The Defeated

The radio man told them about his 18-year-old daughter, Vinoda, who he thought was stuck somewhere in Puthukkudiyiruppu, unable to join the rest of his family. Vinoda was one of the over 5,100 people the Tigers were holding as human shields. The army and navy had taken over the island’s entire coastline for the first time in decades, cutting off any escape route by sea. A thinning group of Tigers was cornered in a two sq km area. They built high bunds around the area, lit circles of fire along the perimeter and forcefully held thousands of terrified civilians, hoping the army would hold its fire. They didn’t. Shells continued to fall over thousands of civilian hostages. One night, Vinoda’s husband, panicking and losing his mind, decided to make a run for it. When he tried to break through the bunds with some 20 others, the LTTE shot them all. Later, when Vinoda was reunited with her father at a camp for the internally displaced, she would tell him that when the army finally rescued her, she saw charred bodies lying along the periphery of the battle zone.

As night fell, Siva found a temple for his family and the radio man to sleep in. Just as they lay down, a couple of young LTTE fighters ran in. Stripping down to their underwear, they dug a shallow pit in the mud, and dumped their weapons, green uniforms and cyanide capsules into it. Then they grabbed Siva’s extra lungis and ran out. They were trying to blend in as civilians. Being unarmed and vulnerable was the only way they would be safe.

Siva thought about how he had once felt protected by the ‘boys’, who had for the past three decades appointed themselves the sole leaders of 2.5 million Sri Lankan Tamils. Now, he felt, being a government ration shop clerk had probably been the safest identity he could have had.

SWARNA HAD FALLEN ASLEEP ON THE TREE, and woke up coughing furiously. Remembering where she was with a start, she slapped both her hands over her mouth. It was eerily quiet; in the past five months of the escalating last conflict, mornings had come unceremoniously, without even the chirping of birds. Below her, the carnage was over.

Five naked girls, their bodies twisted in the last moments of struggle, lay still on the ground. Where were the others? Where had they gone? They didn’t even know how to get around the dense forests without her.

Swarna pressed her throbbing knee. Her old injuries, the ones that had dragged her out of the war and into family life, seemed to be burning again.

Swarna’s had been the first wedding in Vanni after the 2004 tsunami. She’d met her husband while lying injured in a battle in Mannar. A missile shard had hit her square in the abdomen, and after running through bramble for an hour, she had collapsed from excessive bleeding. A combatant who happened to pass by lifted the half-unconscious Swarna, threw her on his left shoulder, and continued to run, still shooting with his right hand. “I was hurting, but I was embarrassed … My clothes were fully torn from here to here,” Swarna says, her finger making a straight line from her stomach to her inner thigh.

When she came to the Mullaitivu Base Hospital, Swarna found a man lying in a stretcher next to her. His shoulder was in a cast, and almost his entire body was punctured by tiny shrapnel. The doctors told her it was he who had saved her life.

When no one was around, Swarna asked him his name. “Deepan,” he replied, giving her his LTTE name.

When they were discharged from the hospital, Deepan and Swarna were declared unfit for battle. She was transferred to the LTTE’s films division, while he was made a jeep driver. In a few months, they decided to get married.

The wedding was held in Pudukkudiyiruppu, in early 2005. Swarna was a Hindu and Deepan a Catholic, but after they joined the Tigers, they had forsaken religion and any faith in god. They came to their wedding ceremony in fatigues, and in place of a mangalsutra or a ring, Deepan tied a thick yellow thread with a golden Tiger-tooth pendant around Swarna’s neck. This was followed by a satyapramanam, an oath. “Even though we’re married,” they vowed, “we will place our nation, our Tamil soil, our Tamil people above each other. We will pick the gun over any birthday, family function, or consideration of love and kinship.” It was an oath every Tiger man and woman had to take if they chose to marry while serving in the LTTE.

