In the Tigers’ Lair

On March 31, 2011, the United Nations released a Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka for war crimes allegedly committed by both the Sri Lankan military and the notorious Tamil Tigers in the last stages of the war over Tamil autonomy which had been waged for decades but ended in May 2009. The report concluded that there were “credible grounds” for believing that such war crimes had been committed.

I read the report with increasing dismay, with personal reasons for distress. I had spent over six months in Sri Lanka in the period from 2004 to 2006, some in tsunami relief throughout the island but the last three months working in the traditional Tamil lands of the north-east, the region of the final brutality. I had been involved in many of the Tamil hospitals, health clinics, orphanages and schools which were to be destroyed. I had treated sick children of villagers, and participated in fund raising for repair of a home for blind and deaf children which was to be razed by Sri Lankan shellfire, despite its well-known identity. What happened to those blind children when the Tamil civilians were corralled against the sea and shelled on the sand? I had been able to facilitate the provision of sewing machines and, oddly, a cage of budgerigars to inmates of a psychiatric centre that was to be flattened, and wondered what further derangement resulted from exploding shells. Did the birds get away?

I had also grown to know and love some of the Tamil combatants. I had gone to the north-east on the request of an aid organisation to deliver a course of paediatrics to some students who had missed out on tuition because of the war. To my surprise, they had turned out to be the entire medical wing of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). I went for two weeks but stayed for twelve, during which I learned from the students. There had been thirty-two of them: bright, enthusiastic, committed; each with a profound story. Nine are now dead and some are still missing. When I read the report, I could see them working in their surgical bunkers in those last months of the war, overwhelmed by the brutality around them. 

Meeting my students 

Our journey to Kilinochchi began after the 2004 tsunami when I had joined an aid organisation to care for its victims in the south and east, and then returned to distribute paediatric life-support equipment to a number of hospitals around the island. I had driven by road through the north-east to Jaffna and had noted the poverty of the region and the dilapidation of the hospitals in Kilinochchi and Jaffna compared with those in the south. I had also observed the discipline in camps for tsunami survivors that were run by the LTTE in Jaffna. In the Sri Lankan areas to the south, there had been chaos, with food thrown from the back of moving trucks. North of Jaffna, however, people queued for food dispensed from big cooking drums.

I had become intrigued by Sri Lanka and, after returning home, decided to take long service leave and return with another aid organisation to work in a paediatric hospital on the east coast. My wife and I had only been back in Sri Lanka for a few days, however, when I was asked whether I would consider going to Kilinochchi for a couple of weeks to help some medical students catch up on paediatrics. The ceasefire which had been brokered by the Norwegians in 2002 still held and there would be no security problems.

We were happy to comply. I knew I could do useful work there; but another interest had grown. So many Sri Lankans had so strenuously sought to condemn the Tamil Tigers, and the Tamils themselves, they had roused my curiosity. I had begun to think, seeing as we had declared war on terror after 9/11, that it was important to try to understand its motivation. Perhaps I would meet a Tiger or two and ask?

I assumed my students were from the medical school at Jaffna University because I knew its programs had been interrupted by the war. I never wondered if they were Tamil or Sinhala. It was irrelevant. It never crossed my mind that there might be any Tigers in their midst. I had no idea we would end up living in their lair for three months.

Heading for Kilinochchi, the de facto capital of the Tamil north-east, we travelled up the A9 from Colombo by car. We passed through Sri Lankan army bases that straddled the pitted road every ten kilometres or so, then more frequently as we approached the border with the LTTE-controlled north-east. I was told not to admit to the Sri Lankan soldiers manning the border that we would be staying in Kilinochchi but, though the process was extensive for us and exhaustive for our Tamil driver, fortunately it was one question we were not asked. After the military build-up on the Sri Lankan side, to my great surprise on the other side there were only a few makeshift wooden sheds in which passports were checked by men in blue uniforms, but no soldiers and no weapons.

