16th February 1997

A land of seduction and strife

January's issue of the National Geographic magazine carries a 20 page colour spread on Sri Lanka by Prit J. Vesilind and Steve McCurry Reproduced here are extracts from the report

Birdsongs dart through the humidity. Leeches fatten on my ankles on a morning that seems liquid with heat. With my guide, Kamal Samarasinghe, I hike through the scrub jungle of central Sri Lanka, carrying a package of betel leaves, nuts, and tobacco - gifts for Tissahamy, the aged chief of a clan of Veddas.

The Veddas say they are aborigines, descendants of hunter-gatherers who first inhabited this island in the Indian Ocean some 12,000 years ago.

Later that day we sit on a baked-mud veranda with Tissahamy and his oldest son, Uruwaruge Wanniya, a tall, unsmiling man whose eyes seem fixed somewhere in the distance. He speaks for the chief, who is disgusted by the selling of his culture. But, he tells me, "This land is not big enough for us. And if we go into the reserve to hunt, they arrest us. We feel like cattle being herded."

The outside world that encircles the Vedda people is a tropically seductive island that punctuates the grand statement of India like a comma.

Today Sri Lanka is a world of modern comforts and complexities, a nation of 18 million people gathered from waves of conquest, trade, and colonization, a nation still struggling to find unity. For the past 13 years it has been wracked with ethnic violence and social insurrection in which some 100,000 islanders have died or simply disappeared.

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Sri Lanka means "blessed island" in Sinhala, and at its best it has been an enlightened, multi-ethnic democracy, an India without the crushing social problems. Its 90 percent literacy rate is among the highest in southern Asia; its population growth rate of 1. 3 percent is very low. Caste discrimination is minimal, and women seem fully engaged in the life of the nation. But when I arrive in the fall of 1995, Sri Lanka is mired in a civil war. The government, dominated by Sinhalese, is battling the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or, simply, Tigers), guerrillas who demand a separate state for Tamils.

After decades of tension between the two ethnic groups, hostilities broke out in 1983 when the Tigers attacked a Sri Lankan Army patrol, killing 13 soldiers. Mobs of Sinhalese went on a rampage in retaliation - burning, looting, and executing Tamils throughout the country, unleashing a cycle of violence.

Four years later, in 1987, the Sri Lankan government asked India to send troops to help enforce a cease-fire, but the move awakened an old Sinhalese fear of invasion from the north and provoked a campaign of terror by a Sinhalese Marxist group, the People's Liberation Front (JVP), to overthrow the government. The Indians pulled out after two years, but the counter-attack by the Sri Lankan Army and police against the JVP lurched out of control. Tens of thousands of insurgents and suspects were liquidated, often without trial.

Sri Lanka's President, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, gained office in 1994 by campaigning against such human rights abuses and advocating peace with the Tigers. She represents the political establishment; her late father had been prime minister, and she has named her mother to be the current prime minister. But for many Kumaratunga symbolized a new generation of hope that is now stymied by the relentless hostilities.

"It is a twist of fate when the peace candidate is waging war," says Radhika Coomaraswamy, a Tamil woman who is a director of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Colombo. "Among the human rights groups there is an eerie silence. They are flabbergasted. But they still believe she is the only one who will deliver a political solution."

To make sense of the present, Sri Lankans tell me, I must revisit the colonial past. Great Britain ruled Ceylon for 133 years, granting independence in 1948 and leaving behind a passion for cricket and a ruling class of pipe-smoking, English-educated politicians - both Sinhalese and Tamil - who proved fatally out of touch with their own culture. The modern tragedy of Sri Lanka begins there

The British, he says, often pitted ethnic groups against one another to control their colonies. In Sri Lanka they elevated Tamils, who had been quick to learn English from American missionaries, to dilute Sinhalese power. An educated class of Tamils arose, and by 1947 the minority Tamils held 60 percent of the most lucrative government jobs.

After independence Sinhalese resentment provided fuel for a populist candidate for prime minister, Solomon W.R.D.

Bandaranaike, who in 1956 campaigned to bring power to middle - and lower-class Sinhalese and to institute Sinhala as the state language.Bandaranaike's "Sinhala only" policy effectively cut off the Tamil professional class, which was forced to learn Sinhala or lose jobs and status. Although Tamil was later deemed a national language, resentment had alreeady poisoned the air.

A young AK-47 toting Tamil guerrilla
In the 1970s and '80s radical Tamils renewed calls for a separate state, to be called Eelam. The Tigers were one of several anti-government groups, but their leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, consolidated power with a string of political assassinations, including, it is alleged, the killing of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

Peace might have come in March 1995, after President Kumaratunga presented a proposal to divide Sri Lanka into several regions, granting Tamils virtual autonomy in the north. Moderate Tamils expressed interest, but the Tigers balked, charging that the government was merely trying to drive a wedge between them and other Tamils

"I think the people of Jaffna are fed up with the Tigers, " says Radhika Coomaraswamy, the Tamil woman I had met in Colombo.