At the LTTE’s inception, Prabhakaran had banned marriage, relationships and sexual activity among the cadres. It was part of a rigid disciplinary code for combatants, which included bans on smoking, drinking and gambling. Believing that lust would distract combatants from the call of duty, and that family life would make them selfish, Prabhakaran ruthlessly enforced celibacy. He is known to have defamed, excommunicated, and even murdered those who strayed from his diktat. One of those who he allegedly killed was a dear friend and cofounder of the LTTE.

Soon, however, Prabhakaran himself fell in love. Several versions of the story of his first love exist, all told with varying degrees of glee and irony, but always in a guilty whisper, as if even after his death, talking about his personal life would reduce Prabhakaran’s carefully constructed larger-than-life persona. According to one story, a pretty young girl came to the leader’s attention through a newspaper report. She was on a hunger strike to protest the killings of hundreds of Tamils by the Sri Lankan Army, and Prabhakaran sent his close friends to find out more. Eventually, he decided to meet the girl in person. He ended her weeklong hunger strike with a glass of juice, and then, struck by her dedication to the Tamil cause, asked for her hand.

Another theory had it that the girl had accused Prabhakaran of not caring enough about his cadre, and letting them die like cattle without so much as an apology for their martyrdom. She is said to have challenged the LTTE leader to stop her from fasting unto death. Prabhakaran is said to have abducted her to silence her accusations, but when tongues started wagging about the leader living with a girl, Prabhakaran announced a wedding.

Whatever the version, soon after his own wedding, Prabhakaran revoked the anti-sex and anti-marriage rule. It was a big relief for several clandestine lovers in the LTTE, but the stigma, as Swarna realised when she tried in vain for several postmarital years to become a Black Tiger, seemed to have remained. A married woman would always be suspected of infidelity, of loving more than just Tamil Eelam. She would be considered weaker, unless she proved otherwise.

In the ‘last war’, Swarna was appointed navigator and cameraperson. She had not been in a battle for years; her hair had grown long, and she felt unfit. Still, a month before she would find herself hiding up a tree, she had been put in charge of a group of girls between nine and 13 years old. Within a minute of meeting the group, Swarna smelt their fear. The girls didn’t want to be there, and it was written all over their faces.

Swarna, her younger brother, father, and husband had all joined the Tigers voluntarily. They’d undergone intense training before they were sent off to fight with their platoons and stayed in quarters built specifically for troops. Swarna sent her two sons to LTTE-run crèches where they were fed and cared for when she went to war. As she puts it, “The LTTE made everything so comfortable for you that you felt ashamed if you didn’t go out there and fight for them with all your heart.” There was, in a sense, at least an illusion of voluntarism.

From 2006, however, young boys and girls didn’t have a choice. It was the beginning of the pudikkara (catching) season, when Prabhakaran realised that his guerrilla army didn’t have enough soldiers to fight a conventional battle with the Sri Lankan Army. Children would be ‘caught’ by the LTTE—kidnapped from their homes and schools and forcefully sent to the frontlines, with barely 10 days of training. Between 2003 and 2008, the United Nations recorded 6,000 cases of recruitment of children as young as 14. Swarna clarifies that age didn’t really matter. Anyone around five feet tall, boy or girl, was dragged away.

As the ‘catching’ escalated, several families dug out bunkers under their houses, in which they hid their teenagers for years. They didn’t go to school, didn’t venture outdoors, and didn’t talk to anyone other than immediate family. One of the girls Swarna was in charge of said her 12-year-old sister got married to escape conscription. But the LTTE soon wised up. They had photographs of every family that lived in Vanni. They would crosscheck the photo with everyone in the house. If anyone, especially a youngster, was missing, they’d take a hostage.

The new recruits were tonsured and sent to training camps, and told a drone with cameras would circle overhead, watching their every move. Anyone trying to escape was either shot at immediately, or brought back to the commander, who would publicly beat them.

In March 2009, when Swarna was asked to take the new recruits to war, she felt a churning in the pit of her stomach. She was used to taking orders, even when every bone in her body rebelled. She had shot a Sinhalese soldier, barely 20, at point-blank range, as he kneeled in front of her, begged her, and showed with his hands rocking an invisible cradle that he had two babies. She had killed a friend who had defied orders and cost the Tigers an entire operation. “I can kill when I can justify it,” she says. But this, sending children to face a real army when they could barely hold a gun, didn’t seem to fit her larger cause.