As we drove north, empty fields extended to the tree lines. Where were the infamous Tigers? Why did the Sri Lankan army not drive up the road to Kilinochchi? Weeks later I raised the question with one of my students, who replied they had tried to do that once before and were crushed. He wished they would try it again, explaining artillery co-ordinates. He could not foresee the disaster of overwhelming force that even then was accumulating with the help of Pakistan and China.

Kilinochchi (now destroyed) was a ramshackle town, strung out along the highway on which lorries thundered. Little shops fronted a strip of mud, eroded into gullies by monsoonal downpours. Their goods spilled onto the path: oily bits of motor cycles contended with the bright materials of the sari shop. Beyond the shops were buildings shell-pocked from earlier stages of the war. The usual cornucopia of rices and spices and sweets of Asia were, however, nowhere to be seen. Poverty was obvious.

Soon after arrival I was taken to meet my students in the hospital. The crowd jostling at the gates was distracted at the sight of a foreigner being led around the back, to a lecture room comprised of tin walls that reached halfway to a corrugated iron roof, in which was assembled a smart looking group of young men and women. There was a scraping of iron chairs on the bare concrete floor as the class sprang to attention at the entrance of the foreigner.

Unaccustomed to this kind of reception from Australian students I wistfully ascribed it to local custom and gave no thought to its regimental quality. The students appeared older than I had expected and I wondered if they had lost more time than I had thought. I introduced myself and invited them to sit down: more scraping, followed by silence. I began to talk. Over the following weeks so did they, personally.

It was soon obvious that I needed to emphasise the traditional Western medical procedure of taking a detailed history, performing an ordered examination, system after system, and then coming to a list of diagnostic possibilities, investigations and treatments. At first I had no idea that the luxury of such a time-consuming approach would have condemned many of their patients to early deaths from blood loss from battle wounds. Nevertheless, I started in the traditional way while reviewing the theory of diseases of children.

After a couple of weeks I thought it was time to get the students to start practising an ordered examination of the chest and I asked a male student if he would mind removing his shirt, and a female student if she would demonstrate the examination procedure on him. They prepared to do so but when the fellow removed his shirt I was confronted with the sight of chunks of flesh missing from his back, and as the female student reached out to conduct the exam I noticed similar deep scars. My startled question, “Good heavens, what happened to you two?” provoked general laughter. “Shrapnel,” they replied. Surrounded by thirty-two people enjoying my discomfort, I persisted, rather lamely asking, “Has anyone else here been wounded?” The class dissolved into laughter. As they began to settle I sought but did not find higher ground by re-formulating my question: “Well, who hasn’t been wounded?” Much more laughter followed as only a third of the class raised its hands—but not only hands were raised, three artificial legs were also waggled before my eyes. “Haven’t you noticed these?” they asked with hilarity. That was when the truth began to emerge. My students had all fought in the infantry of the LTTE before being selected to train as doctors. They comprised the entire medical wing of the Tigers, including its highest echelon. 

From the tiger’s mouth 

After this ice-breaker we became more comfortable with each other and I felt able to ask increasingly personal questions. Why had they joined the LTTE? They all had a very simple answer: because “it talked least and did most” for their motherland, Tamil Eelam. I already knew of some of the difficulties imposed on the minority Tamil race by the two-thirds majority of Sinhalese when the British bequeathed a first-past-the-post parliamentary system at independence in 1948. I knew of the “Sinhala Only” Acts of the early Sinhala-dominated governments in which Sinhalese and Buddhism had been installed as the official language and religion, and preferential admission given to Sinhalese in universities and government service. I had heard of forced settlement of Sinhalese in traditional Tamil lands, and of growing violence, culminating in the riots of 1983 in which Sinhalese mobs, directed by voting lists (which implied official collusion), sought out Tamil properties and their inhabitants in an orgy of burning (the petrol-and-tyre “necklace” of the African National Congress was popular with some at the time), pillaging and rape. If there had been no collusion with navigation for the mobs, the government did collude morally by its subsequent silence and then apparent “understanding”. As a result of these riots perhaps 1000 to 3000 Tamils died, others fled overseas or, if they lacked the money, to the welcoming arms of the LTTE in the north-east.

