2nd November 1997

From Dam street to damnation

Family reveals multi-million rupee world trade in human cargo

by S. S. Selvanayagam

Smuggling Sri Lankans overseas has become a flourishing industry in a newly emerging underworld.

Local ganglords who have established connections worldwide are carrying on a lucrative trade earning millions of rupees, an investigation by The Sunday Times revealed.

Some western nations posted Immigration Liaison Officers to Colombo to stem the illegal human traffic. A handful of them operate closely with the Department of Immigration and Emigration. And yet the traffic goes on unabated. How intense it is can be seen from the number who are detected in various countries and finally deported to Sri Lanka, The Sunday Times found.

Last Monday, 32 year old Sinnathurai Sathiyasekar, his wife Vathana (27) and their eight year old daughter, returned to Colombo from Moscow. That was their second attempt to hunt for the proverbial pot of gold in the west. Their saga cost them over a million rupees. They returned poor but richly wiser in experience.

“I wanted to get away from the war and look for a better future for my daughter. That made us sell our belongings and say good bye to native Jaffna,” Sathiyasekar told The Sunday Times. He had learnt of a ganglord who fixed everything for a fee. The news had reached him from relatives and friends who had paid their way out of Sri Lanka. They were all doing well, or so he was made to believe.

One October afternoon, last year, Sathiyasekar walked the narrow lanes off Dam Street to an obscure building. As he stepped inside, he was greeted by a dark, imposing man seated behind a table. He had a telephone by his side. Between answering calls, he was busy reading through documents or perusing passports.

“I told the man that my wife, daughter and I would like to go to Holland. Vathana’s (wife) father lived there,” he said. The ganglord looked through a note book and detailed out the route - via Bangkok, Cambodia and Johannesburg. The fee-Rs 700,000. That included tickets and “visas.” Anxious to get away, Sathyasekar paid up.

The trio boarded a flight to Bangkok and later arrived in Cambodia. The ganglord’s “agent” received them and hosted them for three days. Thereafter they flew to Johannesburg (South Africa), the last stop before their dreamland, Holland.

There they met the ganglord’s “agent.” Sathyasekar said “this man was angry. He said the ganglord had not remitted his share of the money. He confined us to a room and gave us just plain bread. He said he would chase us if his fee was not paid.”

Sathyasekar(inset), wife and daughter after their gruelling ordeal. Pic by Laksman Gunatilleke

“With great difficulty I contacted Vathana’s father. He remitted us the equivalent of Rs 300,000,” he added. Three months had gone by when the money arrived. He said “the agent gave us three Singapore passports and asked us to prepare to fly to Amsterdam. But we were arrested by Immigration officials at Johannesburg.”

It seemed the visas to enter Holland were not in order. The South African authorities put the Sathyasekar family on a flight to Singapore. When they arrived there, they were arrested and detained for three days in an underground cell - one of many that held illegal immigrants.

“They warned us they would imprison us for three years. But they deported us to Colombo,” Sathiyasekar revealed. When they arrived in Colombo, the Airport Police arrested them. They were detained for five days.

“From the Police Station, I made a call to the ganglord. The Police were unaware. The ganglord sent one of his friends and he obtained our release,” said Sathiyasekar. They were taken to a lodge run by the ganglord. Accommodation was provided free but they had to spend for their food.

During our stay, we argued on many occasions to obtain a refund of the Rs 700,000 we had paid. The ganglord said he would refund only half the sum. They were attracted by an offer the ganglord made - he would make another try. This time he would accompany the trio.

“He not only took the three of us but also 31 other Sri Lankans to Moscow. He handed all of us to a Pakistani “agent” who was awaiting us,” Sathiyasekar said. He added “ They drove us on a day long journey to Minsk. We were given accommodation in two rooms for a month. We were given rice, wheat flour, potatoes and onions but we had to prepare our own meals.”

The meeting place in Minsk appeared to be a centre for channelling illegal immigrants. A total of 55 persons, which besides the Sri Lankans included Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, were asked to get into a trailer mounted container.

