Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka's Hidden War
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Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka's Hidden War
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781846274718 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Granta Books |
| Publication date: | 09/06/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 582 KB |
About the Author
Frances Harrison was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, as well as the School of Oriental&African Studies, and Imperial College in London. For many years she worked as a foreign correspondent for the BBC posted in South Asia, South East Asia and Iran. From 2000-4 she was the resident BBC Correspondent in Sri Lanka. She has worked at Amnesty International as Head of News and while writing this book was a visiting research fellow at Oxford University.
Read an Excerpt
Still Counting the Dead
Survivors of Sri Lanka's Hidden WarBy Frances Harrison
Portobello Books
Copyright © 2013 Frances HarrisonAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9781846274695
That afternoon was pregnant with malice, the weather oppressive and
sultry. A tropical storm hung in the air, waiting to explode above the
tiny strip of golden beach at the north-eastern corner of the island of
Sri Lanka. It was 18 May 2009. Four Catholic priests in grubby white
robes with black sashes had just come out of bunkers. They carried a
white flag and held their hands in the air. Terrified, they knelt on the
hot sand. They were surrounded by dozens of emaciated children in
ragged T-shirts: orphans in their care, some of them in blood-soaked
bandages. All were pleading for their lives with the Sri Lankan soldiers
who had their guns trained on them from across the beach.
In the background, a plume of grey smoke billowed from vehicles
set ablaze by the shells that had rained down. Even the palm trees
on the beach that had so recently been a tropical paradise had been
decapitated by the ferocious battles of the previous weeks. Now blackened
stumps replaced foliage. Strewn on the ground were people’s
last belongings – a shoe, a water bottle, a piece of clothing; dotted
around the bloated corpses that lay sprawled out in the open. The
stench of decomposing flesh and burning tyres hung in the air, mixed
with cordite, sweat and the tang of human fear.
The gunfire had been relentless. For days the Tamil priests and the
children – some as young as six – had been waiting for a lull in the
fighting so that they could surrender. The landscape was dotted with
trenches reinforced with sandbags. Injured fighters and civilians were
all trapped together in this, the final killing field, just a few hundred
square metres in size. One of the priests had a radio telephone and used
it to call a brigadier-general in the Sri Lankan Army, who advised them
to raise a white flag when the soldiers approached. Twice the priests
had tried to come out, but each time they’d been shot at and forced to
crawl back into the bunker on their hands and knees. The day before,
one man had been killed while trying to defecate.
The priests knew that the war was over, and that if they didn’t surrender
soon they’d be taken for rebels. All night they had heard the cries
for help as the soldiers threw grenades into bunkers. The mopping-up
operation was under way at the end of five months of unprecedented
carnage. Miraculously, the priests and the children had survived.
More than a dozen Sri Lankan soldiers stood in full combat gear,
rifles and heavy machine guns pointed at the group, ammunition belts
strung across their shoulders. They’d masked their faces with black
cloths to hide their identities, making them look even more like executioners.
Young recruits from the south of the island, they were frenzied
with fear after seeing so many of their comrades killed. For the last
three days they’d faced waves of rebel suicide fighters making a futile
last stand. Now they wouldn’t think twice about shooting at anything
that moved.
‘The soldiers were like animals, they were not normal. They wanted
to kill everything. They looked as if they hadn’t eaten or slept for days.
They were crazed with blood lust,’ said one of the priests later.
‘We are going to kill you,’ the soldiers shouted in their language,
Sinhala. ‘We have orders to shoot everyone.’ The tense stand-off lasted
about an hour, with the kneeling priests begging to be spared in broken
Sinhala. They told the soldiers that they’d already been in touch with
the brigadier-general at army headquarters, who’d promised to send
help. They implored them to use the telephone to check their story.
The soldiers were so frightened they made a priest dial the number
and then put the handset on the ground in the space between them,
fearing it might be booby-trapped.
Ordered by their superior officers to accept the surrender, the
soldiers instructed the group to cross over one by one; they began to
strip-search them, including the clerics, even removing bandages to
check underneath. One young boy had a dressing on his lower back
and the soldiers pulled it off and stuck their fingers in the wound. They
punched a priest in the chest for no apparent reason.