LAKRUWAN WANNIARACHCHI / AFP PHOTO A store inside a camp for the internally displaced in Vavuniya.

The girls stood shivering in front of Swarna, their faces pale with hunger and fear. In the previous decade, they had only seen loved ones die, their older brothers leave on boats to foreign countries, and their schools shut down every few months. Their parents had ideological reasons to rebuild their community from scratch over and over again through a lifetime of war. But for them, it was an exorbitant price to pay for wars they had not chosen. These children were born to the war, but not its justifications. They did not have easy enemies and heroes. They did not see why they must fight, Swarna had thought, and it was useless to tell them.

Was this how the Tigers had been fighting in the last few months? Is this how they expected to win? With children? This was uncharacteristically inefficient, she thought, especially to face a newly strengthened Sri Lankan military that had been given orders “to finish the job”. Child guerrillas stood no chance against a conventional army that was attacking from all sides. Maybe that’s why the LTTE was retreating more than advancing. Maybe that’s why more combatants seemed to be dying.

A feeling of doom overcame her. She realised the war was long over. What was going on now was a charade, a last ditch attempt by the Tigers to remain a fighting side. Swarna swore on the Tamil soil and did as she was told. “It’s not like I could just leave and go join an office as a clerk,” she explains. “I could have thought more about it, but I couldn’t have objected. Sometimes, you do things for something you love, and you hope it will make sense later.”

But now every one of those girls was gone, raped and killed in a war they’d never understood. It did not make sense.

Swarna swung off the tree, looked at her compass, and walked eastwards. She had to find her family. On the way, she took off her chain with the tiger-tooth pendant and dumped it in a river.

ON THE 18TH DAY, Siva reached a bund, beyond which was Matalan, from where the Sri Lankan Army was taking Tamils to the rehabilitation camp. In front of them was a pile of rubber slippers that people had left before clambering up. Siva added his black pair to the pile, smiling. It felt like he was entering a temple.

He jumped down to the other side, and crossed the shallow end of the Nandi Kadal Lagoon. At the shore, a young soldier extended his hand to help him up. That was the first time Siva had ever seen a Sinhalese person up close. The boy told him to keep moving, collect his food parcel, and go to the next village, Senduranchilaiyadi. From there, a bus would take him to the Vavuniya camp.

Senduranchilaiyadi was mayhem. Instead of going to the bus, the Tamils were shoving, hollering and snatching at the potato-curry and rice packets that were being served. Some were running wildly in the mango orchard nearby, climbing the trees and slobbering through the mangoes. Biscuit packets were being given out, but people ravenously rushed at the army personnel distributing them. Overwhelmed, the soldiers began beating the Tamils, trying to get them in a queue and shove them into the bus. “We thought 2,000-3,000 people will come,” mumbled a soldier. “If all you two million come and sit on our heads, what will we do?”

Little did Siva know that entire villages had been evacuated. That about 300,000 people like him were roaming homeless, the largest number of people ever displaced in Sri Lanka. What he knew, however, was that he had already begun to reshuffle his loyalties—place his life in the hands of the army he had been bred to hate; and hate the LTTE he had looked up to, sheltered and worked for, in whose promise of Eelam he had almost lost his family.

WHEN SWARNA REACHED HER MOTHER AND SONS  near Puthukkudiyiruppu, she decided it was time to take a boat to India. The asking rate was LKR60,000, but she knew the boatman, a handicapped ex-fighter. She could give him her pistol, some kerosene she had stashed somewhere, and LKR30,000. Her husband had been shot near Devipuram, and he wouldn’t survive a nightlong motorboat ride. He had decided to surrender to the army.

Yes, I should leave Sri Lanka, leave this damn place, she thought. Go first to Rameshwaram in India, and then from there to Malaysia, then maybe seek asylum in Canada. People had done it before. She should try, she resolved.