“After an arduous journey, we were asked to dismount in a desolate area. It was dark. We trekked through the area for three hours. We were accommodated for nine days in straw thatched huts for nine days and later handed over to an armed Russian group who carried walkie talkies,” Sathiyasekar said. The men wore masks to cover their identity. The men escorted the crowd through rivulets in an apparent bid to erase their trail.

Those who showed reluctance to advance briskly were kicked or assaulted with iron bars and pitch forks. “We went through tracts of land which we later learnt was ahead of the Polish border.”

This is where things began to go wrong. They had been spotted by the Polish border guards. The hooded men left their human cargo and made a hasty retreat. Just then there was the whirl of rotor blades. The noise increased. Hordes of Polish Policemen arrived in helicopters. They aimed their pistols at the crowd, handcuffed them.

“We were all marched to a camp where we were interrogated and finger printed. We were then moved to a Lithuanian Army camp. There were 238 more Sri Lankans there besides nationals from other countries. Breakfast was loaves of stale bread and tea without sugar. Supper was porridge mixed with fragmented beef. There were many including my wife who avoided the porridge since it contained beef,” said Sathyasekar.

At the camp was an Immigration Office. Some Sri Lankans approached the Immigration Officials. “They said if we could arrange for payments for our passage and their “fee”, we would be free to leave. We stayed in the queue for hours to use the only telephone. Five of us were able to raise the money for our return,” said Sathyasekar.

Permission to leave was granted only to those who had travel documents. Adults raised $ 700 and children $ 350. The five who were cleared to travel were taken to Villanius airport under Army escort. From there, they flew to Moscow, only to witness another sordid scene.

There were 25 Sri Lankans stranded there. They were all victims of the ganglord. Five others, all girls, who arrived with this group had managed to find their way out. The rest including Sathiyasekar family were put on board a flight to Colombo.

Sathyasekar and family arrived in Colombo last Monday, a sad but happy man - sad because he lost his money and happy because he escaped the ordeal of a longer stay in a prison like some of his ambitious fellow countrymen.

“All I now want to do is forget what happened to us. We want to plan a better future here for our daughter,” said Vathana, Sathiyasekar’s exasperated wife. With a gleam in her eyes, eight year old Babila, their daughter, nodded.

Assignment Colombo: in search of an answer

Indian involvement in Sri Lankan af fairs from 1983 to 1990, has been a matter of much cogitation in Indian and Sri Lankan public opinion. The Indian dimension of the cogitation had the additional element of critical and at times self-flagellating introspection. There has been wideranging criticism of the policies of Mrs. Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi towards Sri Lankan affairs during this period. I was directly involved in this important and critical phase of Indo-Sri Lanka relations as India’s High Commissioner to Colombo from 1985 to 1989, the period during which India’s mediatory efforts reached its peak culminating in the signing of Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement to resolve Sri Lanka’s ethnic problem. The agreement between President Jayewardene and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was signed on the 29th of July, 1987. Violent upheavals which occurred parallel to the negotiations for the Agreement, led to the President of Sri Lanka seeking India’s military assistance to stabilise the situation in his country and to safeguard its unity and territorial integrity.

Rajiv Gandhi responded to Jayewardene’s request resulting in the IPKF’s induction into Sri Lanka. Political undercurrents characterising India’s mediation efforts between Sri Lankan Tamils and the Sinhalese Government, the signing of the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement and the deployment of IPKF as an instrumentality to normalise the situation in Sri Lanka after many years of ethnic violence made the period 1983 to 1989, the most critical phase in Indo-Sri Lanka relations since both countries became independent between 1947 and 1949.

V.P. Singh’s Government withdrew the IPKF on the suggestion of Premadasa who succeeded Jayewardene, without allowing the IPKF to complete the task assigned to it, a task which our armed forces would have completed if allowed to stay on for another six months or so, in my assessment. The withdrawal of the IPKF was interpreted by considerable segments of Indian public opinion as a major failure in India’s diplomacy and failure by our armed forces to fulfil responsibilities entrusted to them.