Then it was time to leave. After so many weeks of starvation, nobody
had the energy to carry the injured. One badly wounded female rebel
in a nearby bunker was too weak to be picked up. She told the priests
to leave her and help the others who could walk. As they left, a Tamil
in the group glanced back and saw a soldier pointing a rifle at the
girl’s forehead. Terrified, he turned around before he heard the shot
ring out. They made a long march up the coastal road to an army camp,
traversing a living hell, their bare feet stained with human blood.
Around them fires were still burning, and limbless, decomposing
corpses lay under vehicles or alongside bunkers. A priest said he personally
saw thousands of dead on that journey, most of them civilians, not
fighters.
‘We have killed all your leaders and you are our slaves,’ jeered one of
the soldiers guarding the group, using broken Tamil so they’d all understand.
As they trudged on, some fainted with exhaustion, including the
priest who’d been punched. The people with him insisted he be given
medical treatment. ‘Many people have died. Why are you crying for
one father? Let him die,’ the soldiers said.
At one point a senior army officer came and the people got down
on their knees to plead for the priest’s life. By the time a medic attached
a saline drip, the priest had already died. He was not alone. As the
survivors were driven out of the war zone later that night they saw
hundreds of naked male and female bodies lined up on the ground,
illuminated by lights powered by generators. The victorious soldiers
were using their mobile phones to take trophy photos of the dead
rebels – some of the disturbing images that soon appeared all over the
Internet. It was the digital era’s equivalent of a triumphant swordsman
putting his foot on the chest of a vanquished enemy.
Three hundred kilometres to the south, on the winning side, people
had been dancing in the streets of the capital, Colombo. There was an
eruption of joy, with car horns honking, firecrackers exploding and
bystanders waving yellow Sri Lankan flags depicting a lion carrying
a sword. After decades, the civil war was over. It was a victory few
military analysts had thought possible.
State television had interrupted programming that day to announce
that the rebel leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, had been killed. They
broadcast pictures of his bloated corpse lying on the ground in the
jungle, the dead eyes staring and a handkerchief covering a bloody gash
in his head. Nothing more clearly marked the end of the war than the
corpse of the Tamil Tiger leader who had once been worshipped like
a god by his diehard supporters.
At his peak he’d controlled a quarter of the island, commanding
an army of thousands of devoted Tamil men and women who wore
cyanide capsules around their necks to avoid being captured alive. They
took up arms to fight for a Tamil homeland because they no longer
felt safe living with the majority Sinhalese community on the crowded
island; Tamils had been burned alive in the streets of the capital. They
faced discrimination in employment and education and had become
convinced that they would never be given a fair deal in Sri Lankan
society.
From a band of a few angry young men, the Tamil Tigers developed
into one of the world’s most brutal insurgent groups, and one of its
best-equipped, with tanks, artillery, naval and air wings, and spies and
sleeper suicide bombers planted all over the island. They purchased
arms in the black markets of Asia and Africa, operating legitimate shipping
businesses to move weapons and raising at least £126 million a year in contributions from the Tamil diaspora.
When I first visited the Tigers in 2002 as the BBC correspondent in Sri Lanka, they ran a de facto
state for Tamils in the north-east, with their own courts, police, banks and border controls.
Predominately Hindu and Christian, Tamils were the majority in
the north, but the Sinhalese, who are Buddhist and Christian, formed
a majority in the rest of the tiny island of twenty million people. Sri
Lankan Tamil links to the sixty million fellow-Tamils who live just
across the water in the southern tip of the Indian mainland made
the Sinhalese insecure. ‘A majority with a minority complex’ is how
many have described them. Initially it was India, then the diaspora
populations in Canada, Europe and Australia, that funded and equipped
the separatist cause.
The rebels succeeded because they were ruthless – willing to
obliterate any challengers, even from their own side, and kill innocent
Sinhalese civilians. Tigers drove suicide trucks packed with
explosives into the heart of the capital, murdering presidents, prime ministers,
ministers, MPs, office workers, and anyone who got in the
way, with chilling efficiency. In one such attack in 1996 ninety-one
people were killed and more than 1,000 injured, including 100 who
lost their eyesight. In July 2001, the Tigers attacked the island’s only
international airport, knocking out half the fleet of the national carrier.
