Sri Lanka's Secrets: How the Rajapaksa Regime Gets Away With Murder 9781922235541, 9781922235534

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Sri L ank a’s Secre ts

An elderly woman struggles to cope with loss of relatives. First there was the shock of seeing it happen, then the agony of understanding why.

Sri Lanka’s Secrets How the Rajapaksa Regime Gets Away With Murder

Trevor Grant

© Copyright 2014 All rights reserved. Apart from any uses permitted by Australia’s Copyright Act 1968, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the copyright owners. Inquiries should be directed to the publisher. Monash University Publishing Building 4, Monash University Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia www.publishing.monash.edu http://www.publishing.monash.edu/books/sls-9781922235534.html Design: Les Thomas  Cover image: Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa at the Executive Session III at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Perth Sunday, Oct. 30, 2011. (AP Photo/Ron D’Raine, Pool). National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Author: Grant, Trevor, author. Title: Sri Lanka’s secrets: how the Rajapaksa regime gets away with murder / Trevor Grant. ISBN: 9781922235534 (paperback) Series: Investigating power series. Subjects: Rajapaksa, Mahinda, 1945 Tamil (Indic people)--Government policy--Sri Lanka. Political atrocities--Sri Lanka. Political persecution--Sri Lanka. Crimes against humanity--Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka--Politics and government--21st century. Sri Lanka--History--Civil war--1983-2009. Australia--Foreign relations--Sri Lanka Dewey Number: 323.1194811 Printed in Singapore by Markono Pte Ltd.

‘The battle of man against power is the battle of remembering against forgetting …’ Milan Kundera

A man without a home, and hope, contemplates a bleak future.

Contents Foreword...........................................................................................viii Acknowledgments.............................................................................. xii PART ONE: ETERNAL WAR Chapter One: The Dear Leader of South Asia........................................ 3 Chapter Two: Australia’s Sweet Embrace............................................. 21 Part Two The Teardrop Island Chapter Three: Love and Tragedy........................................................39 Chapter Four: A Tortured Life..............................................................49 Chapter Five: Driven by Fear...............................................................59 Part Three: Operation Extermination Chapter Six: Run for Your Life............................................................. 71 Chapter Seven: Shot like Fish in a Barrel.............................................. 87 Chapter Eight: Dancing on Tamil Graves............................................ 109 Part Four: The Living Dead Chapter Nine: Welfare, Rajapaksa-Style ............................................ 131 Chapter Ten: Children Lost............................................................... 149 Chapter Eleven: Military Meat............................................................ 165 Chapter Twelve: Left to Die............................................................... 177 Part Five: Vale Truth and Justice Chapter Thirteen: Lies, Damned Lies and Rajapaksa . . ......................... 189 Chapter Fourteen: Celebrity War Criminals......................................... 207 Chapter Fifteen: How Long Must They Suffer?. . .................................. 221

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Foreword When the Rajapaksa government forces moved in for ‘the final solution’ to the Tamil Tiger problem, they first banned all foreign journalists, human rights monitors and UN observers. Thinking themselves safe from outside scrutiny, they mass murdered tens of thousands of innocent civilians through bombardment from land and sea. But truth will out, initially captured in fleeting and grainy images on cell phone cameras, often held by perverted Sinhalese soldiers wanting a souvenir of their crimes and confident of their impunity. Some of these images are too grotesque for this book: they show summary executions, naked female bodies on the beach, violated and drowned, lines of captives beaten on the head with rifle butts, shot where they crouched in handcuffs. Here, we have photographs taken at the risk of their lives by medical and social workers (notably by the courageous ‘Maravan’) which show the everyday actuality of the so-called ‘no fire zone’ – boys hiding in bomb craters awaiting the next hit, families overcome with grief for the death of their loved ones, the barbaric conditions of ‘welfare centres’ where food and medical supplies were wilfully refused. This was the reality of the ethnic cleansing committed by the Sri Lankan Government in 2009, a form of genocide that has never been punished by the international community and which has more recently been condoned by the Australian Government. Trevor Grant’s book is important because it explains to Australians, in words and pictures worth a thousand words, why their government’s policy is not only wrong, but immoral. Mr Grant tells of the long history of persecution suffered by the Tamils but concentrates on how, in May 2009, they were lured onto thin strips of land, ‘no fire zones’, where they were promised shelter from the war. This was a trap – when the bombs did fall, there was nowhere to escape, other viii

Foreword

than to the beaches where they were shot from waiting warships. He covers these events through eyewitness accounts from victims of shellings, of torture and of rape – at the hands of soldiers who believed, correctly, that they would never face prosecution. The evidence for the killing of the rebel leader’s twelve-year-old son – photographed in captivity eating crisps one minute, then dead the next, with his chest riddled by bullets – is the clearest proof of a particularly nasty war crime. It has, of course, never been investigated by the government, one of whose ministers has been credibly accused of ordering the crime of assassinating a prisoner of war, who happened to be someone’s child. Australia stands with China, and with other such stalwarts of human rights as Cuba and Russia and Venezuela, in wanting to ignore these crimes against humanity. Only the other day Tony Abbott wrote to me, in response to criticism of Australia’s failure to sponsor the UN Human Rights Council resolution calling for an international enquiry into the atrocity, The Australian Government takes all allegations of human rights abuses and international crimes seriously. The government considers that engaging with Sri Lanka, not isolating it, is the most effective way to encourage and advance progress on human rights and accountability, the rule of rule and reconciliation.1

This is a seriously mistaken policy: if history proves anything, it shows that you do not help human rights by ‘engaging’ with (i.e. appeasing) tyrannical governments which destroy them. ‘Engaging’ by gifting gunboats to a navy that pumped shells into clusters of women and children is no way to ‘take international crimes seriously’, it is the way to make mockery of attempts to punish international crimes. 1



Letter 30 April 2013, from the Prime Minister to John Dowd, Malcolm Fraser, Gareth Evans, Owen Harries and Geoffrey Robertson.

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There has been no progress on human rights, and no accountability, in Sri Lanka – hence the Human Rights Council motion calling for an international investigation. There has been no progress – just the opposite – on the rule of law: the respected Chief Justice, Dr Bandaranayake, was unlawfully forced from office by the Rajapaksa government when one of her rulings – an entirely correct ruling striking down as unconstitutional their attempt to control the Tamil province – proved inconvenient. 2 There has been no reconciliation – by all accounts, including Trevor Grant’s, the killings, the reprisals, sexual violence and detention of journalists, and the discrimination against Tamils, continues. By ‘engaging’ with this oppression, we merely increase the likelihood of more refugees. This is not a party political point – it was Bob Carr who foolishly supported Sri Lanka as host of the Commonwealth Conference, against the wiser opposition of Canada and Mauritius. And just as there are two sides to every story, so it is right to acknowledge that the Tamil Tigers were bloody terrorists who committed war crimes against their own people in their final days. But this is the point: States have a responsibility to protect the lives of all their people. Terrorism by a few of those people provides no excuse for planned killing of vast numbers of civilians – that is state terrorism, an altogether more wicked thing. Governments may be justified in eradicating those who take up arms against them, although truly responsible governments will at the same time try to ameliorate the conditions and remove the injustices that have provoked the insurgency. If Tamils are not accorded equal rights in Sri Lanka – and they never have been – then they are entitled to autonomy. If the repression continues, they are entitled to independence. Nothing succeeds like secession. 2



See my report for the Bar Human Rights Council of England and Wales, Report on the Impeachment of Sri Lanka’s Chief Justice, February 2013, available at www.barhumanrights.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/biblio/legal_opinion.pdf.

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In the meantime, Australia’s exudations about how seriously it takes human rights abuses are hot air, when it continues to deport Tamil asylum seekers back to the country whose malevolent government has given them humanitarian reason to flee from persecution. ‘Stop the boats’ may be a siren slogan for Australian politicians, but if it prevents the government from demanding accountability for crimes against humanity, then there will be a lot more boats in future. Geoffrey Robertson QC Doughty Street Chambers, 28 May 2014

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Acknowledgments I owe a significant debt of gratitude to the many brave Tamil photo-journalists and photographers, amateur and professional, who have contributed so much to this book. Every one of them deserves to be acknowledged personally and effusively. Sadly, though, it cannot be done. Even though the guns were finally silenced on May 18, 2009, the war continues for Tamils in Sri Lanka. Which means the people who took so many of the images that appear in this book, and survived the unrelenting bombing and shelling of innocents to get their visual proof of war crimes to the world, are unable to reveal themselves five years later. Their fear of personal exposure says so much about the island nation of Sri Lanka in 2014, a place where torture, disappearances, rapes, jailings and harassment remain a fact of life for the minority Tamil population. Any public display of their work must be done anonymously, for they know that those who have documented the truth of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s brutal regime will suffer. And even if they are physically out of reach of the khaki-clad torturers, rapists and murderers, they know that if they are identified in any way it will be their families who will become the victims. Many of the images you see here are testimony to a remarkable professionalism and courage in the face of a systematic killing machine that overwhelmed the north-east of the country, and all who were unfortunate enough to be trapped there by government deceit. Some of the photographers perished, along with an estimated 70,000 civilians; others managed to escape to foreign countries while some are living in hiding, and poverty, in Sri Lanka. One is Maravan,3 a Tamil social worker who spent the final months of the war amid the carnage of the No Fire Zones. He is now a refugee in Australia. He brought a large collection

3

A pseudonym to protect his identity.

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of his own photographs, and those of others when he fled torture in 2012. There are also many images taken by doctors and medical staff as they attended the wounded and dying while shells and bombs rained down on their hospitals. It is an archive that becomes increasingly important as the months and years pass because its’ raw, graphic, shocking content refuses to allow the perpetrators of these crimes to re-write history. No matter how voluble and manic they may be in their attempts to do so, the world now has all the evidence it needs to judge the truth of what happened, and is happening, in Sri Lanka. Scores of others have played their part in telling this story; smuggling out photos and video, taking risks to acquire revealing film footage and stills taken by trophy-hunting Sri Lankan soldiers. Many victims have willingly put themselves through psychological terror in order to relate their experiences of torture and rape, and the death of family members, to journalists and authors, such as me. Then there was the assistance and guidance I received from the respected Norwegian filmmaker, Beate Arnestad, whose work has played an influential role in laying bare the many crimes of the Sri Lankan regime, particularly her documentary ‘Silenced Voices’ which reveals the country’s brutal policy of media suppression. The exiled Sinhalese journalist, Bashana Abeywardane, from Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, is another who knows all about this policy from first-hand experience. His group has done so much to expose the wider story of Tamil oppression and genocide, most notably through the revelations contained in the awardwinning UK documentary, No Fire Zone. For his help, I am grateful. These are the witnesses that the Sri Lankan Government feared so much, when it pushed hard to exclude the outside world from its final victory thrust against the Tamil Tigers. Thanks to them, the full horror of Rajapaksa’s ‘war without witness’ is now exposed for all to see, ensuring that the quest for truth and justice – critical precursors to reconciliation – will one day be successful. Trevor Grant, February 2014 xiii

PART ONE

ETERNAL WAR

Left: A woman desperately seeks shelter for her child.

Chapter One: The Dear Leader of South Asia

Despots and dictators have long been alert to the political possibilities of the sporting field. When Generalissimo Francisco Franco wanted to rally the Spanish population in the 1930s, he changed the famous red colours of the national football team to fascist blue and ordered specific chants to ring around the stadiums during matches. Naturally, one was ‘Viva Franco’. His Italian counterpart, Benito Mussolini, built lavish new stadiums, put his name on one of them and ensured the players lined up to give the fascist salute before each game. He was said to have ‘encouraged’ referees to guarantee Italy’s victory in the 1934 World Cup, and his own prestige. Adolf Hitler enlisted the boss of the US Olympic Committee, and fascist sympathiser, Avery Brundage, to bring the 1936 Games to Berlin to showcase the Nazi theory of Aryan superiority, only to have it famously blown apart by black American Jesse Owens’ haul of four gold medals. Uganda’s Big Daddy in the 1970s, Idi Amin, was more than a sideline urger. He was his country’s light heavyweight boxing champion before moving on to the presidency and the slaughter of more than 350,000 of his own people. Saddam Hussein appointed his unbalanced, sports-mad eldest son, Uday, as head of Iraq’s Olympic Committee and allowed him to jail and torture members of the national soccer team when it lost. In 2014, Russian president Vladimir Putin had to back away from putting gay Olympians behind bars, so as to allow the Sochi Winter Games to boost, not threaten, his international image, which he loves to enhance by stripping to the waist for the cameras to show off the body said to be honed by years of judo. Left: Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa at the 2011 CHOGM event in Perth.

SRI LANK A’S SECRETS

It works domestically, as well, as a neat diversion from the totalitarian politics of this former KGB boss. Thus, it is in keeping with a long tradition that the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, a man accused of war crimes and of turning his country into a brutal dictatorship, sees the national obsession with cricket as the ideal vehicle to launder his blood-drenched image. He, too, built a stadium for a World Cup – in cricket, in 2011 – adorned it with his own name and appointed the army to run it. He, too, meddles with the running of the national team. In 2010, during the Sri Lankan tour of England, he ordered former captain Sanath Jayasuriya to be selected in two matches. Jayasuriya might have been 41, and retired for three years, but there was a more important consideration here for Rajapaksa. Jayasuriya had been elected in 2010 as one of his party’s new MPs. What’s the use of a national cricket team if it can’t be used for a bit of promotion? British newspapers were taken aback, describing this shameless exercise in political marketing as a ‘Sri Lankan scandal’ and ‘a disgrace’.4 Such criticism, though, fails to penetrate the impervious hide of the Sri Lankan president, a man facing rather more serious charges than fiddling with the selection of a cricket team. Rajapaksa’s need for a makeover has become more pressing as the world begins to comprehend the full extent of the crimes committed as his military forces, in May 2009, pushed towards final victory in a civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that had lasted for the best part of thirty years. This rebel group, which became renowned for its ruthlessness in a bid to restore the homeland taken from the minority Tamils when the British occupiers unified the island in the nineteenth century, was the product of two decades of repression by the majority Sinhalese rulers after the British departed in 1948.

4

The Guardian, June 21, 2011.

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The conflict, which began in 1983, was punctuated by several peace initiatives. However, it reignited in 2006 after the collapse of a four-year ceasefire and gradually degenerated into one of the greatest atrocities in modern times. It has been described as a ‘war without witness’ after the remaining United Nations’ aid workers departed hastily in late 2008 when Rajapaksa threatened them by declaring that he could no longer guarantee their safety. A few well-timed artillery salvos next to UN camps amplified the message. Free of independent observers and armed to the teeth with everything from white phosphorous to cluster bombs, he was able to unleash his genocidal military force upon an unsuspecting Tamil population.5 According to a UN-commissioned report, this cherished victory came at the hideous cost of between 40,000 and 70,000 innocent Tamil lives as the government forces eagerly leapt over the battlefield dividing line known as the Geneva Convention.6 Once across this last moral barrier, there was no turning back. Empowered by the government’s unambiguous ‘whatever-ittakes’ philosophy, and convinced of their immunity from oversight and sanction, they engaged in a criminal, pre-meditated slaughter of Tamil civilians, with the full encouragement and endorsement of Rajapaksa and his brother, Gotabaya, an ex-army commander who had slipped comfortably into the role of ruthless overseer of military operations, as defence secretary. However, despite the Sri Lankan Government’s successful attempts to keep the major world media outlets, along with freelance journalists and photographers, at bay, a good deal of evidence emerged from the smoke and gore of the killing fields and internment camps of the north. The gut-wrenching expose Sri Lanka’s Killings Fields, produced by award-winning UK documentary-maker, Callum McCrae, used secretly filmed video as well as a lot of random mobile 5



6



Frances Harrison, Still Counting The Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Hidden War, Portobello Books, 2012. BBC News report, April 26, 2012. UN Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts report, March 2011.

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phone footage. It created shock waves around the world when it aired on the UK television station, Channel 4, in 2011 and then on Australia’s longest-running and most respected current affairs program, Four Corners. The Norwegian journalist and film-maker Beate Arnstead made the highly acclaimed Silenced Voices, documenting much of the genocide as well as the murders of many truthseeking journalists. McCrae produced another TV documentary, No Fire Zone, which had a similarly stunning effect when it was released in 2013. It revealed, among the countless atrocities committed, and often filmed, by trophy-hunting soldiers, strong evidence of the pre-meditated murder of Balachandran, the twelve-year-old son of the LTTE leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran. It all meant that as the president attempted to bathe in the domestic post-war glory provided by a jubilant Sinhalese populace in the capital, Colombo, and the southern and central parts of the country, he was kept constantly on the defensive by mounting international concern about the annihilation. By 2011, he had been officially outed as an accused war criminal. Rajapaksa is a politician who believes that the bigger the lie the better chance it has of being swallowed. As the war pushed towards its horrendous conclusion, and thousands of dead Tamils littered the smouldering, scorched landscape of the No Fire Zones into which they had been herded by government forces, he kept on saying his government had a ‘zero civilian casualty’ policy and was running a ‘humanitarian operation’. By 2011, the evidence was too obvious for even a man as brazen as Rajapaksa to continue making this claim. He switched tack, saying his soldiers went into battle carrying a gun in one hand and a human rights charter in the other.7 However, a special UN investigation team appointed by the UN secretary-general, Ban Kimoon, didn’t think so. In March 2011 it announced that Rajapaksa and his government should

7

BBC News Report, May 27, 2011.

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Chapter One: The Dear Leader of South Asia

be investigated for war crimes and crimes against humanity, charges also levelled at the leaders of the Tamil Tigers, all of whom had either been wiped out in those final days of war, or brutally executed after they had wrongly assumed that the act of surrender would save their lives. To a man whose every word and action is governed by the enhanced superiority complex of Sinhalese chauvinism, the suggestion that he should have to answer to anyone, least of all, meddling foreign investigators, for seeing off the Tamil Tigers, was an outrageous affront to be challenged and resisted at every turn. That tens of thousands of innocent civilians were deliberately murdered in the process was immaterial, at least to him and his partners-in-crime. In 2009, his foreign secretary, Dr Palitha Kohona, gave voice to the regime’s attitude when he said that the victors were never investigated for war crimes. An Australian citizen and former Australian Government official, Dr Kohona has also been accused of war crimes over his role in the machine-gun deaths of a group of surrendering Tamil Tigers on May 18, 2009.8 The Sinhalese triumphalism in the wake of the final day of the war became the platform from which Rajapaksa was able to launch his turbo-charged campaign to crush every last vestige of Tamil pride and resistance. There would be no respite. The deliberate murder of tens of thousands of Tamil civilians on a finger of sandy beach in the north-east of the country pegged out the pathway. He led his country even deeper into the dark recesses of genocide and ethniccleansing. Instead of demobilising the fighting forces at the end of the war, he increased the size of the army, flooding the traditional Tamil areas in the north-east with military installations and personnel. Land seizures for army and navy bases, military housing and Sinhalese settlers, became commonplace.