A number of articles and books have been written about India’s involvement in Sri Lanka, both by Sinhalese and Indian journalists and academicians. While none of the Sinhalese participants in the drama has written any detailed account of the events, some of the Indian military personnel who were involved in the events from 1987 onwards have written books and commentaries. Sinhalese writings have been by academics and journalists. Two major Sinhalese works on the subject are: President Jayewardene’s biography written by K.M. de Silva and Howard Wriggins and another by Rohan Gunaratna about the Indian intervention in Sri Lanka. Being a witness to events and attendant controversies of this period, I felt that I should write about Indo-Sri Lanka relations on the basis of my perceptions and my perspectives. It is also my view that most of the writings on India’s attempts to solve Sri Lanka’s ethnic problem have been interpreted and assessed either in polemical terms or in terms of nationalistic attitudes or highly normative criteria.

Apart from Sinhalese writings and comments, the LTTE has put out a wide range of publicity material critical of India and the IPKF, misinterpreting. to my mind, India’s motivations and attitudes. The LTTE publication The Satanic Force was an exercise of malevolent propaganda against the Indian Army, but for whose intervention Prabhakaran and the LTTE would not have survived the campaign launched against them by the Sinhalese Government from January to May 1987. A further irony was that certain politicians in Tamil Nadu indulging in narrow populist rhetoric describing their own armed forces as “The Indian Tamil Killing Force.” Various self-centred motivations were attributed to Rajiv Gandhi for having signed the agreement with Sri Lanka and having sent the Indian forces to that country. In my view these criticisms are not valid; the negative polemics are patently unjustified.

Ten years have passed since the signing of the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement, seven years after the withdrawal of IPKF, I felt that even at the risk of inviting disagreements and generating controversy, matters should be put in proper perspective and the record put right according to my perceptions of the events and the motivations which impelled Indian policies towards Sri Lanka. Over and above all I feel that Indian public opinion should know the details and background of a complex diplomatic initiative which India took to safeguard the unity of both India and Sri Lanka against centrifugal forces which were being taken advantage of by a number of interested countries.

Broadly speaking Sri Lankan developments between 1990 and 1995, could be compartmentalised into two periods. The Premadasa period which ended nearly a year after his assassination in 1994 and the Chandrika Kumaratunga period which started with her electoral victories from 1994 till now. Premadasa’s gameplan was to remove the IPKF from the island, to make the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement irrelevant, and to checkmate and then stop India’s support to the legitimate aspirations of Sri Lankan Tamils. Once these objectives were achieved he planned to inveigle the LTTE into negotiations, lull them into a mood of complacency and then to neutralise them militarily. Premadasa succeeded in detaching India from the Sri Lankan situation, with the change of Government in India in December, 1989. He, however, did not succeed in his second objective of enmeshing the LTTE into dilatory negotiations and in destroying their capacity for struggle. A series of negotiations that he undertook with the LTTE and the number of proposals for devolution of powers which he suggested failed because they were a dilution of the package of devolution and autonomy provided for in the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement, a package the LTTE had not found fully satisfactory. Premadasa also under-estimated the political sophistication and the tactical adroitness of the LTTE leadership. These exercises continued for a period of nearly four years but ultimately degenerated into a conflict situation again. The conflict continued during the Presidency of Mr. Wijetunga who succceded Premadasa after the latter’s assassination in May 1993.

President Kumaratunga is genuinely interested in meeting Tamil aspirations. She has been and is sincere in her endeavours to find a practical and durable compromise to the ethnic divide which is affecting the prospects of unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Sri Lanka in a profoundly negative manner. She resumed negotiations with the LTTE from 1994 onwards and put forward a comprehensive set of proposals for Devolution and Autonomy in the Tamil areas in August 1995. Her proposals were an improvement on the devolution package envisaged in the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement in some respects. She took the bold initiative being specific and detailed about subjects on which devolution would be given to the Provincial Councils, specially to the Tamil areas. These proposals also envisaged the devolution of financial powers and providing representation for the Sri Lankan Tamils in various segments of the power structure of Sri Lanka.