The economy suffered, holding the whole nation back. Poor Sinhalese
men had little choice but to join the army, only to come home
disabled or in a body bag. Ordinary people lived with the constant
threat of suicide bombers, terrified even to let their children walk to
school. Because of the Tigers’ campaigns against both the government
and civilians – bombs on buses and in shopping centres, for example
– everyone in the south knew someone who had narrowly missed a
bomb blast.
During the decades of war, foreign tourists kept on coming to
sun themselves on the southern coast. As if by unspoken agreement,
the rebels never attacked holidaymakers. Europeans sipped coconut
juice and stared out at the horizon of the ocean, unaware that just an
hour’s flight to the north people were dying in First World War-style
trench warfare. No waiter or driver in the south would volunteer an
opinion about the civil war, knowing it was bad for business. Look
at the Sri Lanka Tourist Board website and you will see pictures of
idyllic beaches, heritage sites, colourful festivals, steam trains and lush
tea gardens. The only odd thing is that none of them is in the north of
the island, which has, if anything, more beautiful beaches. In the north
you can paddle utterly alone at midday, on miles and miles of flat sand,
without seeing a single hotel. Dig a little deeper on the Tourist Board
webpage and you will find that the heritage sites are all Buddhist.
You’d be surprised to know that Sri Lanka also has Hindus, Christians,
Muslims and animists. The website’s history section abruptly ends in
1972, just when the civil war got going. The Tourism Board simply
doesn’t mention four decades of Tamil separatist struggle. Denial has
become a Sri Lankan habit.
Not surprising, then, that in 2009, when the brutal climax of the
war arrived, tourists on winter-sun holidays were lying on Sri Lanka’s
southern beaches oblivious to the bloodshed that was unfolding on
the opposite side of an island the size of Scotland. Tamil civilians
were being bombed by the government, used as human shields by the
rebels. Medics were performing amputations with no anaesthetic, and
watching half their patients die. The Tigers snatched people’s children
to die a pointless death in jungle trenches. They said they were fighting
for the Tamil people and this justified making them stay in the war
zone, whether they liked it or not.
Like the tourists, the world turned a blind eye to the tens of thousands
of civilian deaths that took place in the north-east of Sri Lanka in
the space of just five months in 2009. A UN panel later found reports
of up to 40,000 dead credible; there are signs that the final death toll
could be a lot higher. At the same time that Sri Lanka’s vicious war was
raging, the world’s attention was focused on the Israeli incursion into
Gaza, where the final death toll was about 1,500.
Sri Lankans haven’t been very good at counting their dead, but the
UN’s assumption is that at least 100,000 have perished during the four
decades of civil war – roughly equivalent to the number who died in
the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.
By 2009, much of the international community had made a conscious
decision to side with the Sri Lankan government and ignore the cries
for intervention. A Norwegian-led peace process had failed, and many
countries blamed the Tigers’ intransigence. The European Union, the
US, Canada and India all proscribed the Tamil Tiger rebels as a terrorist
group. The Sri Lankan government found it easy to rebrand its longrunning
ethnic conflict as part of the global ‘war on terror’. This meant
that those who might have spoken out for the victims were muted in
their efforts.
Sri Lanka also found new allies emboldened by the West’s hypocrisy
– how could Washington and London preach to others about
human rights after Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib? – so China,
Russia, Pakistan, India and Iran were staunch in their support for the
Sri Lankan government, ensuring it received enough weapons and
credit. Today the same countries protect Sri Lanka from war-crimes
investigations, championing its achievements in defeating terrorism.
In academic circles across the world, the winning strategy is now
dangerously referred to as ‘the Sri Lankan option’ – a new way of
crushing terrorism using brute military force rather than a political
approach. It involves scorched-earth tactics, blurring the distinction
between civilians and combatants, and enforcing a media blackout.
Proponents tend to gloss over the indiscriminate killing of women
and children, the violations of international law and the crushing of
a free press. Worryingly, other countries with ethnic problems have
been studying Sri Lanka’s approach – the Burmese military, the Thais
and the Bangladeshis, for example. When the Sri Lankan military held
a three-day conference in June 2011 to teach other armies its brutal
tactics, the stench of war crimes didn’t stop representatives from forty
countries, including the USA, attending. They hoped to learn from a
country that now claims to be expert in counter-terrorism.