8

Sydney Morning Herald, April 4, 2011.

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Once the occupation was secured, the jackboot and M16 rifle became the feared symbols of authority for all Tamils. The military was afforded civilian police powers, and a degree of impunity that brought all kinds of abuses, from torture and rape to arrest and harassment. Women live under the constant threat of rape and sexual assault. In November 2013, while on a brief trip to Sri Lanka, the Australian senator Lee Rhiannon was arrested and forced to leave the country after meeting with a group of activists. One of them was a lawyer who showed her evidence of text messages sent by an army commander in the north to Tamil women. ‘The women were being used to service these army people. In some cases the women are raped, in other cases the term they use is “comfort women”. Personally, I call that rape. This major-general sends the texts to the women when he wants to see them’.9 No civil Sri Lankan institution is free of the military, which has quickly asserted itself as the new power elite. It runs infrastructure projects and operates many businesses, including hotels, resorts and restaurants. University orientation week takes on a whole new meaning, with new students forced to complete three weeks of military training and indoctrination at army bases. These sessions include the singing of ‘victory songs’ in Sinhala and vows of unwavering allegiance to the motherland. Army officers are regular visitors to junior schools, where children are required to bow to them when they appear in classrooms. No Tamil civil gathering in the north-east, not even a family birthday party, is permitted without army permission. Memorials for Tamil war dead are banned. In 2012, four students at Jaffna University were sent to military rehabilitation camps for lighting candles in their dormitory as a mark of respect for Tamils killed in the war. Not even Sinhalese civilians are safe from the military excesses. In August 2013 villagers in Weliweriya, on the outskirts of Colombo, had gathered to protest peacefully outside a factory

9

Interview with the author, November 2013.

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Chapter One: The Dear Leader of South Asia

that was polluting their water supply. Without warning, they were attacked by rampaging armed soldiers, who shot and killed three teenagers and injured at least 40 other villagers. The dead youths had fled into a nearby church, where, it was reported, the soldiers pointed their guns at the mother superior, demanding to know their whereabouts. One of the protesters told the local media: ‘Today for the first time we understand what the suffering of the Tamils must have been. If they can kill people asking for water – the same people who supported and respected them – we can only imagine their conduct during the war in the north’.10 Although this assessment may have jolted Sinhalese sensibilities, the vast bulk of its people remain in denial about the conduct of the military during the war. At home, Rajapaksa sees the international condemnation more as a help than a hindrance to his relentless pursuit of unimpeachable authority. It allows this cunning autocrat to portray himself, and the country, as victims of a foreign conspiracy attempting to usurp Sri Lankan independence, and deny them their due rewards as victors in war. In 2013, the UN Human Rights Commissioner, Navi Pillay, denounced the lack of human rights in the country after a visit. Rajapaksa’s reaction was a predictable play to the home audience. ‘This is propaganda against Sri Lanka, so please compare with other countries. Don’t isolate a small country like Sri Lanka and try to bully Sri Lanka’.11 Invoking the colonial bogeyman works like a charm every time. It also brings a raft of bonuses, not least virtual carte blanche to do as he pleases when it comes to consolidating his family power, wealth and influence. Indeed, he and his three brothers, Gotabaya, Basil and Chamal, control an estimated 80 percent of the country’s budget12 and in 2010 were effectively in control of at least ninety-four state institutions.13 12 13 10 11

Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, ‘We asked for water tanks, they sent us war tanks’, August 3, 2013. Al Jazeera interview, September 28, 2013. Global Mail, September 5, 2013. Sunday Leader, May 8, 2010.

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The ever-increasing entrenchment of Rajapaksa and his Sinhalese Buddhist chauvinist values is directly proportional to the decimation of Tamil rights and identity. The lawyer who gave us the word ‘genocide’ and helped draft the Genocide Convention after World War Two, a Polish Jew named Raphael Lemkin, wrote that genocide was ‘the destruction of the national identity of the oppressed group (and) the imposition of the national identity of the oppressor’. It is accompanied by a fanatical self-righteousness, elements that are all too obvious in Rajapaksa’s Sri Lanka. The stench of the master race philosophy permeates the language of government. A 2013 report in a pro-government website, ColomboPage, details a direct order from Rajapaksa to the Minister of Education to ‘regulate the activities’ of international schools and introduce three new compulsory subjects, ‘history, religion and mother language’ for all students. ‘The president has remarked that having a good knowledge in the country’s history and the civilization will help mould a patriotic future generation that loves the motherland’, said the report.14 A day after the last shot was fired in the war, in May 2009, Rajapaksa opened parliament in Colombo with a speech that left no doubt about the bleak future for the struggle for Tamil rights and freedom of expression. We have removed the word minorities from our vocabulary three years ago. No longer are the Tamils, Muslims, Burghers, Malays and any others, minorities. There are only two peoples in this country. One is the people that love this country. The other comprises the small groups that have no love for the land of their birth. Those who do not love the country are now a lesser group.15 14

ColomboPage, May 9, 2013. Sunday Leader, May 24, 2009.

15

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Rajapaksa did not invent this merciless stance on Tamil rights. He’s simply the most successful at it, in a long line of Sinhalese rulers whose desire to contain and destroy the Tamil identity and culture has known no bounds. When the British departed the country in 1948, leaving the Sinhalese majority with un­ fettered constitutional power, any hope of a shared, peaceful transition to independence also took flight. The Sinhalese leadership immediately disenfranchised one million Tamils and stripped them of citizenship. Tamil voting power subsided from 33 percent to 20 percent, rendering it ineffective and unable to block the rampant Sinhalese majority. In 1956 this majority immediately replaced English with Sinhala as the official language for public and government institutions, effectively destroying the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of well-educated Tamils. In 1971, a new policy of ‘standardisation’ in universities was introduced to push Sinhalese students ahead of Tamils, who had traditionally been well-represented in higher education. The entrance exam pass marks for Tamils were made higher than for Sinhalese. For example, Tamils had to get 250 out of 400 to get into medicine, while Sinhalese needed only 229. Tamil representation at university dived from 27 percent to seven percent within three years. Suddenly there were thousands of unemployed, unfulfilled, angry young Tamils ripe for radicalisation. More than two decades of non-violent protest counted for nothing. Humiliation and despair took root in the Tamil psyche. By 1981, the year the Sinhalese police helped burn down the historic Jaffna library, resulting in the loss of precious ancient Tamil cultural artefacts and 95,000 books, young Tamil men had formed a number of resistance groups, the most attractive and most successful of which proved to be the LTTE. Two years later, there was no turning back. After twenty years of anti-Tamil pogroms, often aided and abetted by government military and police, and the Black July pogrom of 1983, in 11

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which at least 3000 Tamils were killed, many burned alive in the streets surrounded by singing, dancing Sinhalese, the Tamil Tigers gained unstoppable impetus in their own community. Thus began a brutal war that ended twenty-six years later in a small, non-descript Tamil village on a skinny peninsula between the sea and a lagoon. Most Tamils would have understood the dominant Sinhalese mentality well enough to know that defeat would result in hardship and suffering. However, it would have been difficult to envisage the plunge into the forbidding darkness of carefully programmed genocide and ethnic cleansing that has accompanied Rajapaksa’s rise from political foot soldier to unassailable lord and master of all he sees and covets. This dramatic political and social deterioration would not have been possible in a former island colony of twenty-one million people without the support of the global powers that keep small nations in check, like so many dogs on a chain. Down through the years, Sri Lanka’s greatest attraction to these empire-builders has been the deep water port of Trincomalee on the east coast, described in the early nineteenth century by Britain’s Lord Nelson as the world’s finest harbour. Some 150 years later, the Americans thought so too, and used it regularly from the 1950s onwards. The strategic value of Sri Lanka lies in its geographical position in the major Indian Ocean shipping lane. Now this worth to foreign power and capital is enhanced as China takes a more outwardly aggressive position in the Indian Ocean and the US counters by expanding its presence in the Asia-Pacific region. This was the deal. China needed bases. Sri Lanka needed money and weapons to follow through on its war strategy, especially after the US cut back direct military aid in 2007 in order to be seen at least to be concerned about increasing human rights abuses in the country. 12

Chapter One: The Dear Leader of South Asia

So China suddenly became Rajapaksa’s biggest donor, upping aid to almost $US1 billion. He was suddenly flush with cash and able to acquire all the sophisticated weaponry he needed. The added Chinese sweetener of six F7 fighter jets completed a package that would eventually obliterate vast swathes of the Tamil population.16 The quid pro quo came in the form of permission to build a massive port in Rajapaksa’s sleepy home town in the south to accommodate Chinese naval ships and aircraft carriers, thus securing a critical base in its ‘string-of-pearls’ strategy that runs across the Indian Ocean, from Pakistan to Burma. Most importantly, once the military hardware had done the job to finish the war, China used the threat of veto to block UN Security Council debate, and thus any effective action or sanction, over the war crimes it had helped Rajapaksa to commit. As for the Americans, they needed to ensure Rajapaksa didn’t slip too far into the arms of the Chinese, so, despite the obligation to be seen to disapprove of a genocidal murderer, they have done nothing material to discourage him. Meanwhile, Rajapaksa sits back stroking the gold charm he often holds in the palm of his left hand, counting the millions he’s able to skim off the top of new business deals with China, and rejoicing in the knowledge that these two powers, no matter how far he went in his bid to destroy the Tamils, will always work to prevent his war crimes from reaching the only places that can lead to justice, and his downfall – the UN Security Council and the International Criminal Court.17 American complicity in Sri Lankan war crimes and genocide is an uncomfortable truth for those who believe that the US is the leader of the free world. What is all the more frightening Larry Marshall, Inside Story, November 13, 2009. Referral to the ICC generally comes from UN Security Council or a 1998 Rome Statute signatory nation. The ICC prosecutor can also refer a case.

16 17

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is that so many nations in a position to do something about this travesty in Sri Lanka are lining up to give Rajapaksa a rails run to the finish line. The US, the UK, India and Australia all have their own reasons, none of which justify their appalling duplicity and inaction. Britain, which, along with the US, was found by the Rome-based Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal in 2014, to be complicit in a genocide perpetrated by successive Sri Lankan governments, mouths strong words of condemnation of Rajapaksa once in a blue moon and then spends the rest of the year retreating to its default position of approval. India does the same. Mindful of its 60 million Tamils in the state of Tamil Nadu, and the potential for retribution at the polls, the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, is occasionally ready to utter an admonishment. However, as stated by the tribunal of highly credentialed lawyers, judges and human rights advocates, including a former assistant UN secretary-general, there can be little doubt about the complicity of the nation that once trained and housed Tamil Tiger fighters in their formative years and, later, under the guise of peace-keepers on the island, swapped sides and engaged in the mass slaughter of Tamils. In the late 1980s India intervened against the LTTE in order to gain control over the Tamil population, as a strategic asset, an action that resulted in the deaths of 12,000. In the 1990s India played the role of a junior partner in a strategic alliance with the US, and has continued to subordinate its strategic policy approach towards Sri Lanka under the US war paradigm.18

Australia’s position is just as reprehensible, designed as it is to facilitate the cynical domestic political objective of ending the flow of Tamil asylum seekers that have been exiting Sri Lanka in droves, driven by the human instinct for survival. When confronted with the undeniable evidence of torture, persecution and war crimes, Australia’s stock response has been to look 18

Report by Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, sitting in Bremen, Germany, January 2014.

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the other way, and praise the perpetrators. The unashamed immorality of Australia and these other governments that engage in double-speak about these crimes, feeds into the most pressing problem for those attempting to stop an accused war criminal from completing a genocide – a lack of awareness, and thus interest, in the wider world. The job of raising awareness is left to the likes of the Australian senator Lee Rhiannon, who ventured into the (Sinhalese) lion’s den in November 2013, equipped with a governmentapproved visa, only to be tracked and arrested in Colombo, and promptly cast out, for daring to meet with people trying to resist the totalitarian creep in their society. It was distressing to be denied one’s liberty but I was able to come back to Australia. The people I was meeting with were very distressed when the Immigration officials came and demanded an identity card. The people were very worried about their situation. It really rammed home to me the problems in their country about legal and human rights. I saw huge tracts of land that had been taken over by the army. [We] were given reports about the rape of women. A Catholic priest told us of a recent case of Tamil children being taken away from their families. The government invasion of our meeting came on top of much evidence we had seen about attacks on media outlets. One newspaper office we visited in the north of the island had bullet holes still in the wall. We saw photographs of the journalists who had been shot. We saw the printing presses with bullets in them, computers with bullets in them. An extraordinary situation, much worse than I realised.19

Living and working as a truth-seeking journalist in Sri Lanka has long been a death-defying occupation, a fact the former editor-in-chief of the Sunday Leader, Frederica Jansz, knows only too well. After her predecessor was murdered while on his way to work in 2009, she sensed 19

Interview with the author, November 2013.

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things were heading in the same direction for her the moment she received a death threat in 2011 from the president’s volatile brother, Gotabaya. After fleeing the country soon after, she gave a clue to the mentality that exists within government towards the media. One story that comes to mind immediately is one I carried on the front page in 2011, where I said that a foreign government, namely China, had given a grant to the president of as much as $US9 million. It is the first time, I think, in the whole history of Sri Lanka that a foreign government has given a head of state such huge sums of money to be used at his discretion. We ran this story, we had proof. The president went absolutely berserk. He called the chairman of the Sunday Leader, he screamed at him, threatened him, too. Two days later posters were printed calling the Sunday Leader and its journalists ‘traitors’. These posters came up all outside the office. We paid a price. We always have.20

As did the chief news editor of the Jaffna-based newspaper Uthayan, Gnanasundaram Kuganathan, in July 2011 while walking home from his office. ‘Men with iron rods attacked him. He almost died’.21 Rajapaksa cannot tolerate an inquiring media, because he has so much to hide. At every turning, in every nook and cranny of communal life, especially in the north, where the military brutalises the people on a daily basis, there are stories of terror and abject misery. Peter Arndt, the Brisbane-based executive officer of the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission, discovered this bleak truth during a visit to Vavuniya, in the heart of the Tamil homeland, in September 2013. His group met with a dozen women, all of whom were either the wives or mothers of Tamil men who were jailed, tortured, and in some cases killed. Interview, Al Jazeera, January 15, 2013. Ibid.

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The stories were depressingly the same. The men were questioned by authorities who were trying to get them to admit an association with the Tamil Tigers. There was often torture involved. Characteristically, the stories we got were that the men were made to kneel, their legs were trampled on and they were beaten. Ethnic-cleansing and genocide were words I heard from the mouths of the Tamil people there. You know it’s true when you see the group of women I met; when you learn how the authorities were continually taking in men, in particular, with scant or no evidence, detaining them, separating them from their wives and families; you know it when you see the military authorities moving into that territory and marginalising the Tamil people in every way they can economically. Many people are not able to resume their normal occupations; the army and navy are taking away all the economic opportunities. People who speak out are always in difficulty. We were meant to meet a Jesuit priest there. He works with families of the forcibly disappeared and was one of two Catholic human rights workers who met with Navi Pillay on her trip just before we arrived. After the visit, the authorities questioned him. He’s been constantly threatened and followed ever since. Normally, he would have come to our gathering to talk about the situation. But we were told he simply doesn’t come to those meetings because he would bring the authorities with him. They follow him everywhere.

If there were any doubts left in Arndt’s mind about the human cost of Sri Lankan government policy towards Tamils, they were dispelled when he made a visit to the homes of two victims. I’ll never forget these two women. One of them had moved with her husband and son from Jaffna to Vavuniya so the son could study at a technical college. They had invested all their hopes in him. The husband was too sick to work. The son’s future income was everything to them. One day he was taken into custody. When he and others were going to be moved to 17

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a jail down south, well away from their families, the prisoners protested. They were severely beaten. He died a few days later. His legs were broken and his body bruised from being beaten with chains. They even tried to force his mother to sign a letter saying he died of a heart attack. Today she is filled with anger and sadness, and hopelessness. She took us back to her very simple home, a one-room mud-brick house with coconut thatching, about the size of a normal Australian bedroom; no electricity, holes in the roof. There was a little shrine in that one room to her son who was gone, and with him their hope of any future gone, replaced by a life of misery and poverty. The other woman was without her husband, who had been detained for some time. She had a child-like voice and cried all the time, as did the other women when they told their stories. I remember when we had finished lunch with them and they were going, this woman came back to say thank-you. There was just so much emptiness in her gentle voice as she said goodbye. I can never forget that sound; how heart-broken and desolate she felt …22

Memory is always the most critical weapon in the fight against genocide, and this is why the Sri Lankan Government expends so much energy trying to obfuscate, distort, misrepresent, ignore or erase the shocking reality of the programmed terror that fills the lives of Tamils. No aspect of daily life escapes the reach of the smothering hand of the Rajapaksa regime, which, since he assumed power in 2005, has been built on the cult of personality and nationalist ideals that acknowledge only two strains of public thought: patriotism or treachery. Opposition parties have been neutered, the constitution has become a tool of political convenience, with previous limits on presidential terms scrapped, the president granting himself immunity from Interview with the author, October 2013.