Author with President Jayewardene at the inauguration of an Industrial Estate in Colombo in 1986, where Jayewardene introduced Dixit to Israeli advisors to Sri Lankan Forces

Her proposals also provided for over-arching central control even on devolved powers including on subjects which were not really related to national security issues. Though she has tried to sustain these proposals and to formalise them through parliamentary mechanisms, they have been rejected by the LTTE. Her sincere efforts have also failed because there are certain thresholds beyond which no Sinhalese leader can be fully responsive to Tamil aspirations, if he or she desires to survive in power. The impasse continues, Sri Lanka remaining subjected to a civil war situation. The current Sri Lankan predicament has the following constituent trends:

1. No meaningful political dialogue to resolve the ethnic problem seems possible in the short term.

2. Emotional and psychological antagonisms between the Tamils and the Sinhalese have only increased because of recurring violence perpetrated by the LTTE and the military operations undertaken by the Sri Lankan security forces in Tamil areas.

3. The armed forces and the Buddhist clergy seem to be much more averse to a compromise with Sri Lankan Tamils compared to their attitude upto 1989-90.

4. The armed forces have become a more influential factor in Sri Lankan politics because of their being the mainstay of governmental authority in the island despite Sri Lanka’s traditional and vibrant commitment to democracy.

5. There are however some doubts about the Sri Lankan army’s capacity to sustain their operations against the LTTE. According to some reports there are problems of discipline and large-scale desertions. The LTTE takes full advantage of this situation.

6. In contrast, despite extensive pressure generated on the LTTE, it is showing an incredible capacity for survival. The LTTE somehow has safeguarded and retained its sources of arms supplies and other categories of financial and material support, not only from all the southern States of India where they have connections but also from other South East Asian countries and from even Australia, Europe and North America.

7. One consequence of the revival of military confrontation between the Sri Lankan Government and the LTTE has been the Sri Lankan Government seeking external assistance for maintaining their military capacities against the LTTE. The US, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, Israel and some of the South East Asian countries are providing Sri Lanka with equipment and training facilities. India is politically supportive of the Kumaratunga government but does not seem to be involved in providing military supplies. etc. in consequence of the Sri Lankan public opinion’s reaction to Indian military involvement in Sri Lanka between 1987 and 1990. The point to remember here is that because of Sri Lanka’s resource constraints and enhanced training and logistical requirements, a number of foreign countries are now involved in the Sri Lankan situation which will impact sincere response from Rajiv Gandhi to the Sri Lankan Government’s genuine requirement of safeguarding Sri Lanka’s unity and territorial integrity.

One of my university teachers asked me in 1991, two years after I left Sri Lanka, whether the Indian experience in Sri Lanka was not a tragedy. That it was! And to my mind Rajiv Gandhi’s violent demise epitomised the tragedy.

I was recently with Mr. P.N. Haksar, former Principal Secretary to Mrs. Gandhi, whom I consider my Guru, in politics and diplomacy. I told him that I was completing this book on Sri Lanka and posed the question to him, whether our Sri Lankan experience was a tragedy. I added the further query, had not Mrs. Gandhi initiated a policy of involvement in Sri Lanka, could the tragedy have been avoided. Mr. Haksar’s response has left me with much to ruminate about my Sri Lanka assignment. He said: “Mani, you must have read all the Shakespearean tragedies. Have you ever given thought as to why in each of these tragedies there was one individual who was the focal impulse to all the tragic developments. Whether it was Richard III, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello or Hamlet?

It will take a long time and it would be difficult for me to decide whether Ms. Gandhi, Jayewardene, Premadasa or Rajiv Gandhi can be perceived in this Shakespearean mould. It is my hope that those who read this book may provide an answer to the profound introspection articulated by Haksar.

– J.N. Dixit

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