Yesterday the Sri Lanka Army captured Kilinochchi, the de-facto town capital of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) stronghold situated in the north of the country. This is ten years after the Army lost control of the territory in much of the North to the LTTE, where Mr. Prabhakaran, the Machiavellian leader of the rebel group, is still said to be at large.
My first visit to Kilinochchi in late 2004, when the territory was still under LTTE-control is made of vague visual imagery in terms of memories, but the feelings I felt then are still fresh and intense. A ceasefire agreement was in effect at the time between the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE and after the outpost of Omanthai – the last vestige of the Government - a narrow strip of a few hundred meters known as ‘no man’s land’ gave way to the control point of the LTTE in the deep reaches of the North terrain of Sri Lanka. The LTTE made its northern home in the neighbouring districts of Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu and parts of Mannar, which together had come to be known as the Vanni region, so describing the once-upon-a-time kingdom of the north central region, but lately had come to be understood as a synonym for rebel-held land in the North.
Even as the Chinese crackers go off in the backdrop in Colombo’s celebration of this ‘victory’ for ‘all the peoples of this country’ as the President addressed the nation hours after the news was broadcast by the Defense Ministry yesterday of the Army takeover of Kilinochchi, my thoughts wandered back to my entry into the district years ago. I remember sitting in my vehicle half numbed by the reality of a seeming impossibility for those of my race at the time – something thought impossible for any of my generation and ethnicity – to enter the northern rebel-held and Tamil-dominated areas. The drive into Kilinochchi was completely uneventful, and the only time I felt the palpitations within me was when I piled into the car to register at the LTTE headquarters, as I was a new entry into ‘their territory’ – the Eelam nation. Hailing from a relatively prominent (in)famous political family in the south myself, I didn’t expect to casually fly under the radar without rigorous questioning of my business in ‘their’ region. I held my breath until the officers at the HQ gave me the ‘all clear’ after seeing my paperwork, with minimal questioning, largely thanks to the suavity and charm (and unquestioning integrity) of my Kilinochchi colleagues. I was surprised by and yet respected the relative independence the LTTE showed towards humanitarian workers in the region.
Upon arriving at the office from my hotel the next morning at the very minute I had agreed to meet with my colleagues to chart out the schedule of the day, I found myself seated at the reception area alone, with only the security guards for company. None had arrived. So I waited; half an hour later, one of my colleagues sauntered into the office. Highly miffed at the shameless display of non-punctuality I asked him with all the sarcasm I could muster in my voice if this was how dedicated the staff were to the work of serving communities in this part of the country? He looked at me completely baffled. Impatiently I went on to explain the fine print of my riddled words – why was he half an hour late for our scheduled meeting? To this he gave me a knowing and audaciously condescending look and laughed. He explained himself before I opened my mouth, considering the change in my temper was transparent in my face. He told me that ‘here we stuck to Kilinochchi time, and not to Sri Lankan time.’ I was flabbergasted! What nerve, I thought to myself. Then it dawned on me the truth of his words – they were not meant to sound chauvinistic. On the contrary, he was referring to the Sri Lanka Government’s turning back the time in Sri Lanka by half hour as some idiotic energy-saving attempt, in a bid to curb to an extent the galloping costs of electricity production for the country some years before then. The sensible powers-that-be in the rebel-held areas had resisted the change in time. So in reality, the real time against GMT was observed in Kilinochchi. (The Government has reverted Sri Lanka to real time since.) However nondescript and non-consequential this little anecdote, I read into this incident a first indication of the seriousness of the ‘struggle’ and the conformity of all to the powers of the region.
Throughout the course of the next few days I was taken to observe some of the activities of the humanitarian work in the region. Since the program I was covering had much to do with child nutrition activities, I remember looking out for any and all information in this regard wherever I went. We found ourselves visiting several of the program’s beneficiary families. I was especially interested in seeing the families with children who had suffered various health and physical anomalies as a result of under nourishment and chronic malnutrition. I gathered ample evidence of this state of being among children from my visits.