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prosecution, the judiciary losing all pretense of separation from government, not least through the cavalier, illegal ousting of the chief justice in 2013, and the civil police being effectively absorbed into the military, under direct control of the defence secretary and presidential sibling. The government’s economic manifesto bears the name of the president, not the country – ‘Mahinda Chintana’ – and is officially promoted as one man’s ‘Vision of The Future’. A clumsily staged photograph of the dear leader showing the way to a young schoolgirl completes the image of the exalted visionary guiding his country to prosperity and prestige. Even the national sporting obsession is not immune. In fact, as mentioned earlier, there’s no better way for a tyrant to enlist some serious image enhancement. As the president reclined in the plush red leather seats, and surveyed the action at the shiny, brand-new ‘Mahinda Rajapaksa’ stadium in the opening match of the 2011 World Cup, he was the perfect picture of a man at peace with his surroundings, just as Franco and Mussolini were, in another time in stadiums they built to glorify themselves and their ideals. There is, of course, always going to be resistance but it’s easily dealt with. When India beat Sri Lanka in the Mumbai final of this World Cup – so vigorously promoted as a symbol of national pride, especially by the president – there were many disaffected Tamils in Jaffna who didn’t feel the same way. Instead, they lit fire-crackers to celebrate the defeat of the team that plays under the banner of the Sinhalese lion. Rajapaksa’s goons were quickly on the scene with their guns and iron bars, to put the recalcitrant youths in their place. Franco and Mussolini would have been proud of him.

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Chapter Two: Australia’s Sweet Embrace

It was the sweetest embrace. Radiating admiration for the imposing, stiff-backed ex-navy gentleman with the grey beard, the Australian MP advances across the room and greets him as if he was family. When British film-maker, Callum McCrae, watched this display of mutual bonhomie between the Federal member for the Victorian country seat of Murray, Dr Sharman Stone, and the Sri Lankan High Commissioner to Australia, Admiral Thisara Samarasinghe, at a function in Canberra in June 2013, he thought it was a little over the top. McCrae was in Australia as part of a world tour, showing his new documentary, No Fire Zone, which reveals in gruesome detail the Sri Lankan military’s obliteration of tens of thousands of innocent Tamil civilians huddled on a sliver of yellow, sandy beach in the north of the country in the last days of the country’s twenty-six-year civil war, in May 2009. It was his second documentary about this tragic event which has brought accusations of war crimes against the Sri Lankan Government and military. Thus, he had become a man despised by the Sri Lankan Government and its supporters, all of whom have mastered the art of combative denial and diversion whenever confronted with unpleasant facts. So it occurred to McCrae that Stone’s greeting of Samarasinghe, a former Sri Lankan naval commander also accused of war crimes for his part in the massacre, was a show of loyalty, partly for his benefit, letting him know that the Sri Lankan Government had friends in high places in Left: Mahinda Rajapaksa and Tony Abbott at CHOGM, Colombo, 2013.

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Australia and that he could keep producing his documentaries until he ran out of celluloid, but they won’t be changing their cozy little relationship any time soon. Stone’s affection for the Sri Lankan regime is well-documented through her parliamentary study trips to the Tasmania-sized island nation of 21 million people, about 75 percent of whom are Sinhalese and about 18 percent Tamil. In 2011, she gushed in a Sri Lankan press conference about seeing shoeless Tamil children going to schools under leaky thatched roofs, and noted how wonderful it was that Australian aid money was being used to help them get an education. She also opined that Tamils living in Australia – those who painted a picture of repression and persecution in the country – had been away too long and had lost touch with the reality of a country on the move. But what of those stories that relatives of Tamil Australians, as well as so many respected international agencies, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, keep relaying to the outside world? Of white-van disappearances, of torture chambers where men and women are raped and murdered, of military takeovers of land and business, of government-backed religious persecution, of politicians being attacked? Of a list of 146,000 missing Tamils, and of UN resolutions demanding independent investigations of war crimes? Dr Stone, from nononsense farming stock in central Victoria, had a straight-forward answer. Get over it. ‘The country as a whole needs to put the conflict behind’, she said.23 The Sri Lanka Stone chooses to see is the one most Australian politicians from the major parties, including past and present Prime Ministers, choose to see. A plucky little nation picking itself up and dusting itself off after three decades of war. A country that is literally building its way back to glowing economic health with airports, highways, schools, hospitals, beach resorts and cricket stadiums. A country that is running at 22 percent growth in the war-ravaged north 23

Dr Sharman Stone in an interview with the Sri Lankan Sunday Observer, June 12, 2011.

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and, incredibly, is able to hold sway on the international stage, playing off powerhouse nations, such as the US, India and China, against each other while they engage in their geo-political manoeuvrings for supremacy in the Asia-Pacific region. Yet, this same country has a dirty little secret, which it cannot hide, no matter how much cover, and co-operation, it might get from nations motivated by self-interest. It is the emerging story of genocide and ethnic-cleansing which continues to seep out from the anonymous homes of a grieving Tamil populace and the dark, dank chambers of horror that are hidden away in its rehabilitation camps, military bases, civilian jails and police stations. The screams from the torture sessions in these places should be ringing around the world, yet all we have heard from most world leaders has been the occasional gentle admonishment at the UN. The tendency for some governments to remain dismissive of the most obvious human rights’ abuses began to change at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting (CHOGM) in Colombo in November 2013. The UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, pointedly em­bar­ rassed his host, president Mahinda Rajapaksa, by visiting the north to hear heart-wrenching stories from Tamil villagers living under military occupation four years after the war. He then issued a stinging rebuke of the country’s human rights record and demanded an independent inquiry into war crimes, which was duly launched by the UN Human Rights Council four months later. The Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, boycotted the meeting, mainly perhaps because of a fear of a backlash in the state of Tamil Nadu, home to 60 million Tamils, at an upcoming election. Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, also refused to go. We were left in no doubt why. His foreign minister, John Baird, described the decision to hold CHOGM in Colombo as ‘accommodating evil’. 24 Canada has a large, politically active 24

ABC News report, April 28, 2013.

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Tamil immigrant population but to believe it was acting purely from self-interest disregards the choice of language and the strength of its objection, which included a decision to cancel $10 million annual funding it provides to the Commonwealth. There could also be no doubt about the motives of Australia. Tony Abbott was content to remain isolated at CHOGM in his unequivocal public support of Rajapaksa, going so far as to excuse torture in certain circumstances, a first for an Australian Prime Minister. Speaking of claims that torture was widely used in the country, Abbott made the astonishing statement that while his government deplores the use of torture ‘sometimes in difficult circumstances difficult things happen’. Australia’s contrasting position could not have been more stark. While a conservative British Prime Minister was imploring Sri Lanka to stop torturing its citizens, his political counterpart from Australia was condoning it. Abbott also announced Australia was gifting two former customs boats to Rajapaksa’s navy, which would be used to try to stop persecuted Tamils, many of whom have been tortured, from fleeing the country. Australia’s isolation was completed in March 2014, when it refused to join traditional allies such as the US, UK and Canada in supporting the successful UN resolution for a Sri Lankan war crimes’ investigation and instead chose to align itself with the likes of Russia and China, who voted against it. Like its predecessor, this new Australian Government was prepared to do whatever was required to achieve the singular objective of reducing the flow of asylum seekers washing up on Australian shores in leaky boats. If it meant shedding core values for a coat of convenience, so be it. At one level, the idea of engaging with governments credibly accused of murdering tens of thousands of its own people and terrorising and persecuting thousands more is abhorrent to most Australian politicians. But they rarely operate at such principled levels. Instead, overwhelmed by a culture that regards honesty and integrity as hindrances to be overcome, they choose the 24

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twists and turns of the low road, knowing that it’s the swiftest, if not the most noble, route to a political outcome. Thus, a single domestic issue, deliberately over-heated for its political worth, has been allowed to swamp moral, ethical and legal considerations. The mantra of stopping boats had become so shrill that the anguished cries of torture victims are all but inaudible across the land of the fair go. It should be a discomforting position for a democracy with a record of humanitarian leadership –Australia helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the UN in 1948 and, three years later, became the sixth of the 147 countries to ratify the UN Refugee Convention. Maybe this is why every Australian politician who has visited Sri Lanka since the bombs stopped falling on May 18, 2009, has carefully avoided the grubby truth of the place. Wilful blindness often becomes the only defence against a nagging conscience. Bi-partisanship in the Australian parliament knows no bounds when it comes to the Sri Lankan Government. In December 2012, the usual grim countenance of the-then Australian Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, was nowhere to be seen during a visit to Colombo, as he eagerly embraced the spirit of engagement with the Rajapaksa regime, an all-powerful clan which micro-manages, at great personal benefit, the political and economic life of the country, through its vast web of family ties. When asked in several interviews during his Colombo trip if Sri Lanka was a safe country to return Tamil refugees from Australia, he said he was thoroughly satisfied it was and, to boot, he gave human rights advocates a verbal clip around the ears for getting all steamed up about a non-existent issue. Six weeks earlier, a representative of Carr’s foreign affairs department had been present at the Universal Periodic Review hearing at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. It is a forum in which all member nations of the UN have their human rights records examined by fellow-members. 25

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This was Sri Lanka’s day in the dock, and it was confronted with no less than 210 demands – or ‘recommendations’ in UN-speak – from ninety-nine countries to correct human rights abuses in the country. It brazenly rejected 100 of them, one of which came from the Australian delegate, asking that ‘it take action to reduce and eliminate all cases of abuse, torture’ as well as all cases of ‘abductions and disappearances’. So, in Geneva, Australia says as sharply and directly as you could possibly expect in a diplomatic forum that Sri Lanka is torturing and disappearing its citizens. Six weeks later in Colombo, it’s saying the opposite. Later, Carr went further, saying he’d seen no evidence returned asylum seekers were suffering any discrimination, let alone torture. Indeed, he’d not heard a peep from anyone about it. Hadn’t heard of a 2012 Human Rights Watch report that had contained graphic details of rape and torture of asylum-seekers deported from the UK? Apparently not. His department heads said they knew nothing of the widely published report, let alone having read it. Striding through this maze of wilful ignorance and duplicity with a Machiavellian disregard for inconvenient fact, no doubt learned from a lifetime engaging in the factional politics of the New South Wales Labor Party, Carr waved off questions asked of him in an Australian Senate estimates’ hearing on these conflicting statements. They were two separate issues, he said, with blunt disdain for his questioner, Senator Lee Rhiannon. Unfortunately, he didn’t go on to explain to those baffled by his logic how exactly he could deem them to be separate. 25 Nothing, it seems, was too much trouble for the Australian Labor Government to keep Rajapaksa sweet. In 2012–13, the Australian Federal Police spent $540,000 helping to train the Senate estimates, Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Legislation Committee, February 14, 2013, pp.39–44.

25

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Sri Lankan police, the same force, the AFP has publicly acknowledged, that is credibly accused of systematic torture, rape and disappearances of Tamils.26 Sri Lanka was rated 162 from 179 countries on the Reporters Without Borders 2013 Press Freedom Index, which isn’t surprising given that at least thirty-nine journalists and media workers have been murdered or disappeared in the country since Rajapaksa’s UPFA party came to power in 2004.27 When Frederica Jansz, the successor to one of those murder victims, received a death threat in 2012 from the president’s brother, Gotabaya, and was then sacked as editor-inchief of the Sunday Leader after a Rajapaksa crony bought the newspaper, she took the hint and applied for a humanitarian visa at the Australian High Commission in Colombo. It was quickly rejected because Australian officials concluded she did not face persecution. The US believed differently, and she found safety there for herself and her young children, joining scores of Sri Lankan journalists now living in exile. On the other hand, Australian protection for those Sri Lankan government and military leaders accused of war crimes has been nothing if not generous. An attempt to prosecute Rajapaksa for war crimes in an Australian court while he was in Perth for the 2011 CHOGM conference was blocked by government. And, despite the serious allegations against High Commissioner Samarasinghe it had before it, the Australian Federal Police declined to investigate him. The diplomatic contortions and misinformation campaigns to accommodate Rajapaksa were never confined to the Australian Labor government. When shadow foreign minister, Julie Bishop, who would become Carr’s successor from the 2013 Australian election, toured Sri Lanka in January 2013, along with fellow Coalition front-benchers Scott Morrison and Michael Keenan, there was no end to the superlatives flowing back to an Australian audience. The prioritised objective to Adjournment speech in Australian parliament by Senator Lee Rhiannon, June 25, 2013. Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka website. ‘Introduction: Media workers killed in Sri Lanka’ (2004–2010).

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present a carefully constructed picture of peace and tranquillity in the north of the country would necessitate playing deceptive games with the Australian media. However, they were up for it. They did not bank on vigilant Tamil media at Melbourne radio station 3CR picking up an interview on Canadian Tamil radio with the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) MP, Sivagnanam Sritharan. Bishop told listeners to ABC Radio’s Connect Asia program that she had spoken to TNA MPs, and other people in the north, where most Tamils live, and had seen or heard no evidence of persecution of Tamils. ‘I am certainly heartened by what I see’, Bishop enthused down a scratchy line from the northern town of Kilinochchi. Sritharan blew their covert little game wide open when he explained to the Canadian radio interviewer that he had told Bishop during a 90-minute discussion at his Kilinochchi office that Sri Lankan intelligence had raided his office two weeks earlier and jailed two of his staff members, who were still in prison (he gave documents to Bishop about the raid); people in the Kilinochchi and surrounding Tamil areas were living in fear, that there was no improvement in their lives and that they were afraid to speak out; Tamil refugees were fleeing to Australia because they could not live in peace in Sri Lanka; Tamil villagers visited by Bishop and her party in the Keppapilavu village in the Mullaitivu district, the area where the massacre of between 40,000 and 70,000 innocent Tamil civilians took place at the end of the war, were afraid to speak to her because Sri Lankan intelligence officers were watching them nearby. ‘We also asked the Australians to push for a political solution to the problems our people face in this country’, Sritharan said. They told us reconciliation is the way to go. We asked them: Do you see arresting university students under terrorist laws and sending them to rehabilitation camps as reconciliation? 28

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Tamils who have been in rehabilitation camps are being re-arrested and placed in jails. Do you see that as reconciliation? For many of our questions they maintained a silence. I felt that the intent of their visit was to see how they could stop the Tamil asylum seekers from getting on boats.

There you have it. In that one word – boats – the essence of Australia’s bi-partisan policy on Sri Lanka. No political issue in Australia in the past decade has been subjected to more cunning manipulation and, as a result, subjected to more feverish, ill-informed debate than boats; often rotting wooden ones that invariably leak and sometimes sink, disgorging their human cargo into the ocean and often to anonymous deaths. Yet, as desperate and vulnerable as these people may appear to be, they are often portrayed by an unsympathetic media as invaders coming over the horizon by stealth to threaten our wealth, our health and even the traffic flow on our roads. The debate reached its nadir when a Coalition candidate at the 2013 election, Fiona Scott, implored Australians to draw the link between their everyday traffic jams and the arrival of 50,000 refugees into the country.28 She didn’t care to explain how enough refugees, who, by and large, were living in government-created poverty traps because they were not allowed to work, could own cars to clog up the roads. Australia’s capital cities have a total of about 2700 suburbs. If you divide up 50,000 refugees among them, there would be eighteen for each suburb to cope with. And, based on the total of 13,000 refugees granted visas to stay in the country each year, that’s five per suburb. Inconvenient facts need to be by-passed if the invasion stereotype is to be preserved. 28

Sydney Morning Herald, September 3, 2013.

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The politicians who have easy access to the mainstream media, and thus the ear of the population, are forever attuned to the ballot box potential of the racist strain that runs through a country that had enshrined in legislation a White Australia policy for much of the twentieth century. In fact, it never leaves some of them, even when they are long gone from politics. A former conservative immigration minister-cum-newspaper columnist, Amanda Vanstone, attempted to jolt her readers out of their complacency by painting a picture of cunning asylum seekers playing on unsuspecting, fair-minded Aussies with their tales of horror. ‘They want to press our sympathy button until we can’t stand it anymore. That they have a sad story does not entitle them to come to Australia’, she wrote.29 Certainly the stories are sad, and, while Vanstone was having nothing to do with anyone pressing her sympathy button – if indeed, she has one to be found – there is no escaping the fact that Australia must listen to those stories, as part of its obligation under international law, as a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention. Unfortunately, successive governments have been unashamedly contemptuous of the responsibility. The Abbott government made it clear that it would be disregarding the convention as much, or even more, than its Labor predecessor, especially in the case of Sri Lankan asylum seekers, who were being returned home in undue haste in even larger numbers after minimal or no interviews and no access to legal assistance, a process which many experts decried as a clear breach of the convention. The reason for the cavalier disregard of international law is obvious. In twenty-first century Australian politics nothing has trumped the need to reduce the number of boats, even if the 29

Sydney Morning Herald, October 7, 2013.