There is another side to the story – the human cost of ‘the Sri
Lankan option’. The focus of this book is on the final months of the
battle between the Tigers and the Sri Lankan military. It is not a history
of the whole war and does not tell of the suffering of the ordinary
soldier or Sinhalese commuter living in fear of bomb blasts – that is
the (entirely legitimate) subject for another book. It is an account of
the victory from the perspective of the defeated. Yes, some in this book
were terrorists or their sympathisers, but by no means all. This story
matters because Sri Lanka is no longer just a country whose people
did bad things to each other – it’s an unexpected piece of the jigsaw of
the discourse on global terrorism.
Nobody has told these tales before because there simply were no
international journalists or aid workers in the war zone in the final
months to send harrowing accounts of civilian suffering to CNN or
the BBC. That was an important part of the government’s strategy.
Independent witnesses were deliberately excluded, to distort the
writing of history. As a result, perhaps there never will be an agreed account of what actually took place in those
final months of war – Sri Lankan history will continue to be written
differently according to your ethnic group or political bias. If Tamils
and Sinhalese are ever to live together peacefully, then these accounts
from survivors need to be heard and acknowledged. The bloodshed of
those five months in 2009 far exceeded, in scale and trauma, anything
that happened before in Sri Lanka. If the truth is not confronted,
another generation of Tamils will inherit the collective trauma that
fuels the desire for revenge.
On the Tamil side, too, there needs to be an honest rethinking of
the unquestioning support for the rebels. The sizeable Tamil diaspora
across Europe, North America and Australia funded the insurgency,
driven by guilt about those they’d left behind. Deep down most knew
that the Tigers were brutally abducting children to fight against their
will, extorting money in the name of tax and killing dissenters, but they
chose to remain silent. Denial infects both sides.
The final months of the war saw the Tamil Tiger leadership cynically
control the movement of the civilian population, exposing them to the
horrors of battle in the hope that the appalling images of suffering
would prompt the world to intervene. It was immoral and ultimately
futile. At the height of the mayhem, the rebels turned down an internationally
mediated surrender plan brokered by Norway that would have
stopped the killings. It could have saved thousands of lives. In the end,
all the top Tiger leaders were wiped out anyway and the movement
destroyed. It was just much bloodier than it needed to be.
As a journalist I cannot prove every single detail of the accounts
given to me because I was not there myself. However, the patterns
of the stories match each other and expand on the findings of a UN
advisory panel and the reports of different human-rights groups. I have
travelled the world, hearing hair-raising stories of escape; watching
sleepless, suicidal, haunted people weep, shake with trauma, whisper
with horror at what they had to recount. Their stories marked me
indelibly. Some grown men cried before they even started to tell me
their story, just at the thought of the enormity of it all; others had tears
in their eyes when I, a total stranger, left them – simply because I’d
shown an interest in their tragedy.
Amid the suffering, I have also heard stories of incredible bravery,
self-sacrifice and generosity from ordinary people who drew on inner
strength they didn’t even know they possessed. There are many unsung
heroes, but they would be the last to consider themselves such; rather
they feel failures, because they didn’t save more people.
The majority of those I have spoken to are now refugees. I sometimes
wonder what strangers who pass them on the streets, dismissive
of their inability to speak English or navigate local customs, would say
if they knew even a fraction of what they’d been through. For many
survivors this is the first time they have told their story in full. It was
not a decision they took lightly. Their motivation was not revenge, or
even scoring a propaganda victory. It was about making the dead count
for something.
Continues...
Excerpted from Still Counting the Dead by Frances Harrison Copyright © 2013 by Frances Harrison. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Contentsacknowledgements ix
maps xv
timeline xix
Introduction 1
Sri Lankan Government Statements 10
The War the United Nations Lost 13
Aid Worker Expulsions 2008–9 31
The Journalist 33
Recorded Killings of Journalists and Media Workers, April 2004–March 2009 53
The Spokesman 55
Tamil Tigers 71
The Doctor 73
Some of the Attacks on Hospitals 90
The Nun 92
The Catholic Church in Sri Lanka 114
The Teacher 116
Disappearance 134
The Rebel Mother 136
Widows 159
The Volunteer 161
Disabled in the North-East of Sri Lanka 181
The Fighter 182
Tiger Equipment According to Sri Lankan Military Estimates 199
The Shopkeeper 200
Asylum Seekers 214
The Wife 216
Conclusion 226
appendix one: casualties 236
appendix two: alleged war crimes 240
notes 246