A child of eight I visited had suffered blindness, while another fourteen year old boy suffered deformity of his legs as a result of under nourishment. The District Hospital doctors and the program’s nutritionists explained to me that one of the possible causes for these kinds of growth defects and conditions could be the lack of adequate pre-natal care and nutrition of mothers during the period of pregnancy. One doctor explained to me that during the intermittent years of conflict mothers had taken to running from aerial bombings and other serial attacks by forces on either side, taking refuge in dense jungles for days at a time.
Added to the normal physical strain on these women in their state of pregnancy, they also had to undergo various other stresses such as the lack of clean drinking water and sanitation facilities, the lack of basic nutrition in their food if food was at all possible in the jungles, and the unceasing emotional trauma of keeping themselves alive from the unrelenting stray bullets, shrapnel and rocket missiles. The constant lookout for hidden mines on the ground they walked on and tolerating disease-bearing mosquitoes can’t have been easy to endure; adding to this the lack of sleep, the lack of emergency medical aid let alone regular check ups for the growth of their babies and their own health conditions would definitely have taken a toll on these young and scared mothers. The consequence representing itself in babies born with severe deformities, under growth and in most cases an acquired under nourished state, the effects of which will stay with them for years to come, only to be overcome with special nutritional feeding and health care.
Therefore, close to half the current child population of under-fives in the Kilinochchi district suffers various degrees of under nourishment. Pre-natal under nourishment and conflict-related stresses of pregnant and lactating mothers had also bred the prevalence of children suffering from heart and respiratory complications, one among them the condition called ‘hole-in-the-heart’, requiring intensive surgery in order to give them a chance at life – the possibility of such treatment and surgery an impossibility to many of the parents in the region due to their acute poverty and the lack of medical personnel and inadequate facilities in the single Government-maintained hospital in the Kilinochchi town. As a result of the high death rate of children in these families, most parents opt to have several children to beat the odds of death snatching their young ones from them. Hence, most acutely poor families have several young children and inadequate incomes to provide for their most basic growth needs, keeping generations to come trapped in the poverty cycle spinning endlessly. It is also this poverty and the lack of economic and education opportunities heightened by all the negative war imagery witnessed by youngsters that easily lead them to enlist in the ensuing ‘freedom struggle,’ apart from the scores more reported to be forcefully recruited.The pleasantest memories of my first visit to Kilinochchi and of my several subsequent visits until the recent resumption of conflict was each visit I made to the preschools in the district. There were over 100 of them included under the program I covered benefiting over 4,000 preschool kids. That’s an inkling of the love I surrounded myself with at each visit. These little people come bounding into their preschools accompanied by their mothers or grandmothers every day for a period of a few hours with their little bags on their backs and their water bottles hung around their necks. I have rarely seen an unsmiling face among these little ones – they are the epitome of unadulterated and pure joy. However, their parents and grandparents do not bring them to these preschools because of their concern for a steady start to their early childhood years. No, they are attracted to the preschools because they provide at least one nutritious meal during the day for their children free of cost – a meal parents and families can ill afford most of the time. The predominant livelihoods are agriculture and fishing, both severely affected and restricted due to the conflict resulting in lower household incomes and exacerbating poverty.