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numbers are relatively small. In 2011 UN figures, Australia ranked seventieth of 205 countries in the number of refugees it received in relation to its population. For every 1000 people, 0.98 were refugees. This pales against other developed countries such as Sweden (8.81), Norway (8.24), Germany (7.22), Canada (4.87), the Netherlands (4.51), the UK (3.84) and France (3.2). This is about perception, nothing else. After putting a torch to the issue of border security and boats, and sending panic through the community, these political firebugs then jump in to fight the fire and vie for credit for dousing the flames. Look at me, I stopped the boats! brags Immigration Minister Morrison at his weekly press briefing, alongside the three-star general he has co-opted from his real job to run the game of military charades known as Operation Sovereign Borders. As Sri Lanka became an increasing source of asylum seekers, the Australian Labor Govern­ ment was faced with the choice of being seen as weak on border protection or cozying up to a regime it knew it could never trust. From the moment its leaders chose the latter course, they became putty in the hands of the Sri Lankan president. Like the man who goes into business with the mafia and spends the rest of his days waiting for the horse’s head to turn up in his bed, Australian politicians had nightmares about Rajapaksa’s capacity to control the flow of asylum seekers. The links between senior Sri Lankan government officials and people-smuggling have been widely reported in Sri Lankan media for several years. The accusations went all the way to the Rajapaksa clan, the principals of which are President Mahinda and his brothers, the feared defence secretary Gotabaya, the Minister for Economic Development, Basil, and the Minister for Ports and Aviation, Chamal. The Australian public got its first hint of this extraordinary story from two Australian newspapers. In April 2010, the Melbourne Herald Sun reporters Ian McPhedran and Padraic 31

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Murphy wrote that naval intelligence sources told them that ‘Colombo encouraged Tamils to risk the dangerous voyage’. In February 2013, the national broadsheet, the Australian, reported that ASIO had become aware of a senior Sri Lankan government official close to the president being ‘personally complicit’ in the people-smuggling trade. It was a win-win operation for Rajapaksa. It got rid of more Tamils, with the bonus of being a nice little earner for someone close to him. Australian intelligence authorities were said to have discovered the link after doing a bit of head-scratching, and then some research, into why such a well-resourced outfit as the Sri Lankan navy could not keep a more effective watch on the shores of an island the size of Tasmania. Subsequent Australian media inquiries revealed that government involvement in people-smuggling was widely suspected in Sri Lanka. The Global Mail ’s Eric Ellis interviewed academic, Dr Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, from the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo, during a visit there in 2013. ‘You cannot get out of territorial waters without the navy letting you out. It just can’t be done’. Australia’s former deputy high commissioner to Sri Lanka, Bruce Haigh, described to me how he believed the scam worked. ‘Of ten boats, they would let eight go. The remaining two would be stopped to show the world they are doing something about people-smuggling’, he said. Sensitivities in Canberra about boat people came to the fore again, as the office of Foreign Minister Carr moved on to the front foot not long after that aforementioned edition of the Australian was landing on doorsteps around the nation. ‘There is no evidence to support the allegation that this official is complicit in people-smuggling’, a spokesperson said. There was silence from the same office eight months later when a senior Sri Lankan navy officer was arrested by his government for helping asylum-seekers leave the country. In November 2013, the 32

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officer told Melbourne Age reporter, Ben Doherty, from his prison cell: ‘I am not the man who did this thing. Others did’.30 The apocalyptic conclusion to the civil war in Sri Lanka in 2009 was always going to create waves on distant shores, particularly as 300,000 displaced Tamil civilians, incarcerated after the conflict behind kilometres of barbed wire fencing in disease-ridden camps, were gradually released. In 2008 sixteen Sri Lankans arrived by boat to claim asylum in Australia. In 2012, the number was 6428, vaulting Sri Lanka much closer to the top of the asylum-seeker arrivals table even as numbers from all countries rose considerably. The increased flow of asylum seekers, not just from Sri Lanka, prompted a harsh response from Australian governments. They introduced so-called deterrence policies that denied work rights to new arrivals, leaving thousands of people destitute in the community, they re-opened the detention hell-holes on Manus Island and Nauru, and, perhaps most punitive of all measures, was the decision to off-load even genuine refugees to Papua New Guinea, a country where 40 percent of people live below the poverty line and 60 percent have no access to clean water. 31 They also had specific plans for Sri Lankans; providing $45 million for aid programs, paying Sri Lankan Test cricketers to front advertising campaigns warning Tamils not to travel to Australia, plastering warnings on billboards across cities and towns and, on the political front, happily selling their soul by offering unquestioning support of Sri Lanka’s right to hold CHOGM, increasing intelligence links between the two countries, and staging high-visibility government visits to attempt somehow to provide credibility to the Rajapaksa hegemony. Even from the other side of the world, it was easy to see through these actions. As the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, observed from his New York office: ‘It is Age, November 15, 2013. CIA World Fact book, February 2013.

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pretty clear Australia’s policy towards Sri Lanka is the asylum-seeker tail wagging the bi-lateral dog. And it’s pretty clear that Australia’s is entirely set by its determination to stem the flow of boat people, mostly Tamils, from Sri Lanka’.32 Amid this flurry of measures to accommodate an accused war criminal, in the hope of reducing the flow of boats, Australian political leaders from the major parties clearly had no intention of addressing the simple question put firmly to me by a well-educated, English-speaking Tamil refugee who suffered three bouts of torture in the east of the country before fleeing to India, and then to Australia by boat in 2011. ‘Why wouldn’t the Australian Government try to do something about the root cause of this problem? Why don’t they understand that if people aren’t being tortured or persecuted, they wouldn’t risk their lives like I did, coming so far?’ twentyeight-year-old Sugi33 asked, as he explained to me how he had been trussed up like a chicken on a pole in a Sri Lankan police station, suspended above ground and belted for several hours with wooden sticks and constantly kicked in the lower back with steel-capped boots. However, while it might be the humane and responsible thing to do, the proposition that you actually need to stop the terror to stop the boats gets no traction in Canberra. Successive Australian governments have had the opportunity to do something significant to stop the persecution that has prompted the flight of thousands of Tamils. Yet they have chosen the opposite course. The Labor government joined with other nations, including India, in March 2013, to dilute a UN resolution aimed at calling Rajapaksa to account for war crimes. 34 Its conservative successor went further, refusing to support the 2014 resolution and opting to stand alone and laud him ABC Radio news, March 23, 2013. Pseudonym used to protect his identity. 34 Australian, March 23, 2013. 32

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Chapter Two: Australia’s Sweet Embrace

at a meeting of Commonwealth nations which represent one third of the world’s population. It also began expanding Labor’s legally suspect scheme to fast-track the return of Sri Lankan asylum seekers, under an agreement struck with Rajapaksa. The UN described the move as raising ‘serious issues over compliance’ with the Refugee Convention, which insists that people cannot be returned to a country from which they have fled persecution. The bullish Australian Immigration Minister Morrison flicked the two-fingered salute to the UN, saying: ‘Anyone who may have come from Sri Lanka should know they will go back. We’ll be ensuring that we maximize those who go back and, preferably, they will all go back’.35 Official Australian Government figures in 2012 revealed that 90 percent of all asylum seekers, including Tamils, were genuine in their claims, and were due protection and refugee status. It is further acknowledgment from Australia that persecution is rife in Sri Lanka. By ignoring these obvious truths and joining with other nations to conceal the crimes of Rajapaksa behind a veil of misinformation and inaction, the Australian Government has been party to giving a nod and a wink to the Sri Lankan Government to continue its persecution of Tamils and, thus, has contributed to the flight of asylum seekers they are trying so hard to stop. Indeed, it could be argued that it’s not just a cruel policy, but a dumb one. For, as my friend Sugi told me, a leaky boat will always be preferable to a torture chamber.

Sydney Morning Herald, October 12, 2013.

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Part Two

The Te ardrop Isl and

Left: Red Cross workers evacuate an injured family, risking naval attack.

Social workers found this young Tamil man unconscious on a road in Vavuniya area. They said he had been arrested and bashed by security police.

Chapter Three: Love and Tragedy

He crept through the hospital front door with his eyes darting sideways and his head low, in the instinctive carriage of young Tamil men who live every day with the threat of military intimidation, and worse. He was sweating profusely. It wasn’t the monsoonal heat, or even the military patrol he’d managed to avoid out in the street. It was the thought of what he was about to say, and do. Thomas,36 a Catholic boy from Mannar, had come to propose marriage. In the Intensive Care Unit of the local hospital. To someone he knew only as a childhood acquaintance from his village. A beautiful young woman named Anna,37 who had been brutally raped by navy officers and was recovering from her second suicide attempt in days. Nothing could have prepared him for this moment. Somehow out of the tragedy of this woman’s life, Thomas’s father was determined to try to salvage some human decency and hope. It was a Tamil custom for the parents to choose their son’s wife. Thomas knew it and accepted it. His father knew Anna’s family better than did Thomas. In the tradition of arranged marriage, this was not unusual. ‘I respected my father’s wishes. It is our custom’, he explained to me. He approached the first of the two beds in the restrained light of the ICU. He stood at the end of the bed, sheepishly introducing himself. Anna looked up through bleary eyes, trying hard to lift her head from the pillow, weary from her torment as much as her heavy medication. ‘He came A pseudonym to protect identity. A pseudonym to protect identity.

36 37

Left: A woman displays photographs of her missing family, pleading for news of them. There are tens of thousands who have no idea what happened to their loved ones.

SRI LANK A’S SECRETS

and held my feet and said not to attempt suicide again. He also promised that no matter how many times I was raped, he would take care of me for the rest of my life and accept me’, Anna recalled.38 Love takes time to bloom in any arranged relationship. Their bond was instantaneous. They connected through their tragic co-existence as Tamil victims of a Sinhalese military power that seemingly knows no limits of human degradation and respects nothing but its right to unfettered dominance and gratification. As he watched the distraught figure of Anna, crying on her pillow, with joy and sadness, Thomas had some inkling of the depth of the devastation of his wife-to-be. Two months later, in March 2009, he would know precisely what she had gone through. A Tamil youth growing up in a fishing village in Mannar under the control of the Sri Lankan Navy was chained to a life of daily persecution and deprivation. In 2007, aged 20, he tried to break the shackles by borrowing some money and heading to another Asian country, where he completed a course in hotel management before returning home. In early 2009, as the war and incessant shelling of his village region turned life into a lottery, he escaped to the same country again to look for work. However, after the Sri Lankan customs officers had questioned him at the airport and passed on false information to that country’s authorities about him being a suspected Tamil Tiger, he was deported. When he returned the next day to Sri Lanka, his passport, his wallet and his diploma certificate were confiscated. Then they set about stealing every vestige of human dignity from him. They blind-folded me in a room in the airport and took me to a van. After a short drive I was taken into another room. They removed the blind-fold. The room was small. There was 38

Deposition to Australian Immigration authorities as part of an asylum claim, July 2013.

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Chapter Three: Love and Tragedy

blood, a lot of it fresh, on the floor. One officer told me to lick the floor clean. I refused. He hit me across my ear and eye. He held my hair and made me lick it. I vomited. They injected me with a needle. They said it was for malaria. It didn’t seem to affect me. They gave me a towel and opened a door. There was a shower and toilet there. They told me to take a shower. When I was in there, an officer came in with a shaver and soap. He demanded to shave my private parts. I said no. Another person came in, and did it. Then a woman, about 40, came in. She was dressed in a dark pink blouse and black skirt. She removed them. I was very frightened. I had to lie on the floor. I was naked. She did disgusting things to me. She kept hitting me across the head with her fists. I felt sick. After 30 minutes she got dressed and left. Two officers came in. They gave me my clothes and blind-folded me. They drove me in a van to a bus stop. I went home to Mannar.

Thomas had heard enough stories from his friends and relatives about the frightening excesses of a military that operated with impunity. Now he knew the truth of it. He was physically ill when he got home, thinking about the way he had been violated and, more so, of Anna. Anna had been asleep in her bed when two men came into her bedroom through a hole in the roof in January 2009. After they raped her and fled, two navy people came to her house the next day. They barged in and began searching the house and backyard. Her father had found a torn piece of a blue navy uniform in the backyard. They took it from him and issued a warning. ‘They threatened that if he told anyone of the incident his daughter would be harmed and lose the ability to marry anyone. They also said there is no-one in the area to question their actions, even God. They laughed at us and took the (piece of cloth) with them’, she said. ‘We didn’t tell anyone. Secretly my parents arranged someone to take care of my physical health. After this animalistic attack by the Sinhala army personnel, I attempted suicide. The villagers came to 41

SRI LANK A’S SECRETS

know of my rape and began to treat me as an outcast. I couldn’t handle their looks and whispers. I was alienated from my own people. I attempted suicide again’.39 In September 2009, the war had been over for four months. The Sri Lankan navy, though, continued their training around the war-time base they had set up near Thomas’s village. They usually told villagers when they would be shelling out to sea. On this day there was no warning. Thomas was fishing with his father in their boat. A shell landed. Black-out. Thomas awoke in a bed in a small room in the military camp. His left leg, which had been fractured, was wrapped in bandages. There was a pair of crutches against the wall. The room had no windows. There was a bed and a pillow. No toilet. There was a bell on the floor. When he wanted to use the toilet, he would ring the bell and a guard would bring a bucket. Four days into his imprisonment, a guard came into his room and set up a table. He put about eight bottles of Lion Strong beer on the table, with four glasses. It was night time. Three other people in navy uniform came into the room. One was small with light skin and clean shaven. The other two were older, about 40. They had darker skin and wore moustaches. The guard stood and saluted them. One officer knew some English. He started to talk to me. He said if I co-operate they will release me. They started drinking beer and made me drink. I had never tasted alcohol before. I drank about one and a half bottles. Once they got drunk they took off their clothes. They stripped my clothes off me. They started to sexually attack me. All three did it at the same time. One put his penis into my mouth, another made me put my penis in his mouth. They tried to rape me. I resisted. They kept swearing at me. They started smoking something. I wasn’t sure what it was. They made me smoke. I had never smoked anything before. They ejaculated in my mouth and on my thigh. 39

Deposition to Australian immigration authorities as part of an asylum claim, July 2013.

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Chapter Three: Love and Tragedy

Another raped me. I still resisted. I vomited. They were just laughing and taunting me the whole time. This lasted for about 30 minutes. Then one of them went out. He came back with a round plastic pipe. They put me on the bed, pulled my legs apart and held my face in the pillow. They put the pipe in my anus, back and forth for about 10 minutes. I couldn’t bear the pain. I screamed out for my mother and father. I begged them to stop. They kept putting the pipe in deeper. They said they would keep doing it unless I agreed to co-operate with their sexual ways. My anus was very painful. It was torn and bleeding. I saw barbed wire on the bed. They had put it through the pipe and when the pipe was taken out, the barbed wire was left in. When I agreed to co-operate with them, they took the wire out. They left after about two hours. Three days later the same three came back. I let them rape me. This went on for 10 months. Sometimes they would put a bottle, or a wooden pole, into my anus. Sometimes they would make me drink their sperm, or the cigarette ash mixed with water. They would burn me with their cigarettes. I realized the only way to survive was to let them do what they wanted. They never asked me about anything to do with the Tamil Tigers. They wanted me only for sex. One day they decided to release me, maybe because they could see I was mentally unwell. I was saying weird things to myself out loud. They blind-folded me, took me out on the street, gave some cash to an auto-rickshaw driver, who took me home.

It was June 2010. He was back at his parents’ home. He told them nothing about the rape. Only Anna knew. He wanted to erase it. But he soon found out it would be impossible. He got a job in a bank. He sought medical treatment for his leg. No hospital would take him without a medical record of the injury. Some suspected he might be an ex-Tamil Tiger. Only a military hospital would accept him. ‘I was meant to have a leg operation. When I woke up I had a new scar on my back, near my kidney. They had performed some sort of operation. I’ve had a scan in Australia. I still have both kidneys. I still don’t know what they did’, he said. 43

SRI LANK A’S SECRETS

He left the hospital within a day. When he got home, one of the three navy men who had raped him for ten months telephoned him. He demanded he come back to the camp. One of the men also rang Anna’s family and explained what they would do to her if Thomas didn’t come back. Still on crutches, he did what he was told. It was the same three. That day I refused to do what they wanted. One of them took my crutches and broke them with his boot. They told me to walk without them. I couldn’t. They kept hitting me and smashed my injured thigh. My leg just buckled. They told me I would have to come back regularly. If I didn’t, they would do things to my fiancée. I had no choice. Almost every weekend they would send someone on a motorbike to pick me up and take me to the base. They would rape me and send me home. It probably happened 300 times.

September 14, 2012 … Thomas rattled off the date of his final torture session like anyone else might a birthday or wedding anniversary. A different guy wanted sex this time. He started doing disgusting things. He put his penis in my mouth. I bit it. He got very angry. He put barbed wire into my anus, without a pipe. He also used chopsticks. I was only partially conscious by this time. He had opened up a cupboard in the room. I saw all sorts of things they used for torture; iron rods, batons, poles, whips. After about two hours, he let me go.

It was 10 pm. He hurried into the night, as best he could on his crutches. He and Anna had finally married a week earlier. Now, though, he knew they would have to part. He had no choice. He went looking for an agent to help him get out of Sri Lanka. Thomas and Anna tried hard to make the best of their wedding day. She did not wear the white silk sari she had always dreamed of as a little girl. Nor he the white dress suit. They both wore jeans and T-shirts. There was no time for tradition. It was a registration ceremony only. 44

Chapter Three: Love and Tragedy

About a dozen relatives had gathered in the evening at the small village home of Thomas’s parents. They brought modest presents and goodwill. They ate rice and throat-searing Tamil chicken curry. The women fussed over the bride. The men whispered sly jokes to the groom. They laughed, and they rejoiced in the union of two village families. Really, though, everyone felt the sadness in the atmosphere. ‘Anna cried that day, not so much because she was happy but because she knew I would be going away very soon. I was the same. Very sad’, said Thomas. Without the passport the police had taken from him at the airport in 2009, Thomas had no choice but to find passage out of the country as best he could. He had been given money by his family, all of whom knew his fate if he remained in the country. He found an agent in Negombo. On September 17, 2012, sandwiched under the deck of a boat with several dozen other Tamils, he sailed out of Negombo. Sixteen days later, he stepped on the Australian territory of the Cocos Islands, free of his military torturers in Mannar but about to experience a new form of terror. Anna’s tears gradually dried as the instinctive need for self-preservation overtook her thoughts about married life and reunification in Australia with her new husband. Three weeks after Thomas had left, she began receiving threatening phone calls from the naval officers who had intimidated her family two years earlier. She, too, had to flee. She found refuge through a network of church ministers. Her first stop was a village church 300 kilometres south of her home. She stayed there for three months. Then she went 300 kilometres north-west to a village, where she was housed in a church mission house. After she received threats from ‘unknown people’,40 she was sent back north closer to her home, where she was fed, housed and comforted by a female minister of a local church for five months. Then she made the fatal mistake of succumbing to the urge to see her family. Church document, written in 2013, seen by the author.

40

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On June 15, I went to my sister-in-law’s wedding from my hiding place. Later that afternoon I went to my parents’ place because I hadn’t seen them and my relatives for a long time. I went to their place by bus. There was a navy checkpoint on the way. Myself and three other ladies were taken forcibly from the bus, blind-folded and taken to an army truck. We travelled for four minutes. I didn’t know where they were taking me. I was scared for my life. They removed my blind-fold. I realised I was in a room. They injected me with something. The leader of the group raped me. One of the navy officers took a photo of me naked. They threatened they would release the photo on the internet if I didn’t go to them when they called, or comply with their orders. They blind-folded me again. I was taken to the army vehicle. We travelled for five or six minutes. They removed the blind-fold and told me to go home.

Anna was admitted to hospital the same evening. A doctor’s report details horrific injuries, including multiple bruising, facial cuts and abrasions, bite marks, abrasions and bruising on her breasts and bruised, torn, bleeding skin in the genital region. It states she was assaulted by an unknown group of people, that police were informed of her condition by hospital staff but fear prevented her from telling her story to authorities. She was released from hospital six days later.41 She said she was unable to seek further treatment from a doctor because she would have to report the crime to the police. ‘I cannot tell this to anyone. I cannot even go to the doctor. I told my husband. He informed a humanitarian organisation in Australia. I did not know who else to inform’. This time, Anna’s desperate, immediate need for sanctuary was rejected. I went back to the missionary. They would not have me. They feared what problems they would have to face because of my situation. While my husband is living in Australia, I am unsure where I can get asylum. Every moment I am living on the edge, uncertain if Hospital report from June 2013, seen by the author.