When she told her brother her decision, he was appalled. “How can you leave?” he asked. “You’ll abandon your people?”

“I have children, Guna,” said Swarna.

“You will be a traitor if you leave,” he growled at her. “If all of us leave, there will never be Tamil Eelam. All the people who died for it will have died in vain. Go, drohi! That’s what you were anyway, a traitor.”

Guilt-ridden, Swarna didn’t leave. She pretended to be a civilian, got to Matalan and took the crowded bus with her sons to the army-run Ramanathan camp in Vavuniya.
 

AFTER ABOUT FIVE DAYS IN THE CAMP, everyone learnt to answer questions quickly. If you didn’t have a specific answer, you lied. Old people made up dates of birth. Everyone said they had two acres of land in their hometown, even if they had not an inch. No one gave their combat names. Years spent in the LTTE? Two months, at most three. Yes, I was forcefully recruited. Yes, even though I am 35.

Swarna was told to teach Tamil in the makeshift school. After close to 15 years, she began wearing skirts instead of trousers. She always kept her children close. She knew it was their cute faces that kept her beyond suspicion.

Siva was asked to help serve lunch every other day. His government employee card was opening several doors. The day his baby son turned over onto his stomach, a Sri Lankan Army cadet helped to smuggle a local photographer into Siva’s tent. They draped a red sari over the sheet-tin walls, and took studio-type pictures.

On 18 May 2009, on the day Swarna was running a fever, and Siva received his son’s photo album, Prabhakaran was killed. The streets of Colombo erupted in impromptu celebrations. Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa announced it to the world as the end of terrorism in Sri Lanka. Speaking on the government TV channel from Parliament, Rajapaksa said, “Today is a day which is very, very significant—not only to us Sri Lankans but to the entire world. Today, we have been able to liberate the entire country from the clutches of terrorism.” The war, he said, was a device for a nobler task: that of assimilating the Tamils into Sri Lanka for a unified national identity. The terrorists were taken out of the equation. Peace would prevail; warring Sinhalese and Tamil identities would be reconciled.

Most of the 300,000 people in the camps in Vavuniya hated Rajapaksa, but the speech stirred many of them. They were surprised to hear the president make the distinction between the LTTE and the Tamil people. If he was sympathetic enough to realise that all Tamils were not Tigers, maybe things would get better.

IT WOULD BE SIX MONTHS before Siva would leave the camp, briefly, with some others picked at random by the army. They were being taken to Jaffna in a bus to bring back food rations from the army camp there. As soon as their bus left Vavuniya city, it hit the A-9, the 320-km-long highway that bisects the island from the south to the north, ending at the claw-like tip of Jaffna.

To this day, the A-9 embodies the impermanence of Sri Lanka, connecting the two ethnic communities in whose name wars were waged for a quarter of a century. It was shut in war by the LTTE and opened during ceasefire. After the ‘last war’, and just before the presidential elections in January 2010, the A-9 was cleared for traffic. But this time, it didn’t comprise army vans, NGO cars, bicycles and scooters. The postwar A-9 was choc-a-bloc with tourist buses from Colombo. It had been about 30 years since Sri Lankans from the south had set eyes on the north. There was a festive air in the TV-coaches, and large families came with picnic baskets.

The army checkpoint in Omanthai in Vavuniya, however, remained. Buses were stopped, everyone got out, their IDs were checked. Standing in the queue, Siva felt in his pocket for his national identity card. Since the end of the war, the ID had become critical to his life. It identified him immediately as Tamil—his name was printed in both Sinhala and Tamil, while that of a non-Tamil would have been in Sinhala alone. But without it, he was suspect, a man without a record, whose very existence could drive the army to paranoia. And that could lead to anything from being arrested, sent to a detention camp, separated from your family, to being interrogated or harassed for days on end.

In an oddly conciliatory role for a people whose homes and lives were entirely lost in war, the Sri Lankan Tamils seemed to spend all their energies trying to calm the military. Everyone in Siva’s bus kept their voices low, and their opinions to themselves. They refused to converse in Tamil in the presence of a Sinhala cadet, lest he assume they were conspiring, or poking fun at him. The army was perpetually on the lookout for  undercover Tigers, so Tamils—even those with nothing to hide—spent every waking moment displaying an active innocence.

