Thousands of suspected marxist youth were 'disappeared' in the late 1980s and never seen again. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
NEW YORK, Feb 19 2013 (IPS)

It was almost four o’clock in the morning on Feb. 18, 1990, when Dr. Manorani Saravanamuththu pulled into the driveway of No. 42 Castle Street, an old Portuguese-style home located in a suburb of Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo.

“They’ve taken Richard,” she said, when her niece and her husband opened the door. “The Black Cats have taken him.”

The young couple needed no further explanation. Both were intimately aware of the plain-clothes death squads that drove around in black jeeps, arresting, abducting, abusing and assassinating at will.

Their quarry – members or suspected sympathisers of the left-wing People’s Liberation Front (the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna or JVP) – were usually poor university students, whose bodies would either be found the next day, burning in rubber tires atop piles of other corpses, or would never be seen again.If you have no answer except to meet indiscriminate killings with equally brutal reprisals…you will build up a monster no one will be able to control.

And although this period in the country’s history was even then referred to as the ‘bheeshana kalaya’, or the reign of terror, no one expected that one of its victims would be Richard de Zoysa: the progeny of two powerful Colombo families, star of the English-language stage, a well-known newscaster and bureau chief of the Rome-based Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency, whose dispatches on Sri Lanka throughout the 1980s earned him a reputation at home and abroad as an exceptionally prolific writer.

The days following de Zoysa’s abduction were – for his family, his comrades and, especially, for the government of then-President Ranasinge Premadasa of the ruling United National Party (UNP), which was engaged in what has been described as a war to “root out” the JVP – marked by utter uncertainty.

Day and night, phones rang: desperate calls to police stations and influential lawyers, urgent offers of asylum and amnesty from abroad, incessant requests for government statements from international media, all essentially asking the same question: where is he?

On the third day after de Zoysa had been bundled into a jeep by six armed men (one of whom his mother would identify as a high-ranking police officer in the president’s detail), wearing nothing but a sarong around his waist, a fisherman bobbing about on the Indian Ocean just off the coast of Moratuwa, a seaside suburb south of Colombo, hauled a floating corpse into his narrow boat and rowed it ashore.

And although bullet wounds and three days in salt water had eaten away at the handsome 30-year-old, his mother, called in by a magistrate defying government orders to “dispose” of bodies without due process, recognised him.

The news sparked a massive public outcry among Colombo’s elite: louder, even, than the collective fury over the roughly 40,000 deaths that had preceded de Zoysa’s in that black decade.

Just days after the funeral, the media received a directive from the government: no more mention of Richard de Zoysa — not in print, not in pictures, not on the radio. If murder would not suffice to silence him, then censorship would have to be the next best thing.

A life in writing

Though speculation about the reasons behind de Zoysa’s murder ran a wide gamut – from his artistic involvement in theatre to his sexual involvement with members of the JVP — IPS has maintained that de Zoysa’s greatest contribution was in the field of journalism, awarding him, posthumously, its annual International Achievement Award “for his news accounts of the killings of students by death squads (in Sri Lanka).”

In fact, de Zoysa was corresponding for IPS during possibly one of the most complex moments in Sri Lankan history – a time of total war on more than one front.

According to de Zoysa’s report entitled “Pride Stalks Beneath a Full Moon”, published on the IPS wire on May 22, 1989, “Pride stalks Sri Lanka today, in a variety of guises. There is the racial pride of the Sinhalese, who make up 70 percent of the island’s 17 million people (mostly Buddhist), as well as the pride of the 1.4 million-strong Tamil minority.

“There is also the pride of two fierce militant groups, one Sinhalese and one Tamil; the pride of two armies, one Sri Lankan and one Indian; and the political pride of their governments in Colombo and New Delhi.”

He was referring first and foremost to the thousands of youth in the south and centre of the country who had joined a Marxist insurgency that preached “nationalist revolution for Sri Lanka’s largely-Buddhist Sinhalese peasantry”.

The second group of militants, located in the north and east of the tiny island, were the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a separatist organisation comprised of rebels drawn from the country’s minority Tamil population, demanding independence and a “homeland” for the Tamil people.

Thus the Sri Lankan army, as de Zoysa would report in great detail, was fighting two wars: dispatching soldiers into the “economically-underprivileged southern belt” to crush the JVP and terrorise any possible recruits, while simultaneously ordering troops to the northern jungles to do battle with the seasoned guerillas of the LTTE.

Meanwhile, the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), pressed into service by former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, was tasked with dragging the Tigers to the Indian-backed negotiating table to agree on a devolution plan outlined in the 1987 Indo-Lankan accords.