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the people who attacked me will ruin my life again. I am tolerating all the tortures and emotional traumas in the hope that I will see my husband again.

By late 2013, Anna had escaped the immediate threat of further torture but the trauma had not subsided. She fled to another Asian country, where she was taken in by sympathetic Tamil human rights advocates. Her daily phone calls to her husband in Australia were filled with the distress, fear and uncertainty of asylum seekers awaiting judgement. Thomas found it hard to calm her palpable anxiety. ‘She is very frightened about what is going to happen. We cry a lot on the phone’, he said. Thomas, permanently on crutches, was doing little more than eating, sleeping and trying to live in the present as he waited, in country Victoria, to find out if he would be accepted as a refugee in Australia. His medical reports from Australian physicians, psychiatrists and psychologists bear testimony to the horror he desperately wants to forget. One report details the agony he now suffers from internal tears and wounds in his anus that still bleed constantly and need treatment. (During exploratory surgery in 2013 doctors found pieces of wood and plastic deep inside his anal passage). Then there are the cigarette burns on his scrotum, his penis and thighs, a significant loss of hearing and the broken leg which had become distorted because of an initial lack of proper treatment. His mind is as wrecked as his body. A psychologist’s summary from September 2013 revealed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), elevated levels of depression and anxiety and panic attacks triggered by nightmares and flashbacks. Still three years shy of thirty, Thomas has been drained of hope in life and trust in humanity. He has often thought death would be a better alternative. Yet, there was one abiding memory that gave him heart; the promise he made to Anna at the foot of her hospital bed in 2009. This, he said, he would never forget. 47

Chapter Four: A Tortured Life

Maravan42 is a gentle young man of diverse talents, just as much at home on the stage in sandalwood paste make-up and classical Indian dance costume as he is exploring the depths of the human mind through the theories of Freud and Jung. He was born in the Sri Lankan Tamil stronghold of Jaffna. The eldest of four children, he grew up in a family that valued education above all else. His inquisitive mind blossomed quickly at school and then at Jaffna University, where he graduated with a degree in psychology and various diplomas in counselling, social work, and sign language for the mentally retarded. He felt well-prepared when he set out on his life’s journey in the early years of this century. His first job was working with the deaf and mentally disabled. It was the beginning of a dual ambition to work as a psychologist, and to follow his passion for the classical dance movements of Bharatnatyam that began when he was selected in grade two to perform the snake and peacock dances at Tamil celebrations. His journey, though, was, like that of so many young Tamils, thwarted at the outset by the on-going civil war between the Sri Lankan Government and the rebel Tamil Tigers. After a four year ceasefire ended and the war re-started in 2006, the north and east of the country once again became battlegrounds and Maravan took his skills as a social worker to the war zones, where thousands of Tamil civilians became homeless refugees running away from death and destruction. .

A pseudonym used to protect his identity.

42

Left: An offering to the Gods from a woman who has lost family members.

SRI LANK A’S SECRETS

He was employed as an emergency health and social worker for the Red Cross through the Vanni and Mullaitivu districts for several years during the conflict, including the devastation between January and May 2009, and its aftermath, in scores of traumatised village communities and the concentration camps that saw 300,000 men, women and children detained in the most appalling, disease-ridden conditions. He dodged bombs and lived on the precipice of life while trying to help the injured, the dying and the devastated cope with attacks targeted on schools, hospitals, churches and homes within governmentdesignated ‘No Fire Zones’, and that spared no-one. Desperate to let the world know what was happening to his people, he also took photographs and wrote occasional articles for Tamil newspapers under a pseudonym. With the help of other Tamil photographers, some of whom died in the conflict, Maravan compiled a collective folio of more than 400 images as he traversed the war-ravaged regions of the north. He supplied some of these photographs to the outside world through social media, which were passed on to various publications and websites. Aware of the consequences of being found with a camera, Maravan buried it in the sand on the beach at Mullivaikal, just before he was arrested by the advancing Sri Lankan military on May 15. However, he removed the memory card and concealed it under his belt. Later, he hid it in a room where he was living. As a precaution, he stored many of the images he’d taken, and those he’d acquired from others, on a USB stick, and continued to do so as he toured the camps, villages and hospitals over the next couple of years. Also when he had the chance, he emailed some of the photographs to friends outside Sri Lanka. Before too long, the Sri Lankan military caught up with Maravan, a prime target as a young Tamil man. Having witnessed the horror of the war and its aftermath, and somehow survived without a scratch, he had finally become a victim. He would endure many vicious torture sessions 50

Chapter Four: A Tortured Life

and beatings at the hands of the army, before escaping the country in 2012. After thirteen days on a boat across the Indian Ocean with forty-nine other asylum seekers, he finally found safety, arriving with his nightmarish recollections and photographic evidence on a tiny memory stick, on the Australian territory of the Cocos Islands. In Melbourne, in 2013, everything came back to Maravan in chilling, minute detail as he attempted to document to me the past four years of his life. Suddenly, he was recoiling in his chair and staring blankly at a wall, as, firstly, he re-lived the war; the smell of potassium and burnt flesh after a bombing raid, the feel of blood soaking into his clothes from a dying man lying next to him in a shelter, the cries of the hungry, injured children and their distraught mothers, and the contempt in the eyes, and the actions, of the soldiers and police who took great delight in picking out the prettiest young girls in the queues in the post-war camps for gang-rape sessions. ‘My feelings were never the same. One moment I would be very motivated to help, next I would feel very angry, then sad. I also had a lot of anxiety. Every day as the bombs rained down, there were so many people to help. I felt so helpless at times’, he told me through an interpreter. Sometimes I felt as if I wanted to die. Another time my mind would be somewhere else, a long way away, at home with my family. Wounded people with horrific injuries would be right next to me and I wouldn’t even realise it. We were always physically shattered. So many days we did not eat or drink water. Other times we ate a few biscuits each day. When we were lucky we got dry fish or soup made from rice. Mostly we only had the energy to run away once the bombs dropped. Before they came we just sat there and wondered what was going to happen. Bombs often dropped within 25 metres of me. They came in lots of 30 or 40 at once. I didn’t have time to think whether I was lucky. Many times I had blood all over me. Mostly, it came from other people next to me in the shelters. 51

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The Sri Lankan Army finally took control of the Mullaitivu region, after slaughtering thou­­sands of innocent civilians in Mullivaikkal, in May 2009. After his May 15 arrest, Maravan spent three days under guard while the battle concluded. Then, with the help of some local Red Cross health workers with whom he was working, he was able to evade the mass round-up of surviving Tamils and escape in an ambulance that was headed for a hospital in Vavuniya, about an hour away. It went through two army checkpoints before arriving at the hospital. He then travelled a short distance to his uncle’s place, where he hid for a week. He cut his long hair very short, and began shifts as an emergency psychologist and social worker at the hospital. The hospital was overwhelmed with war victims. Maravan worked day and night five days a week, sleeping two hours a night, sitting up in a chair in the staff room. He worked there for a month before heading to an internment camp at Cheddikulam, where he split his time between the main camp and a temporary camp at a school. He was there for eighteen months before joining the Red Cross community-based health project in the northern regions of Kilinochchi, Mullaituvi and Jaffna. Rather than receding after the bombs stopped falling and victory was proclaimed, the fear, the terror and the panic increased by the day for Maravan. On four occasions, between 2010 and 2012, he was taken to a police station or army base, where he was beaten and tortured while being questioned about the former LTTE fighters he had been employed to counsel, and the whereabouts of his photographs. He was arrested for the first time while he was waiting at a bus stop in Vavuniya on January 4, 2010. He later found out a friend who had been tortured had revealed his sideline as a photographer. I was blindfolded and taken away in a van. They were speaking in Sinhalese about the pho­ tographs I had taken. They were pointing a gun at my head. They kept saying ‘You were working in Vanni. Do you know LTTE members?’ They took me somewhere. I was pushed into a room. 52

Chapter Four: A Tortured Life

I felt barbed wire when I passed through the entrance. I was stripped down to my underwear and kept there for 10 days. I was blindfolded the whole time. They used sticks to beat me.

He was released at 2 a.m. at a bus station. Fourteen months later, they caught up with him again. This time, two CID officers were at his uncle’s house as he returned from his job with the local Red Cross society. They blindfolded me and put me on a chair. They played some music and asked me to dance. They knew I had danced at a public celebration. It was an LTTE song. They hit me with sticks. They put me in a cage. I could not sit, only stand. If I moved sharp blades went through my skin. They kept me for five days. They always asked the same questions, about the LTTE and the photographs.

He knew what he was in for, five months later, when his bus stopped at a checkpoint in Omanthai. They locked me in a room and put a rifle to my head. I heard others say ‘Yes, we know him. He has taken photographs’. They blindfolded me and burnt me with cigarette butts, on my chest. They put salt there, on my skin. It turned blue. I kept crying in pain. I didn’t answer any of their questions. They put hot rods on my back. They put needles and pins in my body. They hit me with ropes, cable wires and shoes. I had a lot of wounds. They released me after 10 days.

The next time, on February 22, 2012, they caught him unawares, arriving in a white van at midnight. I was asleep. They tied my hands and legs. My family was told not to inform anyone, other­ wise I would not return. They showed me published photographs and asked if I had taken them. They asked me where I kept my photographs. They showed me media reports of a remembrance ceremony I had organised for the war dead. They showed me programs. They 53

SRI LANK A’S SECRETS

asked who instructed me to do this. I told them it was part of my grief counselling work. They did not believe me but they let me go.

The fifth, and last, time they took him in, on July 23, 2012, became the turning point in his life. I was travelling to work through Elephant Pass on this day on a bus. The military as usual came aboard and checked the bus. They asked me for my ID card. I gave it to them and they asked me to step off the bus and stand aside with them. The bus left and I then saw a white van coming along the road. They blindfolded me and put me in the van. They didn’t know I could speak Sinhala so I could understand where they were taking me. It was to the army camp at Iranamadu. I was in the van for one hour. When I got out of the van, they tied my hands and legs with nylon rope, but they tied it in a way that I could still walk. I was taken into a building and was still blindfolded. Once I got into a room, they removed the rope from my hands and put on handcuffs. They then started hitting me, first with their fists and hands and then with a wooden pole. They also used cricket bats. I was still blindfolded but I could sense what sort of things they were using. They hit me every day for a month. Certain days it was heavy and other days it was lighter. They were constantly asking me: where are the photographs? They thought I was in the Tamil Tigers media team. They kept on asking me if I was a Tamil Tiger. They tried to get me to sign a paper saying this. But I wasn’t a Tiger. I was working as a psychologist for the Red Cross in the camps, helping former LTTE cadres. The government’s social welfare ministry hired me, with others, to go out into the camps, help former Tamil Tigers and check on their health. The worst part came when they started sexual torture. They were always drunk when this happened. They tied my testicles to the window with a rope and put fire ants in my ears. They 54

Chapter Four: A Tortured Life

put bicycle spokes in my penis. They also put a metal rod into my anus as well as the neck of a bottle. The pain was unbearable. I was raped regularly, by whoever was on duty. Some of them would bite me on the chest as they raped me, like they were animals or on drugs. They put a petrol-soaked shopping bag into my underwear against my genitals. I was tortured the day after I got there and it went on once a day in some form until I got out of there on August 28. I was kept in a cage. If I turned I was hurt by spikes and blades, and barbed wire. They yelled orders to shoot me. There were many others in other cells in the place. I could hear them crying out all the time. Sometimes I would hear an officer say ‘This guy has died, let’s go and bury him’. I knew because I could understand Sinhala. Another boy who was kept with me was shot on the 25th. They got rid of his body in the river. There was a certain CID (Criminal Investigations Department) officer at the base who gave me food and good water each day. He even gave me Panadol. He was kind to me. On August 26, he came and told me that I was going to be killed, like the other boy, because I didn’t admit anything. He told me if I gave him 10 lakhs (about $8000) he would release me. I told him I didn’t have any money and knew nobody who could give me the money. I said I couldn’t trust he would release me. I said: ‘You will shoot me as soon as I get out of the cell’. I gave him the phone number of a lawyer who I knew from other times I was arrested. I was allowed to ring him. I gave the lawyer the CID phone number. The next day the officer came and told me I could leave and give him the money at a specific time and place. I told him I couldn’t do it myself. I would get someone to do it. He walked me out of the place and into the jungle. I was free. He told me it was an area where Tamils lived. I went to an old man’s house. I was dressed only in shorts. I rang my friend in Kilinochchi. He came with clothes and took me away. I got the money for the guard. I knew I had to. I had two lakhs in my account and I got the rest from relatives. I knew I had to go. Next time I would be killed. On August 29 I sent a 55

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resignation letter to my work. I was living in hide-outs until September 28. Through a friend, I had organised an agent and left from Galle for Australia that day on a boat with 49 other asylum-seekers.

Thirteen days later he arrived at the Cocos Islands, where he spent two weeks. He was transferred to Christmas Island for three weeks. He then spent three months in detention in Darwin before being released into the community in Sydney, on a bridging visa, in early 2013. Now, having lost so many friends and relatives to the conflict and its aftermath, he wants to help awaken the world to the unvarnished reality of Sri Lanka. Maravan grew up in an environment governed by either the daily chaos and fear of a savage, relentless conflict or the edgy uncertainty of another frail truce. From a child he knew the smell, the sound and the sight of war and persecution. However, nothing could have prepared him for the experience of witnessing first-hand the sadistic butchery of a regime intent on wiping out tens of thousands of his people. In March 2013 he learned of the death of his thirty-eight-year-old cousin while in custody in Sri Lanka. A post mortem declared it to be suicide. All the signs pointed to torture and murder. He said his cousin’s penis was tied with a cable and there were knife marks on his thighs. The news prompted flashbacks of his own torture and he lapsed back into a deep depression. He was subsequently diagnosed, by an Australian clinical psychologist, as suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression and anxiety. Even when he is doing something he loves, he cannot escape his past. ‘When I am getting ready to perform the peacock dance, I think of all the others I used to dance with. Most of my dance troupe have been killed. All the bad feelings come back’. 56

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Maravan somehow survived unimaginable trauma and suffering on his journey from youthful expectation at Jaffna University to seeking asylum in Australia. Out of it all, he hoped for one small consolation; that, as an eye-witness to a war that was meant to have no witnesses, he could help, by telling his story, to expose these crimes to the world and prevent the Sri Lankan government’s attempts to fabricate history.

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Chapter Five: Driven by Fear In a society as corrupt and debased as Sri Lanka, fear will always be the predominant weapon of the state. It cannot be any other way. Those who control the levers of power live in fear themselves. Fearful of losing power, fearful of their genocidal rule being exposed, fearful of landing in a cell in The Hague.43 In this state of perpetual anxiety, they must terrorise other people to feel safe themselves. Their world of privilege, and of racist superiority, has been built on terror. It will coming crashing down, like a house with cardboard foundations, without the support of military and civilian police forces that are free to inflict terror upon sections of the citizenry. The defining characteristic of this terror is torture. It is the primary method of control of the Tamil population, and a critical weapon in the genocide which began with the instant disenfranchisement of one million Tamils immediately after the departing British handed power to the majority Sinhalese, and that has continued ever since, halted only by the civil war between 1983 and 2009. Duplicitous world powers, who would like to ignore these evil practices but need to keep up appearances as human rights protectors, produce lame public statements and UN resolutions, gently admonishing the regime but doing deals behind the scenes to guarantee it protection from any serious action by bodies such as the Security Council.44 However, these attempts War crimes charges filed against Sri Lanka’s president, ABC Lateline program, October 24, 2011. Keerthy Warnakulasuriya, ‘US promises Colombo no sanctions on Sri Lanka at UN Security Council until 2016’, Divaina (newspaper), March 3, 2013.

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Left: A soldier keeps watch on despairing civilians armed with nothing but forlorn hope. AP Photo.

