be at least 10 different organizations, including the army, navy, air force, police, and the notorious Special Task Force – can boast a standing force of at least 350,000, as well as MiGs and ten or so helicopter gunships, the Tigers are generally believed to have about three to five thousand. And yet with this ragtag, poorly trained, vastly outnumbered band of guerilla conscripts, Prabaharan has managed to hold the entire country hostage for over thirty years. Public opinion is near unanimous; the government is clearly in the wrong, and because they treat all Tamils as second-class citizens and potential Tigers can make no claim to being a country for all of its citizens. And the Tigers are about the worst band of bloodthirsty, merciless, power hungry mercenaries you will ever come across. They practically invented suicide bombing, and still boast the highest number of successful suicide bombings anywhere around the world. They kill without question, and without mercy. They have used child soldiers in various degrees over the years, typically releasing them all every few years in a general amnesty, only to turn around and recruit new ones a year or so later.
Most Tamils are therefore caught between the government, that wants them dead, and the Tigers, who claim to fight on their behalf, but in reality only tax and terrorize their own people. The LTTE long had the support of India, as the neighboring Indian state of Tamil Nadu is composed one hundred percent of ethnic Tamils, but then they assassinated Rajiv Ghandi after he made some remarks about possible reconciliation with the Sri Lankan government, and they have hated them ever since. While the government of Sri Lanka gets nearly all of its military materiel from Pakistan, the LTTE is financed entirely through taxing, looting, and a phenomenally successful program of collecting from the Tamil diaspora abroad. Tamils continue to fund the LTTE either because they remain ignorant of just how badly they are victimizing their own people in Sri Lanka, or because they don’t want to be seen as not supporting ‘the cause,’ despite the knowledge that the cause and the LTTE have long ago ceased to be the same thing, or out of simple fear. A classic LTTE fundraising strategy is to strike up conversation with a Tamil in Canada or Europe outside a Hindu temple, where they often make fundraising drives. After finding out the person’s name and home village, they will then ask for money. The person in question will then give for fear that their relatives back home will be murdered if they don’t. And that fear is very well founded.
Our driver is Singhala, specifically recruited because of his ethnicity in order to help us negotiate the nastier of the checkpoints, where Tamils are routinely harassed and interminably questioned, while Dharshini, our programme officer, is Tamil, as are the beneficiaries of most of our programs. They occupy the Eastern and Northern parts of the country, and so after decades of marginalization and murder by the army, had the bad luck to be amongst those hardest hit by the tsunami that rammed Sri Lanka’s eastern shore. Dharshini is the one who runs most of the focus group discussions, the only one able to communicate with the vast majority of non-English speaking Tamils.
We wander into yet another discussion in yet another camp, this one like so many others: a flat, sandy patch of ground filled with row upon row of identical white tents, and not a tree in sight. This one, though, happens to be in a cemetery, and the grave stones can still be seen punctuated the landscape here and there between the tents and pit latrines. We make our way to the large, open air structure near the camp’s entrance, eager to find some shade from the penetrating sun in the near 100 percent humidity. It’s made of waist-high rattan walls and wooden poles holding up a roof made of standard issue blue plastic sheeting, stamped with the ubiquitous UNHCR logo of two hands forming a steeple over a person. Dharshini makes her way through question after question of the interview guide, and a member of the partner staff who speaks English translates for me simultaneously. She asks each question in rapid-fire Tamil, a language in which it is necessary to produce dozens of syllables per second while barely moving one’s mouth, and the IDPs answer in turn, each speaking at length. The translations, though, are short and concise, and at first I wondered if he was just summarizing or omitting. But I realized that this occurs no matter who is translating, and after many tortured questions with my translators and pleas not to leave anything out I am left to conclude that it takes a long time to say simple things in Tamil. There is much repetition.
In Sierre Leone they have a proverb: ‘Black man sorry na laugh,’ or, when the black man is sorry, he laughs. It is used to describe the peculiar phenomenon of hearing stories of horrible atrocities recounted with a smile, or even a chuckle. The same phenomenon occurs here, and I always know when we get to the question about the leading causes of death in the camp, as it always sends a ripple of laughter – genuine, mirthful laughter – across the crowd: only an outsider would ask such an absurd question. Why, the number one cause of death, for all age groups, is murder, silly! After our first night in TVMP-controlled Batticaloa – which turns into a ghost town at 8:30 pm, as all the killings occur at night – I ask the discussion group when the last killing was: a young guy breaks into a smile, and says that his uncle was shot two weeks ago. I express my condolences, and ask him if he knows why. This sends a riotous giggle across the whole group, and the kid just shrugs his shoulders. I learn later from Dharshini that his wife, who witnessed the killing, knows exactly who did it, but she refuses to speak, knowing that if she did it will likely mean her own death as well as that of several other members of her family.