According to de Zoysa’s monthly features, the peace deal itself split the island still further: with the JVP and the shadowy organisation suspected of being its armed wing (known as the Patriotic People’s Movement or DJV) “implacably opposed to Tamil separatism or anything remotely approaching it”; while the LTTE held out for full separation against a tide of Tamil political parties pushing closer to an official agreement with the government for regional autonomy.

On Dec. 21, 1988, de Zoysa sketched a vivid picture of the delicate “triangle of power” that then governed the island, predicting, “(If) Premadasa, a shrewd self-taught professional politician, wants his presidency to get off the ground, he will have to deal swiftly with two men who, like him, have simple origins – Tamil Tiger guerilla leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and JVP supremo Rohana Wijeweera.

“The actions of this trio,” de Zoysa noted, “will determine Sri Lanka’s immediate future – as well as the fate, in life or death terms, of the country’s 16.4 million people.”

His writings elegantly pieced together the bits of this war-torn story, bringing in a range of voices from government insiders to children in JVP-strongholds who, as a result of curfews and a climate of terror, stayed home from school and played at violent revolution instead.

In this way, he exemplified the IPS ethos of raising the “voice of the voiceless” at a time when testimony in all its forms – whether written, whispered or even insinuated – was deemed worthy of death at the hands of any number of armed parties.

He picked his way across the corpse-strewn island, stopping at coastal towns like Tangalle, 110 miles south of Colombo, to speak with fishermen like Ranjith, put out of work by a thinning flow of tourists; and mothers like Siriyawathi who had traveled hours from her remote village to file a complaint that her brother — “an electrician, not a militant”, she assured De Zoysa – had been blindfolded and led away by the police, not seen or heard of since.

He spent many hours in this town, at the headquarters of the Human Rights and Legal Aid Organisation where Mahinda Rajapakse – then a little known lawyer and secretary of the rights group, now president of the country, wielding an unprecedented degree of power – met with one bereaved woman after another, all begging for news of their ‘disappeared’ sons, husbands, nephews.

“This kind of work is called humanitarian but ultimately makes one inhuman,” de Zoysa quoted Rajapakse as saying back in 1988. “From the time I open my door there are these women weeping and wailing. Eventually one gets desensitised and just concentrates on offering practical advice.”

In uncovering little-known stories, and prying snippets of information from those worst affected but least visible in times of conflict, de Zoysa put his finger on the grisly point the government hoped most would go unremarked: that the late 1980s marked a turning point in military strategy, away from the Tamil “other” in the north and onto the Sinhalese “brother” in the south.

With unwavering accuracy, de Zoysa uncovered how the draconian anti-terror laws – implemented through arbitrary arrests, detention, torture and murder — that had once been used to crush the Tamil rebellion, quickly became the favoured means of stamping out the JVP, a sleight of hand that did not go unnoticed among the Sinhalese peasantry.

His journalism has been described as activism, but a reading of his collected writings for IPS reveals that these stories had no agenda: rather, they are the work of one who wades into murky and murderous waters to fish out the flotsam of stories found floating there.

And while he fitted together the jigsaw of the present, he also – perhaps unwittingly – prophesied the future: his last dispatch for IPS, entitled “Sri Lanka: Nearing a Human Rights Apocalypse”, contained none of the stoic analysis that had hitherto characterised his reports.

Rather, the story flew hastily across a series of killings, with passing reference to “bodies smoldering on public roadways” and the death squads that came knocking “with a licence to kill”, adding that, in the past month, over 1,000 youth had fallen victim to such assassinations.

He ended by echoing the words of former Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who told Parliament shortly before his death, “(If) you have no answer except to meet indiscriminate killings with equally brutal reprisals…you will build up a monster no one will be able to control.”

Excerpt:

Tourists from southern Sri Lanka walk past the gutted remains of the Jordanian cargo vessel Farah III, which was commandeered by the LTTE. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
MULLAITIVU, Sri Lanka, Nov 24 2012 (IPS)

The tour guide’s voice echoes around the dark, musty room, three stories underground. Fifty visitors – among them mothers holding infants, youths snapping pictures on mobile phones and grandparents leaning against the walls – are crammed into the narrow stairwell that leads down into the chamber, listening attentively to his every word.

The tourists have travelled hundreds of kilometres to see this underground bunker, once home to the most feared man in Sri Lanka: the leader of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Velupillai Prabhakaran.

Located a short drive south of the town of Puthukkudiyiruppu, a former LTTE operations hub in the northern Mullaitivu District, some 330 kilometres from the capital Colombo, the bunker complex is nestled deep within the jungle.