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to shield the torturers from scrutiny are as effective as a sticking plaster on a cavernous, festering wound. What they cannot hide is the unending stream of victims whose cries won’t be muffled; not by cynical self-interested governments or their agents in the mainstream media. During my time working with Tamil refugees I have listened to countless stories of persecution, and almost every one is laced with chilling tales of torture that include bashing and burning with hot iron rods, medical injections, soldiers and officers raping men and women, raping with bottles, ice cubes, metal wire being rammed into genitals, and a particular favourite, suffocation by placing petrolinfused plastic bags over the heads of victims. The experience of Thomas and Anna goes almost beyond the limits of human suffering. Thomas bravely attempted to tell me about it over several hours in a house in Melbourne. He spoke quietly but assuredly, faltering only occasionally to draw deep breaths. He knew he had to try to forget but he knew he never would. His recall for detail was remarkable, down to the colour of the blouse and skirt worn by the female military officer who assaulted him in 2009. He wanted acknowledgment. He wanted justice. He wanted asylum. More than anything he wanted his wife; to hold her and honour the promise he made at the foot of her bed in the intensive care unit of a Mannar hospital in 2009. They were not alone. Maravan, who took some of the photographs in this book, suffered unspeakable physical abuse on several occasions. When I met him to talk about the book, and interview him, he was cheerful and very willing to tell his story. He began to falter as he recounted his torture. By the end of our two-hour discussion, even with several breaks, he was a shattered man, with his head in his hands and barely able to communicate. Still he insisted he had to tell the story. 60

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It was the same for Kumar, who sought out a doctor in Melbourne in early April 2013 as soon as he returned from a brief visit to Sri Lanka, where he was picked up by the intelligence police and subjected to horrific torture that left him a physical and psychological wreck. He could barely walk, or talk, the evening I met him in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. It was four days after he had arrived back. He could not sit back on a chair because of the gaping, fresh wounds on his back. With the help of a friend, he told me his story curled up in the foetal position in a chair. He had to quit his job as a chef because of the damage done to his back. Before he left for Sri Lanka, his hope for permanent residency in Australia within a year or so for him, his wife and three primary school age children, was bright. After having to forfeit his 457 visa because he could no longer work, he had to join the lottery for asylum and a protection visa. A life of so much promise was now full of pain and uncertainty. Like so many young Tamils, watching his family and neighbours endure military brutality and oppression as an everyday occurrence pushed Sugi into the arms of the LTTE as a teenager. He was born into a life of constant fear, never quite sure if the buzz of the distant army motorcycle was coming his way; always looking over his shoulder to see whether the Sinhalese officer in the patrolling jeep would stop at their doorstep and unleash his gun-toting soldiers upon them and their village home. Street cricket was never the game of his childhood. It was hide-and-seek from the military. His village was surrounded by a lagoon. Everyone knew the army would come at night, searching for young boys to spirit away into their jails and torture chambers. These boys soon developed the getaway smarts of bank robbers. As soon as dusk descended and these khaki-clad predators emerged from their lairs, the boys’ mothers would pack their dinner into a plastic bag and they would swim across the lagoon to the forest, where they would sleep the night among the coastal mangroves, returning next morning once the coast was clear. 61

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In 1990, the military came for Selvan’s little brother at their coastal fishing village near Jaffna. The two of them had returned from a long day on the sea, scratching out a living while dodging the Navy patrol boats that enforced a strict ban on Tamil boats beyond 200 metres from the shore, a ban reinforced by the whistle of bullets across their bows and the instant killing of any transgressors. On this day when they got home, at dinner time, soldiers had already surrounded their house and several others in his village. The smell of dinner-time cooking filled the steamy air as mayhem descended upon startled villagers. Doors were splintered and bashed off their hinges by rifle butts and heavy boots, soldiers stormed through kitchens and bedrooms like bull elephants, overturning furniture as residents cowered in corners and prayed quietly to their gods, a mixture of Christian, Muslim and Hindu, and perhaps wondered about the disconnect between these soldiers and their Buddhist teachings. They marched away with 36 Tamil youths, saying they were being taken for work and would be back in a few days. Selvan never saw his little brother again. The following are excerpts from conversations I have had with Kumar, Sugi and Selvan, pseudonyms I have used to protect them and their families. KUMAR, 32, married, lives in Melbourne, Australia: I was living and working in Melbourne for three years as a chef. My wife and three children are now with me. My uncle owns a restaurant back in Sri Lanka outside Colombo. He had a stroke in March this year (2013) and I went back there to help him out. I had been back three days when, about 10 pm, while I was riding home with my brother on a motor cycle, I was picked up by the army intelligence police. My name was on their records from 2006. I was a school bus driver and was paid by the Tamil Tigers to deliver some parcels to Colombo. A friend who was tortured told them about me. I was jailed and tortured. I fled the country. But I thought 62

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now that the war had been over for four years it was safe to go back. It’s a mistake I will regret for the rest of my life. This time, they put a gun to my head, blind-folded me, tied my hands and put me in a van. SUGI, 28, single, lives in Melbourne, Australia: My life in a village in Batticaloa was filled with fear for as long as I can remember. As a little boy, in the 1990s, I remember the army coming to our house while chasing some Tamil men. They beat my father with the end of a rifle. One day they locked a whole group of people in a house and burned the house to the ground, killing everyone. You could hear the screams. It was always dangerous for any young Tamil male. You would always be running and hiding as soon as you heard the army motor cycles or trucks. Some friends ran away to another village. They had a party one night, four boys and three girls. The army found them and killed everyone, except one boy. He hid under a bed for five days, drinking his own urine to stay alive. He was mentally disturbed by what he saw and died a couple of years later. I was arrested the first time when I was 20. I was connected with the LTTE, working to help Tamil people. The army grabbed me when I was on a small boat on a lagoon. I was a long way from my village. They asked for ID. I had none. They took me to jail. Selvan, 50, married, asylum seeker, held in detention in Australia: We are fishermen from the Jaffna region. In the 1990s I helped the Tamil Tigers by delivering food in my boat occasionally to coastal villages. I wasn’t forced to do it. I wanted to help them out. The navy was always intimidating people in my village. One day they caught 32 fishermen who had been out in the sea, outside the area they were allowed to fish. They shot them all dead on the beach. They arrested me a week later and handed me to the army. I tried to run away because of what happened to those 32 people. The army wanted to know why I was running. They hit us with 63

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batons and kicked us with their heavy boots as soon as they picked us up. They handcuffed me and put me in a small jail cell. KUMAR … The van trip took about 30 minutes. I wasn’t sure where I was. I was still blindfolded. I was walked into a room in a police compound and they took off the blindfold. I was scared when I saw the room. There was blood splattered on the walls and there was torn women’s underwear on the floor. There was a gas stove in one corner. Next to it was a bucket containing several iron rods. I was stripped naked. They used wire to tie my feet to my hands and laid me face down on a table. I would stay like this for four days. They questioned me non-stop, asking if I was a Tamil Tiger. I kept saying no because it was the truth. They crushed my balls with their hands. They put ice cubes in my anus. The fourth time I passed out. On the fourth day, they heated up the iron bars and hit them across my back. The pain was unbearable. I thought I was going to die … SUGI … In 2001–02, I spent six months in three different jails. They questioned me but didn’t beat me. My father found a lawyer and I got released. I couldn’t live in my village anymore. The army would come to the area all the time. They would go door-knocking and arrest any young Tamil males they found. I was always running away or hiding. I went away to Colombo but was arrested by the TID (Terrorist Investigation Division) in 2008 at my uncle’s house. He was involved with a printing business and he was suspected of helping the LTTE. This time they punched me hard and hit me on the head with pistols. I went unconscious. I was put in a van and taken to a big room in a police compound. There were a lot of people there, all tied up and sitting on the floor in one big room. My uncle was there. Talking or smiling was forbidden. Every day I got bashed with wooden poles. I was there for a month. They kicked me in the back constantly with their steel-capped boots, damaging 64

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my discs. They tied my hands and legs together and strung me up on a pole, beating me for hours. My uncle was bashed and had a copper pipe put in his anus. SELVAN … They took me by helicopter to prison in Colombo. I was released after six months. I couldn’t go back to my village. I went to stay in Jaffna town instead. We couldn’t fish because of Navy restrictions and I needed money. The LTTE gave me money to take food to their camps. The military and police always kept watch on us. In 1990 my younger brother was taken away by the army. He’s never been seen since. In 2007 they kidnapped another brother. He was living in Jaffna. Seven days later we received a phone call to say he’d been found unconscious on the roadside and was in hospital, 150 kilometres south. They had stabbed him all over his body. They cut off most of his ear and cut his eye so badly it had to be taken out by surgery. Two years later they came for me. I had run away a couple of times before when they came. This time they arrested me at home just after I’d had a shower. My wife and children cried out loudly. They said they wouldn’t hurt me, just question 65

Scars on Kumar’s back following his torture.

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me and send me back. They tied my hands behind my back with handcuffs and shackled my legs. They took me in a van to the army base behind Jaffna hospital. KUMAR … After four days I heard one of them say in Tamil that they were going to finish me off. I was now on the floor, grabbing the leg of this man, begging him not to kill me. They wanted me to sign a document, something about the LTTE. I signed and soon after I was blindfolded, put in a van, driven for 20 minutes and pushed out. I took off my blindfold. I was on the side of a road. It was about midnight. My uncle had paid a bribe to get me out. If it wasn’t for thinking about my wife and kids back in Australia I wouldn’t have wanted to live through it. I had to stay alive for them. SUGI … In 2008 they released me on one condition; that I agree to become an informer for the army. I said ‘yes’ just to get out. I rang the TID officer and said I had to go back to my village. I changed my mobile phone number and disappeared. I got married in Colombo. We had a child. I worked for a few months in the Batticaloa region as a sales rep. A friend of a friend in the army warned me not to stay there. I went to India. I came back after two months and was living in Colombo. But every time I heard a motor cycle or saw police on the street I was scared. I couldn’t sleep. It was impossible to live like this. I went back to India. There was no safety there, either. Intelligence between Sri Lanka and India is strong. I heard many people were going to Australia. I found an agent. I needed $5500, which I got from my family. On October 14, 2010, I left on a boat from Karaikal port on the east coast in India. SELVAN … Once I got to the army base, they put me in a small cell. It was the size of a toilet and smelled like one. They removed the shackles but the handcuffs remained. I was there for twelve hours before three army people came to my cell. One was Tamil, a translator. He said 66

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I was alive only because of him. He said the others would have shot me but for him. He said I must tell them why I ran away, otherwise they will torture me. I told them I was scared. They kept asking if I was LTTE. I told me ‘no’ many times. They took me out of the cell and started bashing me with their guns and kicking me. They took a wooden pole and put it through my handcuffs and under my legs, which were shackled again. I was bent right over, hitched to the pole and unable to move. They kept kicking me and rolling me on the ground. I was bleeding from a lot of wounds. These sessions lasted for an hour on the first and last days I was there. After a week, they handed me to the police. They wrapped cloth on my head to cover the wounds. They kept me in an isolated police cell for the next eight months. There was no torture. The police said if I paid them 50 lakhs ($40,000) I would be released. My family sold the house and raised 25 lakhs ($20,000), which they agreed to take. KUMAR … My uncle paid money to the intelligence police to get me out of jail. Then he paid more to get me out of the airport and back to Melbourne. I left on April 10, 2013. On the plane back the fresh scars on my back were so painful I couldn’t sit back against the seat. A man next to me noticed this, and asked me what had happened. I told him I had been tortured. He seemed to know about these things. He said I should go straight to the police at customs in Melbourne and ask for asylum. I almost fainted at customs. But I did what he said. They took me into a room and I told them what had happened. I wanted to show them my scars, which were still bleeding. They said they were not interested and told me to find a lawyer. I went to a local doctor, who put me in touch with the Tamil Refugee Council. From there I began to get treatment, and made my application for a protection visa. SUGI … There were 63 people, including five or six children, on our boat that sailed from Karaikal for Australia. We left at 2 a.m. and had to stay out of sight inside the boat for the 67

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first day. We were allowed out the next evening. On the second day the engine broke down. The belt that drives the engine snapped. We had to use rope from fishing nets to replace the belt. The rope lasted about two or three hours before breaking and needing to be replaced. We had to bale water twenty-four hours a day as well. We had no food or water for five days. Our lives were saved on the fourteenth day when we met an Indonesian fishing boat. They gave use food, water and new belts. The trip to Christmas Island took 19 days. I have been through so much trauma. After torture I had no feeling in my hands or legs for six months. My back is ruined by being kicked. And then it got worse with 17 months in detention, and being treated like a sub-human. They didn’t even call us by name. The guards called us by a number relating to our boat and the position in the queue for the first interview. I was fiftyeighth of the sixty-three so I became ‘58’. It was very insulting. SELVAN … As soon as I was released I realised Sri Lanka was a very dangerous place for me to live. One brother has been disappeared and never found. Another has been bashed and tortured and left to die on the side of a road. He is now disabled and unable to work. Now they have tortured me. I had a discussion with my family and decided it was best for me to leave. I would be a dead man otherwise. My family found an agent to get me out of the country. I went by plane to Singapore in November 2009. I spent three days there and then went over the border into Malaysia. I spent two years there before going to Indonesia. Then I came to Australia by boat, arriving at Christmas Island in January 2012.

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Part Three

Oper ation E x termination

Chapter Six: Run for Your Life

It began with leaflets dropped from the sky by government air force planes, followed by government radio announcements. The message was simple and unequivocal. ‘You must go to the “No Fire Zone”, where you will be safe’. In the war-ravaged north, where life was getting more deadly by the day as the Sri Lankan Army advanced into the Tamil homeland regions in pursuit of the besieged Tamil Tigers, these leaflets were manna from heaven. Later, the Red Cross would spread the word on the ground, in the villages, schools churches and temples, adding significant credibility to it. To be granted a safe haven from the bombing, shelling, rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire, was an unexpected lifeline to thousands of Tamil men, women and children, and they reached out for it with every ounce of strength left in their wilting bodies. As soon as they were told of the locations of this zone by the government, on the north-east coast of the country, they loaded every truck, every car, every tractor, every auto-rickshaw, every bicycle and every broad back, and some not so broad, with their possessions and made haste for this promised land of peace and security. Suddenly, a wave of humanity surged along the roads and village pathways, through the jungle and forest tracks, all heading in the same direction, to the beach and lagoon areas of Mullaitivu district. By the time the march was completed, about 300,000 frightened people had sought refuge on a thirty-two square kilometre piece of ground between a main highway and a lagoon. Left: Thousands of people, and their worldly possessions, head for the No Fire Zone.

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The United Nations’ relief workers in their midst had earlier provided a measure of protection for many of these people. However, this ended four months earlier, in September 2008, when the Sri Lankan Government told these workers it could no longer guarantee their safety and they would have to leave. It was a threat backed up by Sri Lankan air force fighter jets and artillery deliberately bombing close to UN camps. Sadly, the UN hastily responded to this threat, departing the dangers of the LTTE long-time base of Kilinochchi, leaving thousands of desperate, innocent people without protection, and President Mahinda Rajapaksa with exactly what he wanted – a war without witness. The UN decision to withdraw further south to government-held territory in Vavuniya was condemned widely, by senior staff within its own ranks, and by workers on the ground who knew precisely what the outcome would be for the Tamil men, women and children frantically rattling the locked gates of the UN base and chasing after their trucks as they departed. ‘We begged them, we pleaded with them not to leave the area. They did not listen to us’, said a Tamil schoolteacher from Kilinochchi. ‘If they had stayed there, and listened to us many more people would be alive today’. Briton Benjamin Dix was one of those staff members solemnly peering through the dust at the protesting, frightened hordes as he rode a white UN truck out of Kilinochchi. ‘Having to drive out of there past these people wearing a helmet, wearing a flak jacket and all the protection that we have because we’re internationals, I’ve never been so ashamed of the colour of my skin. We should’ve gone further north, not evacuate south and basically abandon the civilian population without protection or witness’.45 Four years later, a report from a former senior UN official, Charles Petrie, offered a scathing assessment of the UN’s abrogation of responsibility to the Tamil people: ‘Hundreds of thousands BBC News report, November 2012.

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of Tamils ended up trapped in a tiny strip of land. The United Nations failed in its mandate to protect civilians …’ Petrie cites the telling words of a Sri Lankan human rights group less than a month after the departure. ‘Given the record of a state that has been bombing and shelling its civilians for over 20 years and freely uses killer squads, the UN knew what the people would confront once they left’. Incredibly, many senior UN staff in Colombo didn’t think it was their job to prevent the slaughter of civilians, and they received no instruction from HQ to make them think otherwise. History had forewarned Tamil people. Niromi de Soyza was a young Tamil schoolgirl in the 1980s who experienced the deceit of the Sri Lankan military warnings during the early stages of the civil war. ‘The air force often dropped leaflets from helicopters, warning of an air raid and ordering civilians to flee to a public landmark. Like most of our neighbours, we took shelter in our bunkers instead, as invariably those landmarks were the next target. Hospitals, schools, churches, homes, were not spared, often resulting in large civilian casualties’.46 This time, in 2009, the people did not have the luxury of choice. They had to take at its word a government it mistrusted and feared, and head to the No Fire Zone. They followed each other, carrying their children and their worldly goods, along with their justifiable suspicions. As they streamed in their thousands across the Vanni region towards Mullaitivu, the generals in the government war rooms tracked the exodus on satellite images, and stroked their moustaches. ‘One UN official privately concluded that the government had declared a safe zone only to concentrate civilians in one place and kill as many as possible’, wrote the former BBC Sri Lanka correspondent, Frances Harrison.47 This was not an isolated opinion but a common assessment by experts who studied the facts. ‘The idea of setting up an enclave to protect civilians, there’s Niromi de Soyza, Tamil Tigress, Allen & Unwin, 2011. Frances Harrison, Still Counting The Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Civil War, Portobello, 2012.

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nothing wrong with that. Except in Sri Lanka there is the very strong suspicion that in fact what this did was to package up groups of civilians who could then be easily targeted’, said Professor William Schabas, professor of international law and member of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission.48 As the fighting intensified, and the Sri Lankan military closed in on the remnants of a beaten LTTE and victory, the people were being gradually pushed into smaller zones. The government announced three No Fire Zones, the first was thirty-two square kilometres, the second was fourteen, and the final one three square kilometres; a tiny sliver of ground that would prove to be more deadly than any frontline. Unarmed Tamil men, women and children were being herded to their deaths by a government free to pursue its genocidal intentions, well away from the gaze of the long-departed UN ground staff and a largely ambivalent western media reporting from distant Colombo. The UN spokesman in Sri Lanka at the time, Gordon Weiss, later observed the meticulous planning behind the government intentions after the declaration of the second No Fire Zone. ‘From this point on the army plan was to drive people into a single corner of the Vanni from where nobody could escape …’49 By the time they had shifted to the final ‘safe zone’, on the beach near the village of Mullaivaikal, between the sea and the Nanthi Kadal Lagoon, there was barely a spare piece of ground upon which to rest and shelter or, as was ultimately to be most likely, to die.

Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, Channel 4 (UK), 2011. Gordon Weiss, The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers, Bodley Head, 2011.

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A family of eight finds a new home as the bombs and shells rain down. Picture from HRW.

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People scatter as another bomb hits Mullaitivu.

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Bombs would hit the No Fire Zone, smoke would rise and people would scatter in all directions.

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A woman carries her baby and her crippled husband’s prosthetic limb as a bomb explodes.

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A workman’s truck near Killinochchi is now an ambulance.

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Fearful civilians pour into the No Fire Zone on the beach at Mullivaikal.

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As the rain pours, so, too, do the people towards the No Fire Zone.

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Everybody pitched in to carry the family load.

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Pitch a tent and dig a trench, hoping to survive.

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Above: A desperate family in Mullaitivu searches for shelter. Top right: A broken-down trailer creates chaos on an escape route from the bombings. Bottom right: Displaced people head across a flooding river during the rainy season.

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Chapter Seven: Shot like Fish in a Barrel.