The LTTE was formed in the late 1970s by Velupillai Prabakharan to pursue Tamil independence and, in the manner of other “movements for national liberation” from Africa to Vietnam, it would also do whatever it took. The LTTE, however, had no need to seek inspiration overseas for an armed struggle with inherent terror because one had already been let loose on home soil, in the south. In 1971 (and again in 1987) the local communist party, the People’s Liberation Front (JVP), had launched uprisings for “liberation” in the south in the name of Mao which claimed perhaps 60,000 lives. Many of the deaths—perhaps most—were caused by government reprisals. In retrospect, a maddening of the population and its authorities can be perceived: a persisting disorder that might underlie current events. 

Sri Lanka is not the tropical paradise of the tourist brochures. It was and is a vicious, ruthless society in which Maoist visions for a new man have competed for supremacy with those of a perverted Buddhism and with Hindu gods for revenge and preservation; a place where ideologies and human greed seem to have warped collective consciousness into accepting the ordinariness of murder and cruelty. When I visited the anatomy department of a university and observed a pile of skulls—some charred, some with bullet holes, some fractured—my quizzical regard was answered by a shrug and the briefest reply: “The troubles.”

I had read of the history of Sri Lanka but my students infused life into the stories of Tamil suffering. As confidences deepened, I learned particulars of why my students had joined the LTTE. They all had personal, family stories of loss of lands and life. As the war intensified between the government and the LTTE in the 1980s, they had begun to find Tamil bodies, to suffer air-raids and artillery fire on their houses in the Jaffna Peninsula, and to be beaten and humiliated by the Sri Lankan forces. One student was on the beach when a ferry-load of dead bodies washed ashore: people from his village who had been on their way to Jaffna when they came under machine-gun fire from the Sri Lankan Navy. Another student lost friends when her school was bombed. Family members of another were seized in a raid on their house by Sri Lankan soldiers and never seen again.

When the Indian Peace Keeping Force arrived in the north-east in 1987, Tamils presumed it had come to protect them and had welcomed it enthusiastically into Jaffna until they realised its purpose was to secure peace for Colombo by disarming the LTTE. A guerrilla war ensued in the north-east in which a representative force from the largest army in South Asia was humiliated and, in the process, turned on Tamil civilians before withdrawing in 1989. Revenge for loss of face became an added fuel for cruelty. By now, most of my students had joined the armed ranks of the Tigers and were fighting in guerrilla bands against both the Indians and the Sri Lankans.

These engagements took place throughout a large area of mostly jungle, extending more than 350 kilometres from Jaffna in the north to beyond Ampara in the south-east. The outlook for casualties was grim. They had to be carried by stretcher along jungle trails which could be intercepted from the ground or the air, or along the coast, at night, in small boats at the mercy of the Sri Lankan Navy. One of my students stepped on a mine while infiltrating a Sri Lankan base beyond Ampara. He told of his evacuation with a shredded leg—dragged from the base by his fleeing comrades, hidden in bushes during the day, borne on stretchers to the coast, and carried in a fishing boat to Jaffna by night. He lost much blood and became infected but recovered to wave his stump at me. Some casualties could not be treated in Jaffna but were further smuggled in fishing boats to sympathetic doctors in India.

The death rate of the wounded was so high that Prabakharan concluded that the LTTE needed its own doctors, and so a medical school was started in 1992 to run in parallel with the University of Jaffna. Its students were selected by their commanders from the ranks of the infantry and were gathered for a special ceremony in Jaffna where Prabakharan made a speech, fragments of which were repeated to me on many occasions by my students. I never met Prabakharan but I think he personified their dream for Tamil Eelam. My students revered him and would have died for him (some did), but they never caused me to think they were in the thrall of the man himself, but rather of the dream of the homeland he represented. 