We came to do an evaluation of our program, but it quickly emerges that the only thing to do is fiddle with minor details in implementation, while the major concern that defines every waking and sleeping moment of life for people in the middle of a war zone is something that we are powerless to address. In one village where we’d built replacement housing after the tsunami the beneficiaries complained that concrete foundations of their homes were cracking due to the concussions from the outgoing artillery of the nearby army camp, shelling Tiger positions in the jungle a few kilometers away. This strikes me at once as perfectly hopeless, as well as a perfect metaphor for the situation these people find themselves in; struggling to raise families and lead normal lives while artillery shatters the foundations on a daily basis.
In Batti we stay in a dump. Here I have no guilt over the accommodation standard, and would actually have preferred to pitch tent at the beach side IDP camp, if it had been possible, and safe. It’s called the Green Garden because to the acres of concrete have been painted green, and not because it in any way resembles an actual garden. The room is so full of mosquitoes that they line the doors and windows clamoring to get out to a place where it’s less crowded. The water smells so sulfurous that a shower is like dousing one’s body in rotten eggs. (Isn’t that how Milton described hell – the overpowering stench of sulfur?) There is no mobile coverage, as the army shut down the network when it found out that some of its senior commanders were in mobile contact with the LTTE, who through prior arrangement were relaying the coordinates of the wrong positions while the shelling was going on to ensure that they wouldn’t be hit. The municipal power supply isn’t strong enough to power the air conditioners, so at eleven thirty when they turn off the generator they turned into low-powered fans, and the green concrete cell of a room with the tiny window turns into an oven. This was the place for which I was instructed to bring my own sheets, as the beds are known to be full of bedbugs.
We stay there two nights before moving south to Ampara, before heading inland again, over the central highlands, back to Colombo. On our way back there is a bombing in Colombo; one soldier is killed, three wounded, as are three civilians. It’s not possible for the army to determine at first if its was a suicide bomb or a motorcycle bomb, as three bikes were completely obliterated. If it weren’t for the phone call from headquarters, it would be easy not to hear about the bombing; such an event doesn’t pass for major news here. The same day there is an assault by half a dozen fishing boats of the ‘Sea Tigers’ on a naval base in Jaffna, but the only thing clear from the media reports, which claim that the government successfully repelled an amphibious assault, is that the body count – of 40 plus Tigers killed – is vastly inflated.
Our last night is in Kandy, at another gorgeous resort with a fabulous buffet, a great view, a massive swimming pool, and an Ayurvedic spa where I get a massage the morning of our departure. We come back to the capital with a handful of conclusions about the program and the partners, a few dozen modest recommendations about how to be more effective, but nothing earth-shattering. It feels absolutely mad; there’s nothing to be done here, of any meaning. The only thing that matters is put an end to the war, and that is not going to happen in the foreseeable future. We are totally unable to address the number one consequence for the population, what we call in our terminology, ‘protection activities,’ which is a polite term for our response to organized murder. Everyone reckons that the government will continue its campaign of hatred against the Tamils indefinitely, and the rebel movement will continue for as long as Prabaharan does, a crazed, unseen sixty year-old man holed up in a deep underground bunker somewhere in the north. Though the army has succeeded in ‘clearing,’ the east, there are several isolated pockets of Tigers hiding in the jungles. It’s widely speculated that when the armed forces turn their attention to the north these groups will resurface and make hit and run attacks on smaller garrisons and police stations, and slowly retake the east, inch by inch, as the army pulls back into more heavily manned positions. Even if they don’t, the east is still in the grips of the TMVP, who are just as heavily armed as they ever were, and the streets are still thick with a generation of young men who have grown up with guns in their hands. In Trinco the streets are still empty by 8 pm every night, even though the rebels have been ‘cleared;’ whoever’s been ‘cleared,’ the murders continue.