As they drove up from Omanthai, Siva looked eagerly out of the window. While he was at the camp, how had his Vanni changed? The scenes whizzing past were those of trees freshly chopped down, houses recently shelled. Women and children sat outside a few haphazardly-built huts with blue tarpaulin roofs. They stared glassily at the passing vehicles. There were soldiers with guns every 15 kilometres. The Vaani looked like it had never been home to anyone.

For Siva and his family, the protracted Eelam war was devastating, but its end far more unsettling. They were finally free to move around, but aware that they were watched constantly. The army that had bombed their homes was now their neighbour and benefactor. They were desperate to start life anew but felt too hemmed in to try. In a fundamental sense, was the war over at all?

The bus passed Kilinochchi, the city that had served as the Tigers’ operational headquarters from 1995 to January 2009, when it was captured by the Sri Lankan Army. Although many Tamils had started returning to their homes from the camps, Kilinochchi remained closed to civilians. Those who wished to return had been told that the area was being demined.

PEDRO UGARTE / AFP PHOTO Displaced from their villages during the final stages of the civil war, 300,000 Sri Lankan Tamils found their way to camps like the one at Manic Farm, in the northern district of Vavuniya.

The Kilinochchi that Siva knew was now a trail of burnt wooden cots, broken ceramic toilets and smashed cars. There were rows of half-standing buildings with their roofs caved in. Tamil signboards had been blacked out, or covered with posters of a waving President Rajapaksa. The police headquarters, court complex, market, temples—they were all gone. The once-prosperous administrative centre of the Tigers was the most thoroughly destroyed city on the island.

Suddenly, a towering, glossy white statue of the Buddha loomed into view. Some Sinhala soldiers were praying at the altar. This hadn’t been there before, thought Siva. Near it, was a broken down Hindu temple. It was being used to charge the cellphones of army troops. A few hundred feet from the Buddha stood a tall, bronze installation of a lotus, a symbol of Buddhism, growing out of a bullet-hit wall. A bombed out water tank had been converted into a tourist spot, complete with a ‘war memoirs’ shop. A family of tourists was snapping a photograph in front of it.

The Tamil areas were all being mended and buffed under government supervision. Once the seat of Eelam, Kilinochchi was being raised from the ashes, but with a more Sri Lankan personality. Army watchtowers on both sides of the road displayed the government’s declared mission: ‘Free Beautiful United Sri Lanka.’

The final checkpoint was at Elephant Pass, the thin strip of road where the A-9 ends and the Jaffna Peninsula begins. But the ‘Yalpanam’ board that Siva always looked for was missing. In its place, was a new sign. It said ‘Yapanaya’, the Sinhala name for Jaffna. Round the bend, a freshly-painted, large yellow board said: ‘One Nation, One Country.’

After they collected the rations, Siva decided to sleep on the bus all the way back to camp. The world he had grown up in was going through an alienating revamp, and he couldn’t bear to watch.

IN THE LAST WEEK OF DECEMBER 2011, just after a Christmas celebration with NGOs, Swarna was allowed to leave the camp with her sons and her mother. When camp officials asked for her ‘place of origin’, she conjured up a random address in Point Pedro, the northernmost town on the island, north of Jaffna. When she got there, she found a sprawling house whose owners were in England, broke into it, and decided to make it home for a while. Her children would be safe, and she could hope to make the seemingly impossible transformation from combatant to free civilian.

A lot had happened in Swarna’s life since the war’s end, and that of the LTTE: She had voted for the first time in her life, in the January 2010 presidential election, although the only choices she had were between Mahinda Rajapaksa and his army general. She was still in camp then, and was taken in by the wave of hope that swept through the Tamils. Later that year, the prime ministerial and municipal elections also took place, and in both, Swarna reluctantly voted for the Tamil United Liberation Front, once the political puppet of the LTTE. “They were a bunch of cowards who ran abroad during the war,” she says, “and had rushed back right in time for poll speeches.” But they were the only ones left.