At the start of the medical school, Prabakharan declared he was asking them to make a sacrifice for the homeland, one which only they could fulfil. He was asking them to relinquish the armed struggle so their wounded comrades could live. He knew the bitterness that had driven them to fight but he was asking them to step back from fighting to ensure the fight was won: to devote themselves to medical books rather than the rifle, so the rifle could achieve its ultimate aim. Seventy-five were chosen in 1992; thirty-two remained for me to teach in 2005. Some had failed the examinations, some were unable to leave the infantry, and five had been killed when shells fell on field hospitals. 

The course had begun in a period of relative peace but was interrupted by prolonged periods of warfare during which my students worked in field hospitals as the medical wing matured and the war evolved from guerrilla skirmishes to set-piece assaults on highly defended Sri Lankan military bases. From grenade-throwing guerrillas, my students metamorphosed into surgeons with such skill they were able to perform end-to-end arterial anastomoses under torchlight while enemy shrapnel thudded into the coconut trunks fortifying their bunkers. It is an astonishing transformation considering that some had not completed their schooling when they were chosen and needed special preparatory courses in chemistry and English.

The success of battlefield arterial repair depends as much on prior organisation as it does on the skill of the surgeon and, accordingly, the LTTE developed a system of management. This began with immediate resuscitation by the medic in the fighting platoon, transfer of the wounded to specialist medics positioned 100 metres behind the conflict, from there to bunkered operating theatres outside the range of mortars, and finally to quaternary repair in jungle centres. All soldiers were immunised and all blood groupings were known, and packs of blood and resuscitating fluids were carried behind the lines. Tractors with trailers were ready to transport the wounded and spotters were placed to detect overflying drones. Circuitous routes to the operating bunkers where plotted so the drones could not predict the co-ordinates of the field hospitals. I visited one of these hospitals and became quickly disorientated winding around under the jungle canopy. Members of long-range patrols were skilled and equipped for resuscitation to the point where they could close penetrating chest wounds and recycle their blood into peripheral veins. They all carried antibiotics and anti-snakebite serum.

Sometimes field hospitals were prepared the night before a battle in order to avoid detection: a house would be transformed into triage centre and operating rooms. Mats would be laid in rows and rope extended above them to hold bottles of intravenous fluid. Each “bed” would be assigned a bucket with instruments. A tent mortuary would also be constructed and manned by people skilled in preserving bodies for the sake of relatives. If they were within artillery range coconut trunks would be emplaced for fortification. Double black sheeting would cover all entrances to prevent detection by drones. Then my students would sit in the darkness and wait for the sounds of the first explosions, then the approaching tractors, then the cries of the wounded.

When not at war, my students pursued their studies. They gained more experience in civilian hospitals in the north-east: some alongside unsuspecting doctors from aid organisations who added to their surgical and obstetric skills; some in public health programs to eradicate malaria and treat cholera; some even joined forces with unwitting Sri Lankan soldiers to care for victims of the tsunami. One of my students chuckled at how he preferred sitting in an army helicopter to running from one.

My students had also been involved in food distribution and the evacuation of civilians when the Sri Lankan army had overrun Jaffna in 1993 and its half a million Tamils had fled with the LTTE down narrow country lanes, or in little boats across the lagoon, under fire from Sri Lankan gunships and artillery, rather than surrender to the oncoming army. They had tended casualties on the beach, and to the multiple needs of refugees reaching the mainland in that massive civilian evacuation that remains largely unknown in the West and provides a precedent for the fleeing of civilians from the Sri Lankans, with the LTTE, in the last stage of the war.

As I learned their stories, I had difficulty comprehending their courage and commitment. Some had been wounded as infantry and some as doctors, working under artillery fire, bleeding, with lines of casualties before them: continuing to operate day and night, until the last case, with aching limbs and strained eyes, and gowns stiffened with blood, all the while carrying the knowledge of the death in the attack of a sister, brother or friend. This was how I imagined they existed in the last months of the war.

I may have begun to understand their commitment when I asked my class one morning if it was true all LTTE cadres carried cyanide pills and would prefer them to capture by the Sri Lankans. One of the girls stood up, gathered her purse, and walked to the front of the class, took out the “pill” and gave it to me. I fell silent looking at the evil thing: not a pill but a glass vial containing white powder. “You bite it,” she explained, “and the glass cuts the lining of your mouth, so the cyanide is absorbed and you die quickly.”

