On the A-9 road from Kandy to Jaffna, bullet scarred palmyrah palms that once lined long stretches where intense fighting between government troops and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had taken place, are no longer to be seen. Many of these dead or dying trees have been chopped down, accentuating an unforgettably arid landscape that has seen enough death and destruction for decades to come.
Agony transcending generations
Erasure of the agonies that ordinary people have had to undergo will not, however be as easy as the felling of trees and the widening of roads. Two years after active fighting ended, each family has a story to tell and a plea to find out what has happened to a loved one. The agony transcends generations. One old woman from Nelliady, lifting her elbow, shows the deep scar left behind by a bullet when she was shot at by a soldier attached to the Indian Peace Keeping Force in the eighties during a skirmish in the village. Her son who was one year old at that time, was also injured but he survived. Twenty years later and second time around when staying with relatives at Puthukudirippu in order to study at a technical college, he was not so lucky. Caught up in the fierce fighting accompanying the advance of government troops, he had vanished literally from the face of the earth. She had spent the past several years, going from police station to detention camp to see if her son is being kept there and has now exhausted all avenues of relief.
This woman’s tale is replicated in hundreds of similar stories in each and every village in this part of the land. Amongst them are scattered and familiar accounts of the corrupt and the mercenary exploiting people’s agony. One mother’s account of the disappearance of her son while studying in Vavuniya is accompanied by a tear filled complaint that, under coercion, she had paid money to a paramilitary group (now in government) who had promised to return her child but to no avail. Somewhat ironically if not surprisingly, the local police had, on her complaint, filed a case on the coerced taking of money but this too had not resulted in any practical action. Local monitors such as the area officers of the Human Rights Commission have only, in some cases, sent an acknowledgement of the complaint but no follow-up action has been evidenced over the years.
Marginal place of the law
The courts and the law have also a marginal place in the scheme of things here. If at all, taking a case to court, provided that a courageous judge sits on the Bench, may prevent the most egregious violations such as the continued torture of a suspect. Yet shadowy abductions and disappearances continue to make a mockery of the law. Many of the stories told by these women bear uncanny parallels to the stories of Southern mothers during the abduction and disappearances of Sinhalese young men and women in the eighties. There is however, a vital difference. In the South, there was closure at least to some extent. Family members of the victims had the opportunity to file cases in court, (however pointless that effort may have turned out to be), many of them were offered compensation and under a different political dispensation, they had at least, the consolation of knowing that the future would hold out something different for their families.
Here in the North, that guarantee and that promise is absent. The wounds may be too raw and too new, even if two years have passed after the war formally ended but the promise of a new future is shrouded in government policies that focus on development at the expense of both truth and justice. A common call by survivors is for lists of those being kept in government detention post May 2009 to be publicly released so that people could find out if their sons and daughters are still alive.
One man brandishes a newspaper picture of five or six youth being detained and identifies his son as being one of them. However, he says that when he went to that particular army camp and pointed to the picture, the army flatly denied that they had ever arrested such a person or that he had been kept there. None of the fifty or sixty people in this part of the peninsula who gathered here to relate their individual stories of horror and despair have been able to present their case to a government body and they appeared not even to be aware of the existence of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission.
Tensions seething under the surface
The tension that seethes and bubbles beneath the surface only needs a small incentive to ignite as was seen most clearly late last month in Navanthurai and adjoining areas when local people pelted an army camp with stones after ‘grease devils’ in the locality had apparently escaped from the crowds and run into the camp for shelter. Later, there were largely indiscriminate mass arrests of young men who were taken out of their homes and badly beaten before being taken to court.
The incidents here were similar to what had occurred in other parts of the country over ‘grease devils’ where official reaction has not been focused on ascertaining the identity of individuals who attack women with knives. Rather, the trend is to arrest people who engage in protests, despite the fact that they do so out of fear for their own security. Indeed, disregarding the obvious fact that these incidents cannot be a figment of the imagination of communities living as far apart as Hatton, Puttalam and Pottuvil, government spokesmen have commonly dismissed the complaints as fabricated. For example, in Navanthurai where the official reaction to protests was, by far, more severe than in other areas, local protests were ludicrously attributed to a sudden inclination to attack the camp for no discernible reason. Local community officials are helpless in these circumstances; a legal practitioner and chairman of a local body in the area, raises his hands agitatedly to show that he cannot do anything to help his community. It is a disturbing indication of the extent to which public trust in the government’s duty to maintain law and order has deteriorated.
Deprivation and injustice
leading to militancy
Not only in Jaffna but also in other parts of the country, the breakdown of cordial relations and trust between the local police and the communities is very evident. In the internal police structures, political authority has replaced the ordinary police line of command. Added to this is the heavy militarization of law enforcement. Unsurprisingly, the replacement of emergency regulations with enhanced regulations under prevention of terrorism laws has had virtually no impact here. These are games left only to Colombo to play. The practical reality is that there is little difference between the new emergency regime and the old emergency regulations. In the North, militarized law enforcement has come to stay regardless of whatever form it may be presented in.
Quite often, the choice falsely presented to Sri Lankans is between development and accountability. Yet, this is a false choice. Truth telling and justice does not necessarily mean filing cases before court implicating service personnel or in aiding the agendas of diaspora forces in taking the country’s military or political commanders to international justice tribunals.
Looked at solely from a people’s perspective, it means disclosing the truth of events that have taken place so that survivors are able to grieve and at least try and close that chapter in their lives. It means putting into place a scheme of things that would not allow for the reoccurrence of such dark days, not through coercion or compulsion but by putting an end to deprivation and to injustice which leads inevitably to militancy. For the people of the North, this closure is long overdue.
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