When people arrived in the No Fire Zones, the first thing they realised was that they were no safer than they were on the outside, where the rockets, the bombs and the bullets were taking away innocent life so randomly and so ruthlessly. Worse, they were trapped in every way – forced by government deceit on to a sandy peninsula between the sea, a lagoon and the merciless government army, air force and navy. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The Sri Lankan military had them where they wanted them, and proceeded to shoot them like fish in a barrel. No place was safe. Temporary shelters were set up in churches and schools. People flocked to them, hoping they and their families might somehow find respite. The sick, the injured and the dying tried to shut out the fear as they awaited their fate in their hospital beds. The Army’s supposed agreement to spare hospitals inside, or on the outskirts of the designated No Fire Zones, meant nothing. Courageous, pro-active doctors scaled hospital buildings with pots of red paint and daubed large red crosses on the roofs. In good faith, they sent the GPS co-ordinates to the Sri Lankan military headquarters in Colombo. To their horror, an hour or so later fighter jets screeched overhead, dumping their murderous payloads upon them, their nurses and their patients. Nearby artillery guns also chimed in with frightening accuracy, aided, as they were, with the precise location of the hospitals. There were sixty-five reported attacks on medical facilities during the final, frenzied assault.50 Once these 50

Interview with UN spokesman Gordon Weiss, in Callum Macrae, dir., No Fire Zone, 2013. Left: People live cheek by jowl in the No Fire Zone, sitting ducks for the army bombs and shells.

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actions were exposed to a stunned world, the government would make frantic, wild claims about the Tamil Tigers bombing the hospitals, or firing weapons from them. Evidence later showed LTTE guns were not situated near these hospitals, as claimed by government, and, with its sophisticated surveillance technology, it knew it. There was no doubting the intention of the military command. It was to wipe out as many Tamils as they could, no matter that the vast majority were injured, helpless civilians. The few surviving doctors had to live with the chilling thought that in their desperation to save lives they had probably inadvertently caused the deaths of hundreds of despairing patients and brave medicos. As they surveyed the smoking ruins of their hospitals and the torn and shredded bodies piled around them, they mourned their naivety in placing their trust in the humanity of the Sri Lankan Government and military commanders. Puyal had spent ten years working for the LTTE as a social worker in the northern and eastern regions. He was inured to the sights and sounds of war and death. Yet he still found it hard to believe what he was witnessing, as he rode his bicycle to the Ponnambalam hospital at 1.30 p.m. one day in early February 2009. He had come to visit a friend at the two-storey hospital, which, typically, was overflowing with victims of the war. About 500 badly wounded civilians and LTTE fighters were crammed into wards, corridors, verandahs, and yards. Suddenly he heard the deafening screech of the feared Kfir fighter jet. He wobbled to a halt on his bicycle and held his hands to his ears. They say that by the time you hear a Kfir over Vavuniya it’s already in Jaffna, 140 kilometres away. On this day, as always, they came as a pair. Four bombs were dropped with such swift precision that they were gone before the smoke began to rise. Puyal arrived ten minutes later. ‘People were lying everywhere amongst the bricks and broken glass, some with huge wounds to their stomachs and chests, others with 88

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legs and arms severed. The top floor had 150 patients, mostly amputees. A lot of them were dead’, he recalled.51 The ruins of these established hospitals were still smouldering as temporary ones were hurriedly set up. These, too, became targets. About 200 people were transferred to the Mullivaikal temporary hospital. By early May, it was a blood-drenched graveyard, having suffered several direct hits from artillery shells during a day-time pounding that lasted for at least an hour. Puyal watched the attack from about a kilometre away while he was helping bury bodies near the beach. ‘There were 250 people killed on the spot. I’m certain the army used phosphorous bombs in this attack. I saw several bodies where the skin on the face and the side was burnt and peeled off. The army kept saying there were LTTE guns around us, around these hospitals. It was a lie. There were none in the area’, he said. In the same week in early May 2009 people lining up for their daily meal of congee (rice and water) were killed by a shell strike. At least a dozen died. A few weeks earlier a temporary child health centre suffered the same fate. Puyal arrived to find the scattered body parts of mothers and their babies. This time he had thirty to bury. His friend found a baby, still alive, sucking on the breast of its dead mother. In the beginning, many months earlier, he had become quite emotional witnessing the carnage, but, as the finals weeks of inevitable terror unfolded all around him, the tears had dried up. ‘There was no point crying. Death was always around the corner. You got used to it’, he said. During the final weeks, he slept mostly in a bunker dug in the sand. Palm tree logs were cut to lay across the top for protection, bolstered by sandbags. He would share the tiny trench with about ten men, women and children. The air would quickly become putrid and they would take 51

Interview with the author in Australia, October 2013. Pseudonym used to protect his identity.

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turns to climb out and gulp some fresh oxygen. Puyal would sit and stare at the flashes of gunfire at night time, entranced by the fireworks, until a bullet whistled past and sent him scurrying back into his stinking hole in the ground. Huddled in their thousands in tents, trenches and foxholes on the beach, they constantly peered out towards the sea and thought about escape. It seemed a good idea at the time, until shells started pounding down upon them, fired from navy vessels out on the Indian Ocean. It was these attacks that Admiral Thisara Samarasinghe, then commander of naval operations in the north and east and later (as noted) Sri Lankan High Commissioner to Australia, who has been accused of war crimes by a number of respected organisations, including the International Commission of Jurists, was one of the men in charge of.52 Hemmed in on all sides, there was no escape from the murderous trap set by the Sri Lankan military. Death became an hourly occurrence in anyone’s immediate vicinity. The bodies of kids who had been flying kites lay in pieces along the beach; women carrying water were sliced in half by flying shrapnel and men desperately trying to dig new shelters in the ground were reduced to a grey, smouldering pile of ash by a direct hit from a shell. The badly wounded, whether they be women, children or grown men, lay on the sandy ground, writhing and moaning in agony, without access to medical aid. Medical supplies and food had been deliberately cut off by the government in order to create maximum pain, suffering and death. Doctors frantically telephoned, and sent SMS messages, to UN staff in Colombo, often in the middle of the night, saying they had no means of helping dying people.53 They got little or no response. Statement by International Commission of Jurists (Australian chapter), October 17, 2011. Petrie Report, United Nations, November 2012.

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Through a combination of callous indifference and abject incompetence, the UN had deserted these people in every possible way. The world body designated with the task of protecting the innocent had performed disgracefully by refusing to disclose to the world proper information from its on-the-ground workers that might have prevented this tragedy. If it had disclosed mounting civilian death tolls, for instance, it would have attracted the international attention needed to bring action from other nations. However they refused because of pressure from the Sri Lankan Government. A high level missive from the UN warned that a ‘bloodbath on the beaches of northern Sri Lanka seems an increasingly real possibility’. It was mid-April. All too late.54 For all its perceived impotence in world affairs these days, the UN has a mandated responsibility to use its massive resources to act, when possible, as ‘the moral conscience of the world’, as former UN official Edward Mortimer describes it. It was possible here, and it failed. ‘There was a responsibility to protect in Sri Lanka but unfortunately it didn’t get the publicity like in Libya. The north of Sri Lanka was destroyed field by field, street by street, hospital by hospital but we didn’t get that kind of reaction. Sri Lanka doesn’t have much oil and isn’t situated in the Mediterranean’.55 When Tamil people saw the swift reaction from global powers to the Libyan civil war crisis in 2011 and compared it to the pitiful UN response to the mass slaughter of civilians in their own country, they were left confused and disgusted. The Security Council, which was prevented from discussing the Mullivaikal massacre by the threat of veto from Sri Lankan Government backers China and Russia, unanimously voted for Libya to be referred to the International Criminal Court. ‘The contrast between that and the complete and utter silence and inaction on scores of thousands dead in Sri Lanka is absolutely striking. I think it BBC Radio interview, November 2012. Interview Edward Mortimer, BBC News Report, November 2012.

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is inexplicable and morally quite indefensible’, said Amnesty International’s advocacy director, Steve Crawshaw.56 The ‘whatever-it-takes’ philosophy that governed the actions of the government and military meant there was no end to the permutations of their killing machine. Starvation was an oft-used tactic, as was the denial of life-saving drugs and medicines and basic medical provisions. The UN reported that the government systematically deprived people in the conflict zone of humanitarian aid, in the form of food and medical supplies, particularly surgical supplies, adding to their suffering. To this end it purposefully under-estimated the number of civilians who remained in the conflict zone. Tens of thousands lost their lives from January to May 2009, many of whom died anonymously in the carnage of the final few days.57

The UN spokesman in Colombo, Gordon Weiss, captured the full extent of the horror through the observations of an anonymous International Red Cross official. The unnecessary suffering of the wounded was, according to one battle-seasoned ICRC official who helped to evacuate wounded civilians by ship from the beaches throughout the three-month siege, ‘the most terrible thing I have ever seen or imagined I might see.’ The government had apparently calculated it was better to let civilians die through lack of medicine rather than risk supplying the Tigers with drugs.58

Eventually the UN acted, when it was too late for tens of thousands of Tamil civilians mur­ dered by their own government. For their relatives it was little comfort to see an independent panel of experts commissioned by the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, in 2011 tell them Sri Lanka: The Killing Fields, Channel 4 (UK), 2011. UN Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts Report, March 2011. 58 The Cage, Gordon Weiss, 2011. 56 57

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what they already knew; that the government ‘shelled on a large scale in three consecutive No Fire Zones, where it had encouraged the civilian population to concentrate, even after indicating it would cease the use of heavy weapons’; that it ‘systematically shelled hospitals on the frontlines’; that ‘all hospitals in the Vanni were hit by mortars and artillery, some of them were hit repeatedly, despite the fact their locations were well-known to the government’; that it ‘shelled the UN food hub, food distribution lines and near the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) ships that were coming to pick up the wounded and their relatives from the beaches’; that it ‘shelled in spite of its knowledge of the impact, provided by its own intelligence systems and through notification by the UN, the ICRC and others’; and finally that ‘most civilian casualties in the final phases of the war were caused by Government shelling’.59 Centuries of brutal conflict on this earth leaves no-one in doubt about the human capacity for evil. But, in the final days of the Sri Lankan Army’s wipe-out of the Tamil Tigers, a president, his government and his military found it in them to plumb rare depths of depravity in war. The idea that military commanders, with the full support of their political bosses, could deliberately pour ground-based artillery and rocket-propelled grenades, along with bombs and shells from the air and sea, upon injured, frightened civilians in hospitals, schools and other temporary shelters is almost too horrible to contemplate. Yet it happened on a regular basis in the last few months of the war. It was pre-meditated and, pathetically, it is still denied by the men who hatched the plan, and who are justifiably accused by the United Nations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The consequences of war are anything but predictable but it takes a special mindset to subvert human decency so completely as Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government did in its obsessive desire to crush the life out of the Tamil resistance and its vast civilian population. 59

UN Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts report, March 2011.

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The scale of this avoidable tragedy begs so many questions. What goes through the minds of the perpetrators? Do they think of their own wives and children when they see these pictures of the scattered body parts of a baby; of the head lying on the ground fifty metres from the minced torso; of the man with his innards hanging out of his stomach waiting to die; of a little girl, a rare living and breathing being in this graveyard, in a futile rage, attempting to awaken her bleeding, dead mother? War is grotesque. But the bloody end to this conflict goes beyond anything you can imagine in this day and age. Fighter jets rained instant death upon men, women and children as they sheltered, not on a battlefield with arms, but many kilometres from the front lines, in a temporary hospital hurriedly erected on a village roadside. Deadly 152 mm howitzers pounded fire bombs loaded with shrapnel into a heaving mass of humanity on a beach, knowing they would sever the legs, arms and heads of unsuspecting children playing tiggy outside a trench, because they were bored and had forgotten all about their mother’s strict instructions not to leave the shelter while she fetched their meal 100 metres away at the food hub. Hospitals became prime targets with precise locations provided by doctors and charity workers in the belief that the laws of war would prevail and they would be used to avoid these places. Then, life-saving aid was deliberately kept from the innocents caught up in the conflict, knowing full well thousands would die as a result. Finally, once they had slaughtered between 40,000 and 70,000 innocent people cowering in their pitiful shelters, the murderers walked proudly along a red carpet to the man with the ultimate responsibility, saluted him and let him pin a medal upon their chests. It is more than war. It is genocide.

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A safe zone in Mullivaikal is reduced to a scene from Apocalypse Now.

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A man sleeps between bomb blasts on the beach in the No Fire Zone.

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People get ready to try to flee via the sea.

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Another anonymous victim of deadly shrapnel.

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A family mourns the loss of a son and brother in a temporary shelter in the No Fire Zone.

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Above: Like everyone around her in this makeshift hospital, an injured woman waits nervously for the next attack, wondering what it may bring. Right: A man is mortally wounded by an army attack and left in a bunker to die. The wound in this photo has been covered due to its graphic nature.

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Evidence of chemical weapons? Children walk past what is left of their incinerated neighbour’s property and family after a direct hit from a bomb.

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More bombs hit and a man, and his family, are stopped in their tracks.

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As the bombs and shells kept coming, people were literally driven into the water.

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People line up for food in the No Fire Zone. Thirty minutes later many of them were killed by a shell attack.

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Hunger was a big problem with children. Food would come maybe twice a week. It was mainly water and rice.

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The beach became a graveyard for thousands of civilians.

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The stench of decaying human flesh overwhelmed all else in this land of carnage as bodies piled up in villages, in fields and on roadsides, awaiting their miserable end in a mass grave. Every available truck and tractor was commandeered to dispose of the bodies. Even so, many thousands were left decomposing where they fell; a child face down and bloodied in a clump of grass, a woman’s torso half-upright against a rock, a man, perhaps her husband, lying near her, his legs sliced away at the moment of death by flying shrapnel. Amid this grim reality, people desperately trying to stay alive lost all sensitivity to their surroundings. They saw, they heard, they smelled nothing but death. Fly-blown bodies became part of the landscape, so common-place that they were hardly noticed; people stepped over them on the road or in scorched, barren fields, without breaking stride; they slept next to them in burrows and trenches and roadside hovels and didn’t even know it; they pushed them aside as they waded through putrid lagoons and mangroves. Such was the magnitude of the killing that it was impossible to avoid, or deny, its existence. Yet, as the Sri Lankan Army pursued its pre-meditated destruction of everything in its path, it continued to claim that it was pursuing a ‘zero civilian casualty’ policy. On May 18, 2009, the day after the war officially ended and thousands of bodies were strewn across the killing fields, President Rajapaksa told the country that the military had conducted a humanitarian operation that resulted in zero civilian casualties, other than those caused by the Tamil Tigers. Left: A devastated husband cannot come to terms with the death of his wife in a bombing.

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After the Kfir jets, cluster and bunker-busting bombs and its white phosphorous, the Sri Lankan military’s most important weapon was its propaganda unit and its capacity to bombard the world with shameless lies. The denials mounted, and became more incredulous, as the evidence of their atrocities became more obvious. It soon became clear that they had murdered many captured Tamil Tiger fighters as well as several leaders who had surrendered to them. Eye-witness accounts confirm two of the leaders, Nadesan and Pulidevan, along with ten other LTTE members, had walked into army custody, unarmed, in civilian dress and carrying a white flag, only to be seen dead in a ditch ninety minutes later.60 It would also be revealed later that the government soldiers had raped and shot several captured female soldiers, had raped and executed the Tamil Tigers TV newsreader and actress, Isaipuriya, after claiming she was killed in battle, and also shot to death – five times at point blank range – Balachandran Prabhakaran, the twelve-year-old son of the Tamil Tiger leader, after he was taken into army custody. Then there was the disappearance of Catholic priest Father Francis Joseph, who has not been seen since he was observed being placed on a bus on May 18, 2009, in the conflict zone, after discussions with army security officers. His case is officially listed by international agencies as a ‘crime against humanity’.61 According to the government, none of it happened. Eventually, it became so entangled in its web of blatant lies, it was forced to revert to type. After one of their own, General Sarath Fonseka, the army commander who became a presidential challenger at the election in 2010, said publicly he had been informed that the defence minister and brother of the president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, ordered the killing of all surrendering Tiger leaders,62 the once-revered International Crimes Evidence Project, February 2014. International Crimes Evidence Project, February 2014. 62 ‘Gota ordered them to be shot’, Sunday Leader, December 13, 2009. 60 61

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general was lambasted by the government as a traitor. He was later arrested, tried and found guilty of corruption, ‘spreading rumours and causing public disorder’ and jailed. No-one was surprised that he retracted his statement during this process.63 The problem for the perpetrators of these atrocities was that the world found it impossible to swallow the fiction of zero casualties and humanitarian motives, given the stark evidence of about 150,000 people missing, between 40,000 and 70,000 of whom had been killed by the Sri Lankan military in one small patch of territory. Thus, the scene of the final thrust in Mullivaikal, where these thousands of civilians died, soon became a target for a military desperate to hide the truth. Something had to be done about the mass graves that had been highlighted in international media and that contained so much evidence. A special acid that would dissolve bones quickly was imported from China. Local media reported that as the international crescendo about war crimes began to rise, the government disposed of the evidence by uncovering these graves and pouring in the acid. Within a short time, bone had turned to dust.64 Another method was to dig up the graves and dispose of the contents, which the military was still doing in systematic fashion well after the war, according to eye-witnesses working with the government’s death and burial registry.65 The desecration of graves continued around the north and east of the country after the war, with at least twenty-five Tamil war cemeteries, containing about 20,400 graves, deliberately bulldozed by the Sri Lankan military. And so too did the harassment of Tamil people who dared to commemorate their war dead, with many students, politicians and others being jailed for doing so.66 65 66 63

64

Petrie Report, United Nations, November 2012, pp.85–86. Sri Lanka Guardian, September 23, 2012. ‘Desecration on the mass graves at Mullivaikal’. International Crimes Evidence Project, February 2014. Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka website report, February 13, 2013.