“How do you know?” I asked, and our eyes met.

She fell silent, as did the class. I had a horrible recollection of how they used to say they would never leave the wounded on the battlefield. They had described heroic efforts to retrieve them. One of my students was wounded in 2008 and, believing he was surrounded and about to be captured, took the “pill”. He was very lucky. He fell unconscious but did not die, and when the battle swayed in his direction he was rescued. His blood pressure had dropped, however, and he had lost circulation to parts of his feet which needed to be amputated, but the rest of his body was intact and eventually he was restored to the front lines— from whence, unfortunately, he remains missing. 

Heroes’ Day 

I think I really only began to get things in proper perspective when I attended the LTTE’s version of our Anzac Day, which they call Heroes’ Day, though it lasts for a week. It began with the erection of canvas stalls along the main street of Kilinochchi and with the bedecking of shops, trees and poles with yellow and red bunting and the flags of the LTTE. Huge marquees were erected and similarly decorated at the northern end of the sandspit known as Elephant Pass, which joins the Jaffna Peninsula with the mainland of Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan army had once enjoyed a base that had extended for some thirty kilometres north of the spit and had been defended, my students proudly explained, by troops specially trained by US Rangers. In 2000, however, the LTTE had landed 3000 soldiers at night in a flotilla of tiny craft a few kilometres to its north with the aim of seizing the supplying road that ran south from Jaffna, and isolating the base for its main attack from the mainland. The landing force, which included some of my students acting as field surgeons, had three days of supplies and no chance of rescue. No one would be able to escape past the Sri Lankan navy. The attack succeeded. The Sri Lankan army was routed. All buildings were destroyed, and the LTTE took charge of “holy ground”.

Holiness, however, was not as obvious as the paraphernalia of war: the acres of sharpened stakes protruding from the lagoon and the miles of minefields that had failed to protect the defenders; the denuded palm trees with trunks shredded by gunfire; the rubble; the abandoned equipment; and the bones. Nevertheless, Elephant Pass was sacred to the LTTE. This narrow neck of land that joined the Tamil head in Jaffna to its mainland body had been choked by Colombo for too long: and for the civilians who had to pass, it was an intimidating, thieving, raping and murdering constriction.

When the stalls and the bunting were erected I imagined, naively, something like our Easter Show was about to take place. But what was there to show, I wondered? What would be on sale? What proud produce was there to sell in this land of poverty? I had been saddened whenever I had crossed the border into the Sinhala regions and compared the emptiness of the shops in the north to the abundance in the south.

To my surprise, photographs began to appear in the stalls: rows and rows of unsmiling, grim, black-haired, uniformed young people: the dead, I was told. And, as if in confirmation, loudspeakers in trees or on the backs of trucks began to wail. My students took me up to Elephant Pass on the penultimate night. We squeezed into a utility and were driven there by the same scarred but jovial Tiger with whom we were nearly killed a week later when he turned his (literally) blinded eye to an oncoming truck and waved one withered arm to ask me a question. Our external mirror exploded into the car as it was clipped by the passing truck. I thought we had been shot and my students found my startled cry amusing.

At Elephant Pass that night there was, however, no crying, though the marquees were adorned with probably 15,000 photographs of the fallen and filled with their families, who shuffled before them in a long queue that wound from the line of waiting buses. Despite wailing loudspeakers there was a painful silence and a tension unrelieved by the warm breeze that ruffled from the lake.

We could not read the names of the fallen, which were written in Tamil, only their dates of birth. We had long heard of “child soldiers” but my students had denied the accusation. They had said their camps were, at times, centres of fellowship for younger boys who had been orphaned. They asked me if I thought it plausible that boys could join guerrilla units that would have to march long distances with heavy packs and be relied upon in that kind of warfare. This sounded reasonable; but I could imagine boys, especially boys bred in such conditions, fighting in a trench, although that kind of warfare was unusual in Sri Lanka. In any case, here was a chance to check. We shuffled past literally thousands of photos, scanning the dates of birth, and found some fifteen-year-olds and more sixteen-year-olds. The vast majority were in their late teens and early twenties.