The massive compound boasts a firing range, a semi-underground garage, a jogging path, a film hall and a small funeral parlor where the Tiger leader paid his final respects to fallen cadres.

“This is out of this world, how did they ever build something like this?” a woman who gave her name as Ranjini asked while walking down the narrow stairs.

Other attractions on the tour of former rebel-held areas include the shipyard where the Tigers experimented with building submersibles, complete with a dry dock and the skeletal remains of the Farah III, a Jordanian cargo vessel that was commandeered by the LTTE.

What is sidelined, however, are details of the beleaguered Tamil population that lived in this region throughout 30 years of civil war, and is now struggling to survive.

Beneath war attractions, suffering continues

The Sri Lankan military came across the bunker complex after the Tigers were defeated in May 2009, signaling the end of a three-decade-long civil war in which the LTTE fought the Sri Lankan government for control over the north and east of the island in order to establish a separate state for the minority Tamil population.

Puthukkudiyiruppu and Mullaitivu, once the central command headquarters of a massive guerilla operation, now play host to thousands of visitors, mostly from the majority-Sinhalese southern regions of the country.

But while these guided tours offer locals a rare glance into the inner workings of the Tigers’ de facto state and the extent of its former military capacity, rights activists fear that many tourists are missing the “bigger picture” – the horrors of the aftermath of the war and the suffering that has become an everyday experience for tens of thousands who were displaced during the last bouts of fighting.

“I feel the (tourists) don’t have sense of what really happened here, or they don’t want to know,” Ruki Fernando, a rights activist who formerly headed the Human Rights in Conflict Programme at the national rights body, the Law and Society Trust, told IPS.

The facts surrounding the final stages of the war have been hotly contested in and outside the country: local rights groups, international humanitarian observers and aid workers claim at least 40,000 were killed, while the government insists that figure is closer to 7,000.

An internal review of the United Nations’ actions in Sri Lanka during the last phase of the war, released in early November, has reignited the furor over what happened here during the first half of 2009 and who was responsible.

The government has maintained a firm line that the Tamil civilians caught in the crossfire of the conclusive battle were “rescued” in a humanitarian operation and moved to safety in government “welfare camps”, while U.N. officials and aid workers classified this process as mass incarceration of Tamil civilian survivors in open-air detention centres, in violation of international law.

These unresolved questions are now being sidelined as the tourists arrive in droves, intent on one thing only – seeing as many of the war relics as possible, according to Saroja Sivachandaran, head of the Centre for Women and Development, a gender-based rights group in northern Jaffna.

“They fail to see that they are travelling through an area of absolute destruction where thousands still live in makeshift shelters,” she told IPS.

Some 450,000 displaced people, including around 236,000 who were rendered homeless during the last months of the war, are only now returning to their home villages in the north, even though basic amenities are still scarce in the region.

So far, just 21,000 permanent houses have been constructed for the roughly 170,000 still in search of homes.

The latest U.N. situation reports warn of serious funding shortfalls for rehabilitation work, a bleak forecast for the displaced.

Prashan de Visser, president of the national youth movement ‘Sri Lanka Unites’, told IPS that the gulf between visitors and those living in the former war zone stems from language barriers and a long history of cultural and social.

Sri Lanka Unites has engaged its island-wide base of 10,000 members to breach the ethnic divides, but there is still a long way to go since misconceptions are deeply “ingrained in the (social) system”, de Visser told IPS.

Sri Lanka Unites organises field tours and conferences for youth from all over the island, and for members of the vast Sri Lankan diaspora. Its main annual event, the Future Leaders’ Conference, was held in Jaffna this year, brining over 10,000 youth together for a week of activities.

During these intimate interactions, de Visser said, youth from different ethnic groups begin to see through the cultural and social barriers that have held them apart for so long.

This year, a group of youth leaders from the southern-most district of Hambantota pledged to raise 300,000 rupees (about 2,300 dollars) for work in the north after taking a field tour of the war-affected areas.

But most of the visitors flocking to the region are unlikely to make similar pledges.

Fernando warned that ‘gawking tourists’ will only reinforce ethnic divides instead of bridging them.

“This is still a massive curiosity park for the visitors, they really don’t want to see beyond the (thrills) offered by attractions like the bunker,” said Mahendran Sivakumar, a 61-year-old retired government education official who lived in the war zone throughout the entire conflict.

(END)

Women in Allankulam, in Sri Lanka's Mullaitivu district, where thousands have been missing since the end of the war. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Jul 17 2012 (IPS)

A bloody civil war was reaching its climax but this Tamil family, who had already experienced the conflict intimately, had one last decision to make that would prove to be the hardest one of all.