The war has divided Sri Lanka into zones. At the time of my visit the government controls the south- central core, the Tigers the northern and eastern coasts, where Tamils, Malays, and Muslim descendants of Arab cinnamon traders have traditionally lived. The government maintains only a tenuous grip on Trincomalee and Batticaloa, the main towns on the east coast, which have been reduced to army-held bastions surrounded by a hostile Tamil population.

I hitch a ride to Batticaloa with a Tamil who works with a non-governmental development agency. We drive as if parting the waters, scattering goats, bicycles, coconut-water vendors, cattle, and monks carrying black umbrellas against the wilting sun.

Few of the government troops who occupy Batticaloa speak Tamil, and their fear is palpable. Spencer Morawilla, a professor at the university here, tells me, "We understand the soldiers. They think that all Tamils have tails. No one trusts anyone."

There is no official way to reach the Tigers. We simply negotiate past the final army checkpoint into one of the most destitute areas of Sri Lanka and on to the village of Vakarai, 35 miles north of Batticaloa. Here, from a side road surrounded by thick vegetation, three Black Tigers emerge,

wearing flip-flops and strolling with cautious bravado. They are suicide cadres, sworn to take their own lives if captured. Around their necks are vials of cyanide.

A waiting list exists to join the suicide squads. On the wall of a deserted hospital a recruiting poster depicts three Black Tigers, two boys and one girl, about 15.

On the following morning we track down the elusive Sivagnanam Karikalan, the Tigers' political officer, at a camp west of Batticaloa. I ask him why the Tigers will not consider the President's proposal to form autonomous districts.

"We have entered into this war to achieve a separate state," he says, "Nothing much will happen through negotiations with the Sri Lankan government." But Karikalan denies that Tigers are responsible for the massacre of Sinhalese villagers:

Back in Colomboe I make plans to see Sri Lanka without the war. My guide, the resilient Kamal Samarasinghe, takes me to the city of Kandy, in the foothills of the central mountains.

The hill country to the south of Kandy remains the most European part of Sri Lanka, due to the dominance of tea. Arriving there is like landing in Oz, a Technicolor fantasy of mountain tops, sweeping hedges, and waterfalls - all as sharp and clear-lined as a cartoon drawing.

Tea pluckers in the hill country
Women pick the tea, dressed in shimmering saris, wrists jangling with gold and silver, as if on their way to some fantastic celebration. They earn less than $45 a month, and that must pay for basic foodstuffs such as dried fish and flour from the company store. Housing is free, but many workers are still stuffed into British-era "line houses," long buildings rude as cattle stalls.

Fishermen on wooden perches
The next day we leave for the southern coast, hairpinning down through mountain vegetation virtually leaping from the soil. In good years thousands of vacationing snowbirds alight here from Switzerland, Germany, and Finland. Most settle in for sun and snorkeling at a necklace of hotels and cottages that extends from Matara to Colombo. The economy depends heavily on tourists, but hotel occupancy is disastrously low because of the war.

We stop in the Sinhalese village of Kottagoda, home of the late Rohana Wijeweera, who led the JVP rebellion. Young men idling by a small grocery say that fanaticism is still cultivated here, that lives are still in limbo. "People are violent mostly because of poverty," one says. "That's why young people get involved in these groups. They see no future, have no hope. Look at us: four educated men, no jobs

In the dry zones of north central Sri Lanka, slash-and-burn chena cultivation is a traditional but fading livelihood. It forces the farmer to push deeper into the jungle to find good soil and then to guard his fields against elephants, wild boars, and scavengers. He and his crew will sit all night in tree houses, shouting, firing shotguns, and singing to kill time and stay awake.

Their songs are called pel kavi, which means "songs of the huts"-lilting, homey melodies that reflect loneliness and wonder. "Ranwan eranwan, gangaboda kokune," one song begins: "Golden and golden, egrets on the riverbanks."

I spend my last night in Sri Lanka with a young farmer named Jagath, in a tree house near Habarane, helping guard his pepper fields. We climb 30 feet to a platform where a small candle glows, revealing two other farmers, both grinning at the foolishness this night has brought them.

"Yo-ha-ha!" Jagath yells into the jungle every half hour, to scare the unknown. The shouts of other farmers echo from the bush, and one voice sings, boldly. Jagath is too shy to sing or too young to know the old songs; he borrows my tape recorder and earphones, and listens to a Verdi opera with a toothy smile.

In the morning the shapes of large trees emerge from the night thickness, the ground seems to lift, until we hang, suspended, under the immensity of the firmament.

A moment of peace

Continue to Plus page 3 -Hitting at Maname: what is the future of Sinhala drama? * Combating terrorism: Book review * Breaking the barriers: Book review

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