The next day, November 27, my students took us to the final ceremony, which was to be held simultaneously in all the war cemeteries in the north-east, of which there were several around Kilinochchi. It was the only time I saw them in their uniforms. I suspected some were at the top of the medical wing and they had all fought in many battles but, in accordance with Tiger tradition, they wore no ranks or medals.

In the middle of the afternoon, we went to a cemetery with about 2000 graves, where families were decking the graves with flowers and food. My students explained that the dead were still living for Tamil Eelam. They sought out the families of dead friends, kneeling with them in the sand. They introduced me but it was hard for any of us to know what to say.

The sun was falling as the numbers of families swelled into a grieving mass, and individual weeping merged into a collective moan. People began to light candles, which flickered on the graves, and I could feel such heaviness it seemed hard to breathe. Or was I holding my breath? I was expecting a dam to break.

The crowd fell silent when loudspeakers began to squawk, and a speech from Prabakharan was relayed brokenly from his centre in the jungle. The crowd listened solemnly. No one moved. My students translated. We were told the dead were indeed living for the motherland, yet the motherland was not yet secure. Progress had been made but more sacrifices would be needed before the sacred land was secure.

That was it. I looked at the sun, an orange ball disappearing behind a row of distant silhouetted coconut trees and steeled myself for what must surely follow. There had been no relieving prayers or hymns, no ceremonies, no other speeches—nothing; it was going to be dreadful. But then the crowd began to disperse, a gentle movement, so silent you could hear only shuffling through the sand. Soon, the thousands were gone, and the cemetery was left to the living dead, denoted by the sea of flickering candles. The crowd had gone wearily, but to continue the struggle. I thought I could feel the motherland.

The Sinhala Buddhist regime in Colombo has always understood this commitment. That is why the war against the Tamils began before the LTTE existed, and continues after its death. 

Dravidian devils 

The ethnic divide in Sri Lanka has its origins in earlier civilisations when Tamils lived in the north-east and Buddhists and animists in the middle and the highlands. Tamils plundered Buddhists, earning a place in their ancient writings as “foreign devils”. These convictions continue. In my times in Sri Lanka I was regularly told by educated Sri Lankans that their race derived from Aryans (even using that word) while the Tamils came from Dravidian stock with all the inference of swinging down from jungle trees.

As well as the need for racial purity, some Sri Lankans carry religious obligations. Legend has it the lord Buddha himself visited the island three times, leaving his footprint on the misnamed Adam’s Peak, while entrusting the future of his dharma to the inhabitants. This has lead to zealotry in certain Buddhist sanghas in Sri Lanka which should strain our exotic Western perception of a peaceful, tolerant religion quietly seeking enlightenment. Buddhist priests have been at the forefront of the attack on Tamils, reifying its theoretical base. Their nine members of parliament have always urged the war against the Tamils. Consistent with this violent xenophobia, Buddhist monks have also been amongst mobs attacking Christian churches in recent years.

While the current ruling Rajapaksa family and colleagues in Sri Lanka have not convincingly renounced worldly ways in pursuit of nirvana, they are apparently aware of the social force of religion and its usefulness in the war against Tamil autonomy. Despite the poverty of many of their constituents, huge Buddhist statues have sprouted prominently throughout Sri Lanka and public deference is made to the priests and their ways, though they did not feature in the plethora of aid organisations after the tsunami. To celebrate victory over the Tamils, President Mahinda Rajapaksa made special homage to the Buddhist Temple of the Tooth in Kandy.

The Tamils have suffered from another divide. The People’s Liberation Front also urged war against Tamil autonomy, because of Lenin’s teachings that independence must be subsumed to the centralised power of the party. The JVP was beaten but not destroyed in the 1980s and is now pursuing the “parliamentary road” by means of its members in the governing coalition. It is one of the pro-Chinese forces in Sri Lanka that have encouraged the development of that country’s business and strategic potential. Perhaps there are other than ideological reasons for the development of its major air and sea port in Rajapaksa’s hometown. 