Fighting during the early months of 2009, in the last phase of Sri Lanka’s 30 year-long civil conflict, was so intense that a Tamil couple in their sixties was forced to make a heart-wrenching choice when they fled the bloody warzone: whether or not to leave behind Thangamathi, the elderly unmarried sister in the family who had been mentally handicapped since birth and required constant care.

Finally, Thangamathi’s brother decided to leave her at a home for the mentally challenged, a location that he hoped would shelter her until his return.

“It was a hard decision, but neither of us was strong enough to take care of her, (when we ourselves) were barely surviving from minute to minute,” he told IPS.

The elderly couple did manage to survive the last bout of fighting between the Sri Lankan armed forces and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which claimed between 7,000-40,000 lives according to conflicting sources.

They eventually returned to their old home in the village of Tharmapuram, in Sri Lanka’s northern Kilinochchi district, sometime in early 2010.

But long before their return, while still living in a government-sponsored welfare camp, the couple began looking for Thangamathi.

For the last three years they have been searching for her in vain. An acquaintance once told the couple that she had been spotted among the nearly 280,000 who escaped the last battle in April 2009 but, unsurprisingly, the information yielded no results.

“We are still looking, but we know that it’s over,” her brother said.

For those hailing from areas like  Kilinochchi – the town that, for over a decade, was the showpiece administrative centre of the LTTE’s proposed separate state of Tamil Eelam until it fell to government forces in early 2009 – Thangamathi’s story is not rare.

In this former warzone, which witnessed some of the worst excesses of the war, thousands are still looking for missing loved ones.

Santhirakumar, a resident of the Mullaitivu district, which adjoins Kilinochchi, has been looking for three family members since the war ended but has had no news regarding the whereabouts of his cousin’s husband, or his two nephews.

He, too, heard that at least one of his missing relatives was spotted on May 17, 2009, just 48 hours before the government declared victory. Nothing more came from that morsel of information.

The endless search goes on, and three long years later there is scarcely more than a faint flicker of hope.

“We have gone to each and every prison, as well as camps in Colombo, Boossa (in the south) and several other places. But we could not find them. It has been three years. But we have not given up. We are still looking for them,” Santhirakumar told IPS.

“We have also informed the police. We do not know where else to go. My brother-in-law’s family has to depend on us and other family members for survival.”

The Department of Census and Statistics carried out an enumeration survey of the northern province between June and August last year, the first of its kind to be conducted in the region in over two decades.

It found that between January and May of 2009 2,635 people were reported as being “untraceable”. This is the figure that the Sri Lankan government agrees on, though rights organisations and other advocacy groups believe the number is even higher.

In Vavuniya, the district located at the southern-most corner of Sri Lanka’s former war theatre, government officials and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) set up a unit to trace missing children in 2010.

Piencia Charles, the top government official for the district, was instrumental in setting up the unit. She said she was motivated to do so after interacting with dozens of distraught women on a daily basis, all of them looking for their missing family members.

Though the unit was initially set up to look for missing children, it has received more cases on missing adults, which it passes on to other organisations.

In a recent address to Sri Lankan diplomats, the country’s defence secretary, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, said that the Vavuniya Family Tracing and Reunification Unit had received 2,564 applications by July 2011.

Of those, “1,888 were about missing adults, and 676 about missing children. According to the parents who made the tracing applications, 64 percent of the missing children had been recruited by the Tamil Tigers,” he said.

UNICEF officials in Colombo said that the Unit was handling 747 cases of missing children. So far, 40 had been reunited with their families, while another 30 cases have been ‘cleared’ for reunion with relatives. Officials said that 70 more cases were being processed.

However, the thousands of missing do not only represent those who fled during the last stages of the war. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is carrying an active five-figure caseload reaching back over two decades, to a period when the country was beset by twin insurgencies: the protracted insurrection of the Tamil separatists in the north and another, short-lived uprising of mostly Sinhala communist youth in the south.

“The ICRC’s Annual Report for 2011 states the ICRC in Sri Lanka was handling 15,780 tracing (including missing) cases as at Dec. 31, 2011. This figure, which reflects the number of cases reported to the ICRC since 1990, is the current (active) caseload of persons who remain unaccounted for,” ICRC Spokesperson, Sarasi Wijerathne, told IPS.

The ICRC added that it had received 1,382 new cases, including 369 cases involving minors, during 2011. Of the total figure, the humanitarian organisation has only been able to trace a mere 136 people, which paints a grim picture for the majority of anxious families desperately searching for their lost loved ones.

(END)