Swarna had only focused on two things in the past two years: hiding her identity, and getting her husband out of detention. The first had worked better than she had expected—so well, in fact, that she felt a sharp pang of guilt every time she saw someone mistakenly singled out by the army as a Tiger. The second, that of freeing her husband, was a cyclical nightmare. She had approached every NGO that came to the Ramanathan camp, she had tried phoning former LTTE commanders in hiding, she had even given interviews to the international press when they came for brief camp visits.

At the end of February 2011, she had received a text message from her husband, saying that he would be released any day. Swarna had left her sons with her mother, and went to Vavuniya to pick him up. A few days later, however, Sri Lankan Prime Minister DM Jayaratne announced in a press statement that there might still exist three secret LTTE camps in Tamil Nadu. There was a conspiracy afoot to kill Indian political leaders, he said, and to create a civil war in Sri Lanka once again. In 48 hours, the Tamil Nadu police denied the charges and the PM apologised, saying he’d made a mistake. But ‘due to security reasons’, all detainee releases were cancelled. A depressed Swarna returned to Point Pedro alone.

Swarna’s six-year-old firstborn screams at her every morning, asking her when he can go to school. But this wasn’t the world she had envisioned for him. Or for herself. Every time she went to the Jaffna market for groceries, Swarna’s bags were opened and she was frisked. She knew of at least five women, in Point Pedro alone, whose husbands were shot by unknown bikers wearing helmets. Jaffna reported more crime than ever before. Ever since she left camp in December, Swarna had been looking for a job—sewing, cooking, manual labour, anything but house work. Nothing had come through. Until now, she had not regretted not getting on that boat to India.

IN THE YEAR SINCE HE LEFT THE REFUGEE CAMP  and moved to Jaffna, Siva had tried getting his government job back. Instead, he was charged with pilfering rations and embezzling funds from January to May 2009. In an elaborate and well-worded letter, Siva narrated his family’s ordeal, and listed reasons for having given away food to starving people and later abandoning the rest of his stock to save his life. The defence didn’t stick. He was fired, and fined LKR65,000.

Siva ran the ordeal through his mind over and over again, looking for reason, logic and karma in the acts and omissions that eventually saved his family’s life—the moment they chose to flee, the villages they chose to avoid, the strangers they trusted their children with. He didn’t want to ever be in that situation again.

Siva decided to stop challenging the government, army or police. Dhanusuya had just started third grade and loved it. His two-year-old son was a delight—a healthy, chubby boy who didn’t seem to bear any of the scars of having spent his first months in this world in the thick of the worst war any of them had experienced. Latha seemed content in the little mud hut they had built with their own hands. Things were unnervingly normal.

Siva joined a media school, “to pass the time”. In early March 2010, his class was discussing press freedom in the new democracy they were confronted with. Siva was one of the few who insisted that the Tamil papers and the Tamil community should stop talking about war crime investigations. “Of course, I might have thought differently if I had lost any family in war, but I doubt it is safe for even bereaved families to openly mourn,” he said, referring to the frequent crackdowns on mass mourning ceremonies.

The Sri Lankan government had set up a domestic Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Committee to look into crimes in the 2006-09 war, and it submitted a report in late 2011. Although it barely skims over war crimes, it does strongly recommend shifting from the military-led economic development to a political solution, of giving more democratic power to Tamil-dominated provinces.

The UN, several NGOs and much of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora, however, continue to demand an international war crimes investigation. Siva insisted that this would only rake up memories everyone was trying to erase, and reignite the suspicion and uncertainty the government felt towards the Tamils. “We should decide whether, how and when we want the crimes investigated!” he said emphatically. “Not those who do not live here, like we do, with the guns to our forehead.” A young man in the front of the class asked: “And what is your plan instead?”

Siva looked him squarely in the eyes and said, “I plan to shut up.”

The author, whose name has been withheld for security reasons, is a journalist in India.