The UN report on war crimes 

Isolated nationally and internationally, on the other side of the war on terror, the LTTE had no sustained capacity to withstand the onslaught of the Sri Lankan forces, strengthened by Pakistan and China, which were let loose in 2008. They were crushed between a withdrawing front and the sea, and pulverised from above. Such was the violence, even the United Nations was moved to investigate charges of war crimes. Its Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka should be read as a timely reminder of man’s inhumanity to man that does not cause the mourning it deserves. It concludes that there are “credible allegations” indicating that “a wide range of serious violations of international … and human rights law” was committed by both the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE. It says “the conduct of the war represented a grave assault on the entire regime of international law designed to protect individual dignity during both war and peace” and claims some of the breaches “would amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity”.

It details butchery. On January 20, 2009, the perimeter of the LTTE was shrinking before overwhelming firepower. The Sri Lankan headquarters demarcated and publicised a no-fire zone for civilians into which two remaining UN workers and “a large number of Tamil civilians” relocated and set up shelters near a food distribution centre. In the early hours of January 24, however, “hundreds of shells rained down”. Those near the UN bunker dived into it for protection “but most IDPs [internally displaced persons] had nowhere to seek cover”. “People were screaming and crying out for help”, and the UN security officer made frantic calls to the UN and Sri Lankan leaders in Colombo “but heavy shelling continued overnight”. In the morning: 

UN staff emerged from the bunker … mangled bodies and body parts were strewn all around them, including those of many women and children. Remains of babies had been blasted upwards into the trees. Among the dead were those who had helped to dig the bunker the previous day. 

As the front contracted, over 300,000 civilians withdrew into another no-fire zone, but this was also shelled, 

from all directions … land, air and sea … [with] aerial bombardment, long-range artillery, howitzers, MBRLs [multi-barrel rocket launchers], as well as small mortars, RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] and small arms fire, some of it fired from close range. MBRLs are unguided missile systems designed to shell large areas, but, if used in densely populated areas, are indiscriminate in their effect.  

Sri Lankan forces shelled the hospitals and denied medical supplies to the wounded. The Red Cross evacuated many wounded by ship, but the Sri Lankan government “did not allow UN staff on the ships”. The wounded lined the beaches, which were sometimes shelled, and shelling near the ships curtailed the Red Cross’s work. Conditions in the shelled hospitals were 

so poor that a large number of amputations were performed without anaesthetic, using butchers’ knives rather than scalpels. … Many died due to lack of access to proper medical care, and scores of bodies were deposited in front of the hospitals each day.  

When the firing stopped, the Sri Lankan government persisted with the false claim that only 10,000 civilians were involved, but as many as 290,000 civilians ended up in what were, effec­tively, concentration camps. The UN report declared that “as a re­sult of the Government’s low estimates, food delivered [to them] … was a fraction of what was actually needed, resulting in widespread malnutrition, including cas­es of starvation. Similarly, the medical supplies were grossly inadequate.”

Given the types of injuries sus­tained in the no-fire zones, the report states, “doctors requested anaesthetics, blood bags for transfusion, antibiotics, surgical items, gloves and disinfectants”. Instead, they received “Panadol, allergy tablets and vitamins”.

The report says that since the war ended in May 2009, many suspected members of the Tamil Tigers remain in captivity: 

there is virtually no information about the conditions at these sepa­rate LTTE “surrenderee” sites … The fact that interrogations and investigations as well as “rehabilitation” activities have been ongoing, without any external scrutiny for almost two years, rendered alleged LTTE cadre highly vulnerable to violations such as rape, torture or disappearances, which could be committed with impunity. 

The UN report leads to the con­clusion that the Sri Lankans knew ex­actly what they were doing when they bombed civilians in the no-fire zones. It reveals they possessed unmanned aerial ve­hicles for “surveillance, target acqui­sition and subsequent battle assess­ments” which could detect “individuals and their movements or positions” day and night, including “civilian installa­tions such as hospitals”.