The LTTE had begun vocational training centers after the Ceasefire Agreement came into effect in 2003. However, these could not have brought immediate economic options to the woes of communities. For one thing, these centers were mostly centered in the Kilinochchi town. But the under-developed roads did not support adequate public transportation to most communities into the town; the great distances separating villages was also a challenge to the many economic development efforts bravely steered by development agencies, the UN, the LTTE and the Government of Sri Lanka within the district through various means and in the form of various programs. But even after years of investment in such programs in the region, their effect was undermined by conflict and the narrow-minded political agendas of the influential few. It was clear from the beginning to all that no real development would be possible until the district had met its Waterloo and the outcomes could be one of many – either way, it was only a matter of time…
Towards evening, I remember visiting a fishing family at their home by the beach. As I struggled to capture the right composition in the waning light just before sunset for my photographs of the family comprising two children – a boy with polio of about ten and his sister of about six - and their parents, the boy with his sense of humour and his mischievous talk had all of us enthralled. His attitude was refreshing among a community whose’ dignity seemed to have been stripped apart by decades of discrimination, conflict, crippling poverty and fear, dousing any trace of light in their eyes. The boy also had another internal complication with his health and was sponsored by an organization for a critical operation that would bring about a greater sense of normalcy to his life in future. His parents spoke softly, desperately trying but failing to hide their emotion at being separated from their son for a period of several months until he returned from Colombo after his operation. The boy was the only one traveling in the company of a few officials from the organization, as they could not all afford to go along with him. This I suspected was not only because of the unbearable expense of the trip but also and possibly more importantly because they felt a very potent sense of dread at the prospect of living in Colombo several months, with possible threats of arrests and the unjust suspicion among people and security forces of their ‘real’ business in the south, hailing from Kilinochchi no less.
This family, like the majority resident in the district, had never been out of their hometown, and very few if any had ever been to Colombo over the last generation. They were held back by fairly founded fears of discriminatory treatment and suspicion and also by the unjust but politically motivated fear and dread fed into them about the people of the rest of the country and the Government by the administration holding sway over their lives in the district. The LTTE also held tight control over the movements of the civilian population that were allowed out of the district. There are many reasons and theories as to why – it is possible that all or none of them are true.
The boy, oblivious to his parents’ fear and misery at their inevitable separation, was full of hope for his future as he told me about his dreams of becoming a successful and rich businessman someday. He told me through my interpreter how he would buy his mother a fancy house and a pretty sari and his father a big trawler boat to catch lots of fish. I asked him what he would buy his sister, to which he mused that it depended on whether she took care of his things while he was away in Colombo for his operation. The boy was vivacious and an unforgettable delight, and a favourite among my memories of the district.
As the sun set on the coast of Kilinochchi like a watercolour painting, shooting streaks of bright orange and pink into the sky, so did my hope for these children’s future and many others’ like them as the years passed and the conflict raged on. Later on I saw imagery, heard stories and read news articles about civilians being forcefully trained in handling arms and in combat. The reports said that compulsorily squadrons of civilians, including women, the elderly and children were trained in ‘self defense.’ The images I beheld were more than mildly disturbing, and my unwarranted anger at the time was towards the political powers that allowed these goings on, at the degree to which innocent civilians were used as pawns in a game of chess. They were dispensable and their lives counted for naught in the great feat of political actualization.However, I have since come to understand that my anger, opinions and feelings are not adequately knowledgeable nor comprehensive enough to make a difference to the status quo in this part of my country. I am but still tracing the whys and the hows of the roots of this conflict and have been engaged in this conquest for the past ten years of my own life. My own findings and understanding are superficial and incongruent with the depth of the issue. The conflict’s origins are over two generations old and perhaps even longer, and my half-baked insights drawn from history books and prejudiced story-telling can only result in dangerous oversimplification of the pain of generations and of whole communities. I am no political analyst and so refrain from opining. Instead, I am at heart, deeply bothered by the plight of the people of Kilinochchi bound by forces greater than themselves, stripped of the right to independent thought, the democratic exercise of choice and the accessibility to opportunity and options that other Sri Lankans seem to enjoy elsewhere at least to a greater degree than they, if not absolutely. And for this there can be no excuse.
I look forward to a day when the lack of nutrition of the children of Kilinochchi will become the whole nation’s problem and responsibility; when young boys and girls can dream big and have access to the opportunities of basic facilities and services to enable them to realize these dreams; when we as a nation come to cherish and appreciate each others’ differences and yet not be threatened by them; when all people of all ethnicity can freely travel and feel a part of the land extent of the island in its entirety without having to justify one’s existence to another.