If it knew what it was doing and if the war was merely against the LTTE, why did the Sri Lankan government rain such “great destruction” on one no-fire zone that 

even the vegetation was shredded. Dead or severely injured civilians lay along the roadsides, amidst shattered shelters, strewn belongings and dead animals [in] stark contrast to the situa­tion outside the NFZ, where there were few signs of shelling … in spite of the presence of a large number of LTTE and far fewer civilians. [empha­sis added] 

The UN report does not delve into motivation but on examining the “historical and political background to the conflict” simply declares that it was “Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism … asserting a privileged place for the Sin­halese as the protectors of Sri Lanka, as the sacred home of Buddhism”, that resulted in “devastating and enduring consequences”. This avoids the word genocide, but con­firms the racial, religious and cultural basis of the conflict. The Sinhalese war was not merely against the LTTE who sought to resist, but against Tamilhood which sought to exist. It was not a war against terrorists as much as a war of terror for Sinhala-Buddhist supremacy. It continues with the humiliation of the Tamils, the continuing incarceration of tens of thousands of civilians, the sequestration of combatants beyond legal rights, the continued occupation and widespread expropriation of Tamil lands by the Sri Lankan armed forces in so-called security zones, and the ever-present “white vans” of the security forces.

The report should raise the question of why the Tamil population again fled with the LTTE, as it did from Jaffna in 1995. Why retreat into a hell hole? Why not run to the Sinhalese? In the end, some did, and perhaps the LTTE would not let others leave. Or, perhaps ordinary Tamils perceived a broader dimension to the war: that it was against them, as much as the LTTE, and remembered how the bodies of many of those who had surrendered to the Sri Lankans after Jaffna fell in 1995 had been disinterred or retrieved from wells. In either case, the number of civilians who died without surrendering in the final stage of the war is not known. Estimates begin at 40,000 but the Catholic Bishop of Mannar, Rayappu Joseph, claims 150,000 civilians still remain missing.

The UN report also alleges that war crimes were committed by the LTTE in the final stages of the conflict, includ­ing firing on their own fleeing civilians, hiding behind civilians and forcibly recruiting teenagers into their ranks. These things, too, are to be condemned, along with past terrorist acts. The LTTE did intimidate, extort, steal, execute, blow up buses, cause explosions in civilian areas, and employed suicide bombers in the manner of kamikaze pilots whose targets were not restricted to combatants.

Such acts were wrong in themselves, and proved disastrous tactically. Being able to be positioned on the wrong side of “the war on terror” was the beginning of the end. It isolated the struggle for Tamil autonomy from international sympathy and lent camouflage for the terror by the Sri Lankan state. Unlike previous movements which came to now-accepted power through similar terror, such as the African National Congress and the Vietnamese communists, the LTTE was never promoted by the Russians or Chinese. Indeed, with those countries blocking inquiries into human rights abuses and with Chinese investment in Sri Lanka, it is hard to imagine a future for the investigation of accountability in Sri Lanka. Would history be different if the LTTE had opted for Mao? 

Who wants to shake his hand? 

What then should Australia do? What should our vociferous defender of civilians in Libya, Mr Kevin Rudd, do? There would be a certain logic to his argument for bombing the grandchildren of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi if he declared he did not want the citizens in Benghazi to suffer like the Tamils in Sri Lanka. But he has said not a word about the butchery in Sri Lanka, and, though prone to appear in UN settings, is not promoting that organisation’s call for an investigation of war crimes in that country. If civilians mean so much to him, why not? He could at least raise the question of providing hospitality to governments suffering “credible accusations” of war crimes and consider the propriety of Prime Minister Rajapaksa joining the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Perth in a few weeks time. Does Julia Gillard want to shake that hand? 

Dr John Whitehall wrote of his experiences in East Timor in 1975 in the October 2010 issue. An article on his and his family’s experiences during the Mexico City earthquake of 1985 and its aftermath will appear in a forthcoming issue.