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There would be no room for reconciliation as the victors danced on the Tamil grave. A clue to the mentality came in 2012 in the form of a military-built holiday resort, Lagoon’s Edge, alongside the final killing field of the war, where tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were murdered by government forces. It was boldly advertised in the Colombo press as an attraction for ‘war tourism’, where you could party the night away on a fancy teak dance floor next door to the stretch of water that only three years earlier was filled with the corpses of men, women and children who had failed to escape the Sri Lankan military onslaught in the No Fire Zones. When the president Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother, Gotabaya, the defence secretary, came to cut the ribbon and kick off the partying in late 2012, their beaming faces gave no hint that, really, they were two accused war criminals returning to the scene of their crimes in a grotesque display of indifference to their victims. Beyond the sickening disregard for the norms of human decency, this was, above all else, a brilliant illumination of the regime’s view of the Tamil place in Sri Lankan society. It is a strong, consistent theme in the history of Sinhalese domination in Sri Lanka, one which helped radicalise Tamil youth and send them in their thousands to the LTTE, itself in many ways a product of decades of Sinhalese oppression. Thus, the Sinhalese triumphalism that emerged after the war ended was entirely predictable, and as the UN declared, became a major obstacle to proper accountability and durable peace prospects. An environment conducive to accountability, which would permit a candid appraisal of the broad patterns of the past, including the root causes of the long-running ethno-nationalist conflict, does not exist at present. It would require concrete steps towards building an open society in which human rights are respected, as well as a fundamental shift away 112

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from triumphalism and denial towards a genuine commitment to a political solution that recognises Sri Lanka’s ethnic diversity and the full and inclusive citizenship of all of its people, including Tamils, as the foundation of the future. 67

It was of no account to the Rajapaksa clan, which has constantly ridiculed and rejected even the restrained international censure over their actions at the end of the war in 2009, and beyond. The regime’s commitment to its genocidal program against the Tamils has left no room for anything but perpetual terror. Those brave souls within the country who suggest the need for accountability and justice are branded as traitors, and suffer accordingly; those who do so from afar get the predictable label of terrorist sympathisers. In 2012, a day after the UN Human Rights Council passed a condemnatory resolution of Sri Lanka, a Rajapaksa cabinet minister, Mervyn Silva, publicly described some journalists and human rights workers as ‘traitors’ and threatened to ‘break their limbs’. He also claimed he personally hounded out of Sri Lanka a well-known journalist and government critic, Poddala Jayantha, who had been severely bashed before fleeing the country in 2009.68 Another journalist forced to flee, Frederica Jansz, who as, noted earlier, assumed the editorship of the Sunday Leader after the shooting death of editorin-chief, Lasantha Wickrematunge, on his way to work in 2009, described Rajapaksa’s stifling of the privately owned media as his next best success story after winning the war. ‘They have all fallen into line, cowered into submission and subjugation’.69 The triumph of Rajapaksa has been to commit ghastly war crimes against his own people and, rather than being subjected to condemnation and legal moves to send him to The Hague, UN Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts Report, March 2011. BBC News report, March 23, 2012. 69 Interview with Journalists For Democracy in Sri Lanka website, September 24, 2012. 67

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gained celebrity at home and acceptance abroad. What happened in Mullivaikal in 2009 has the indelible stamp of state-sanctioned mass murder upon it. These were men consumed by evil. Others have massacred more innocent people over time, but the Rajapaksa regime will stand forever in infamy for the slaughter of between 40,000 and 70,000 people in the space of a few months.

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A husband pleads for aid for his badly injured wife in a temporary hospital in No Fire Zone. His wife was later taken by the army to another hospital. She has never been seen since. When he made inquiries he was arrested by police. He spent four years in jail, where he was tortured and beaten. He now has mental health issues.

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Doctors said so many died in shell attacks because they were crammed so closely together.

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A husband weeps for his injured wife.

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Injured people jammed like sardines on the beach wait for treatment in this hospital.

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A husband and wife are in shock after the loss of a child.

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A man believed to be burnt by a phosphorous bomb waits by the roadside for medical help.

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A bomb leaves a deadly trail. Sometimes there were more dead than living in an area after an attack.

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A little girl receives treatment in a temporary hospital in a No Fire Zone after suffering head injuries in a bombing.

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A little boy tries to console his mother as she grieves over her shattered family in a temporary shelter.

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A young boy recovers alongside his grandmother in a Vavuniya hospital.

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Another victim waits in a shelter for an ambulance after another bombing in the No Fire Zone.

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Two young girls, believed to be sisters, recover from their wounds sustained in a bombing attack.

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A distressed mother tries to deal with her youngest son as his dead brother lays with the family.

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Part Four

The Living De ad

Left: War amputees wait for processing at an internment camp.

Chapter Nine: Welfare, Rajapaksa-Style

As thousands of disoriented, wounded, suffering civilians poured out of the No Fire Zones after the guns fell silent on May 18, they were pipelined directly to internment camps in nearby Vavuniya district. The Sri Lankan military officially termed the infamous Manik Farm and other smaller camps as ‘welfare centres’. It was a typical distortion of the facts, a necessary tool of a government desperate to mislead the world about its genocidal actions, and intentions, against the Tamil population. As the 300,000 people incarcerated there for up to three years knew, and the rest of the world now knows, their welfare was the last thing on the minds of their captors. Indeed, several internationally renowned political commentators, including Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy, thought ‘concentration camp’ was a more appropriate description.70 The visual images, and unending tales of human misery, left no doubt about the true nature of the sprawling camps used to control the Tamil population after the war. Across 700 hectares of cleared forest, men, women and children were held like captive animals for years behind barbed wire; watched over by sneering armed guards ready to torture, bash, rape and intimidate the helpless inmates at a moment’s notice. Lecture by Noam Chomsky at School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, October 2009. Arundhati Roy, Guardian, April 2009.

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Left: Internees push against barbed wire fence trying to spot visiting relatives. Joe Klamar/Getty Images photo.

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Locked away with no freedom of movement, the people faced rampant disease as raw sewage flowed through tents during heavy rain. People without proper shelter died from exposure to wet and humid conditions. Children were killed in pit toilet collapses and young women were randomly selected for gang-rape sessions at night. There was no equivocation from the UN about what was really happening behind those endless kilometres of barbed wire. The Government subjected victims and survivors of the conflict to further deprivation and suffering after they left the conflict zone. Screening for suspected LTTE (members) took place without any transparency or external scrutiny. Some of those who were separated were summarily executed, and some of the women may have been raped. Others disappeared, as recounted by their wives and relatives during (government) Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission hearings.71

Puyal, the LTTE social worker, walked out of Mullivaikal on May 17, as the last firestorm took hold of the small strip of beach that had been the final No Fire Zone. There was an artillery attack that set everything alight in my area. The tents went up in flames. I saw some friends and started walking towards the army lines. There were many wounded people and amputees with us. They dragged themselves along on their hands for two kilometres. We came to an open area there with about 2500 people behind barbed wire. We were held there for two days in 35 degree heat, with no food or water. After two days they did health checks and took us on a bus to Omanthai, near Vavuniya. We waited there for four hours. Finally we got some food; rice and vegetable curry. Then they made announcements in Tamil with loud hailers, telling all people who had connection with 71

UN Secretary-General Panel of Experts Report, March 2011.

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LTTE to step aside. They said if we don’t we will spend 15 years in jail. They said everyone would be forgiven. We were taken to rehabilitation camps. At one time I was blind-folded and had my hands tied for seven days. They hit me but I was lucky. Many were taken away and killed. Others with me were threatened and bashed regularly. I didn’t get too much trouble because I knew how to answer their questions.

Puyal was incarcerated for two years, spending time in four different camps. The government worked assiduously to keep their crimes from the prying eyes of international observers. Just as it was determined to have a war without witness, its post-war actions would be hidden from the world. UN attempts to exercise its legitimate right to protect the interests of surrendered fighters and civilians were rebuffed at every turning. The government kept the UN and all non-government organisations on the other side of the wire, allowing very little contact with the internees. On the few occasions it happened, gun-toting soldiers hovered over any meetings.72 As much as they wanted to keep the UN at bay, they were forced to allow the big boss, Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, to visit a section of Manik Farm in May 2009. He got a carefully guided tour of a spruced-up section of the camps. Even so, he was taken aback by the conditions. ‘I have travelled around the world and visited similar places but this is by far the most appalling scene I have seen’, he later told the media. Two months later, senior international aid workers were reporting that 1400 people were dying every week in the camp.73 Eventually, the UN was able to confirm the full extent of the horror. Petrie Report, United Nations, November 2012, pp.76–77. Rhys Blakely, London Times, July 10, 2009.

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Massive overcrowding led to terrible conditions, breaching the basic social and economic rights of the detainees, and many lives were lost unnecessarily. Some persons in the camps were interrogated and subject to torture. Suspected LTTE were removed to other facilities, with no contact with the outside world, under conditions that made them vulnerable to further abuses.74

A woman who experienced the hell of the camps was former LTTE worker, Dr Naguleswaran Malathy, who spent four months in Manik Farm. The military with guns or batons in hand treated all of us like criminals. The military did not hesitate to use them to beat men and women and even the elderly. When the military was angered they liberally used their boots, too, to attack people. No-one dared complain about the military excesses.

Malathy described one typical scene in which a Tamil man delivering medicine to a clinic was stopped by a soldier after being wrongly suspected of selling it. The enraged military man kicked the employee in his face and stomach several times with his boots. It was only after the military man was too tired to deliver any more kicks that he stopped. Several of us witnessed this in close quarters, frozen in fear. When the scene was cleared, I asked one senior government employee inmate if this misconduct ought to be reported. I was told that if I attempted anything like that I would ‘disappear’.

She recalled seeing an old man squatting on the Zone 3 side of the gravel road looking through the barbed wire into Zone 2. ‘A military person walking past called the old man on to the road and started beating him. It was clear to me that the beating was purely for sadistic 74

UN Secretary-General Panel of Exports, March 2011.

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pleasure’. The general contempt by the authorities for Tamil people played out in so many ways. ‘Sometimes, when a Sinhala cabinet minister visited the camp, the convoy of Sinhala video teams that came with him would throw food at the people and then video with amusement as the people scrambled for the food that fell on the ground’.75 Preventable deaths in the camps were commonplace and the reaction of the Sinhalese soldiers predictable, as an American lawyer from the University of Virginia, Calleigh McRaith, discovered during a fact-finding tour of Sri Lanka in 2012. One detainee told him of several people who had died because their illnesses were not considered sufficiently serious for a trip to the hospital. Bodies would be buried immediately. Funerals were not permitted.76 One of the world’s foremost authorities on international law and a powerful campaigner for the Sri Lankan Government to be tried for war crimes, Professor Francis A. Boyle, alerted the world to the horror of the Tamil genocide and these death camps in 2009. ‘Reports indicate nearly 1400 people die in a week in these camps and that the conditions within the camps are very similar to those in Nazi internment camps’.77 No matter how aggressively and how often the government repeated the lie that these camps were part of a humanitarian assistance program, the propaganda could never hide the stark reality. As Dr Malathy observed: If there was any doubt that the Manik farm camps were anything other than prisons, the procedure in place for outside visitors to meet detainees will clear away that doubt. Across a divide, separated by barbed wire, the inmates and visitors had to identify and signal each Dr N. Malathy, A Fleeting Moment in My Country: The Last Years of the LTTE De-Facto State, Clear Day Books, 2012. Calleigh McRaith, ‘Arbitrary Detention in Sri Lanka: Internment, Rehabilitation, and Surenderees in the Prison System’, Groundviews, February 2012. 77 Interview with Professor Francis Boyle, University of Illinois, in Indian magazine Dalit Murasu, August 2009. 75 76

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other that they would enter the meeting area. The actual meeting area was divided by iron sheets up to the chest, and above it were wooden grills similar to what one would find in a prison. The visitors and inmates could talk through this grill … One was permitted only around twenty minutes maximum to talk because there were hundreds more waiting. The waiting area for Zone 3 visitors had no shade and they would be waiting in the burning sun for hours.78

It was three and a half years before the Sri Lankan Government finally succumbed to global pressure and closed the last of the camps; pressure that was largely due to the efforts of Tamil activists, journalists and photographers, often taking personal risks to gather the evidence and present it to an international community that had been averting its eyes to the plight of the internees, as to so many other post-war issues in the country, for so long. The world is now aware that the camps were nothing more than an extension of the abuse and degradation, of Tamils by Sinhalese rulers, which has been embedded in the military culture for generations. Trying to play the world for suckers, with their language and their secrecy, the Sri Lankan Government could not fool anyone for very long, and have found their place in history alongside so many other vile regimes that have used such camps as part of their genocidal policies.

Dr N. Malathy, A Fleeting Moment in My Country.

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A group of hungry detainees in a camp set up in a Vavuniya school are forced to battle each other for food being distributed from a government truck.

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A father left without his wife tries to shelter his sick baby from the searing heat in Manik Farm.

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A volunteer teacher takes a class in a makeshift school in Manik Farm. Sri Lanka Government photo.

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Children get together for some light relief from the harsh camp regimen.

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A young boy left to fend for himself shelters from the heat in Manik Farm.

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Families find a patch of ground to live on after being locked away in Manik Farm. UNHCR photo.

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Thousands of people were herded into these places and treated worse than cattle. The food smelled, the toilets smelled, everything smelled. SOS Children’s Village photo.

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A small creek carries raw sewage through a section of Manik Farm. Dengue fever, chicken pox, malaria and diarrhoea were very common in the camps. UK DFID photo.

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A typical block of temporary toilets at Manik Farm. These places could be death traps. Children fell in and died.

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The ablutions block in one camp in Manik Farm. Men, women and children had to wash in the same place. UK DFID photo.

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A woman gets her ration of milk at the food hub in Manik Farm. Milk was in such short supply it was more valuable than gold.

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Chapter Ten: Children Lost

The question was unspoken but it was always there in the eyes of the children and, always, it was the same. Why? Gorgeous dark eyes that should have been dancing with delight at life’s prospects were devoid of sparkle, of hope, of innocence. These were the eyes of Sri Lanka’s lost children; knowing, wearied eyes that barely flickered at their surroundings because they had seen too much pain, too much anguish, too much death. Staring blankly into the distance, they expected only more tragedy, more loss, more inexplicable horror. When the Sri Lankan military deliberately bombed hospitals and schools with such relish, they knew they were inflicting more terror upon a civilian population already paralysed by fear. But, worse, they knew so many of their victims would be helpless children and infants. On any given day at school, these children would run from their classrooms at the first rumbling of the Kfir jets in the distant sky. After the first bombing raid had killed and maimed a good portion of the students, and created mayhem among the survivors, the jets would swoop again, taking careful aim at the terrified children, in their unmistakable white uniforms, scattering in all directions across the school grounds. Then, with the body parts of dead and injured children strewn everywhere, the pilot would withdraw, satisfied with the completion of another day’s work, and no doubt in line for a commendation for bravery, or even a medal. Perhaps over dinner at home he might casually Left: A dazed, terrified young girl injured in a shell attack is comforted at a makeshift hospital.

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pull it out, and show his wife and his own little children who would look up at their father with pride, not knowing that he was really a mass murderer of children. Hundreds of children were incinerated or blown apart in an instant in these raids, others were left without limbs, or eyesight. Those that somehow survived were left to face the loss of their brothers, their sisters, their mothers, their fathers. Suddenly there was no-one but a stranger to cling to in the middle of the night when they cried out in fear; their lives shattered before they had barely begun. Tamil children had long been seen as legitimate targets by the Sri Lankan military. On the night of August 13, 2006, about 400 teenage girls went to bed at the Senchcholai school amid the sounds of night-time monkey business, and distant elephant trumpeting in the lush green jungle of the LTTE-controlled Vanni region, excited at the prospect of the next seven days they would spend together learning all sorts of life skills, such as first-aid and leadership. By 8 o’clock the next morning, fifty-two of them would be dead, and 130 others left with all kinds of shocking injuries that included gaping head wounds and severed arms and legs. It was the result of a raid by Sri Lankan Air Force fighter jets, scrambled into action by a government order that this school full of unsuspecting children was an LTTE training base. The international outrage was led by the UN, which stated this was definitely a school, not a camp for Tamil Tiger fighters, and these girls were innocent victims of a government massacre. The government response was predictable. It expressed outrage at the outrage, and kept children firmly in its gun-sights. For the children who survived the holocaust of Mullivaikal, three years after Senchcholai, there would be no respite from the terror. They would become part of the forced transportation to the internment camps, where more than 300,000 Tamils were incarcerated for as long as three years after the war. 150

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Dr Naguleswaran Malathy saw the effects on children first-hand during her incarceration from March to July 2009. During those four months in the camp it was the condition of the children at the camp that I found most depressing. Take the eight-tent group where I was staying. Five of the tents had children under ten. One child died, one became seriously ill and was taken away to Vavuniya hospital and all the other children had frequent fever, vomiting and diarrhoea. Some of the children had persistent skin disease, four contracted Hepatitis A. Newborn babies were sent from hospitals, just a few days after being born, into camp conditions, which were unsuitable even for adults. Toddlers played in the filthy area right in front of the toilets. I had never seen flies and mosquitoes in such numbers in my life. While eating, one hand was fully occupied with chasing the flies; a practice that children would not adopt, thus consuming food contaminated by flies that came straight from the toilets very nearby.79

Fear that the world might discover all of this once again forced the perpetrators to go to considerable lengths to hide their atrocities. As president Mahinda Rajapaksa was declaring that the final victory had been achieved without any civilian casualties, his brother, Gotabaya, the Defence Minister, issued bans on visitors to hospitals, other than relatives of patients, to try to stop the real story getting out. However, he was like the boy with his finger in the dyke. The truth began to burst forth within days of the end of the war as the media and international welfare agencies began to see for themselves what had taken place. A reporter from the London Guardian newspaper, Gethin Chamberlain, was thrown out of the Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children in Colombo in May 2009, but not before witnessing 79

Dr N. Malathy, A Fleeting Moment in My Country.

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a distressing example of the horror that had been inflicted upon so many children by the Sri Lankan military. The ward on the sixth floor, where some of the most seriously injured children are being treated, was a depressing sight. Small children with amputated limbs, gunshot wounds and burns lay in cots around the ward. The matron said they had received many such cases, brought down from the war zone for treatment in the specialist children’s hospital, but she could not say how many. ‘This girl was shot in the stomach,’ she said, gesturing to the child screaming in the cot by the window. ‘The stitches are from where the doctors removed the bullet.’ Other children sat on chairs at the side of the ward, a girl with her arm in plaster, a boy with what appeared to be burns. Others lay in cots with gauze and bandages on their wounds …

A spokesperson for the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Sri Lanka, Bhavani Fonseka, gave an insight into the post-war mentality of the Rajapaksa regime, which was governed by the ridiculous ‘zero casualty’ statements. ‘There is a policy of “don’t talk, keep it under wraps.” But the truth is that there are so many injured that they have had to ship them to hospitals around the country. It is huge numbers if you look at the kids spread around the hospitals’, she said. During her trips to hospitals, she saw many children who had lost both arms or both legs. ‘We are going to have a generation of amputees’.80 The war had stopped but the victims continued to mount. A little boy and his sister found what they thought was a piece of scrap metal they could sell in their village in the north. They had no idea it was an unexploded ‘bomblet’ from a cluster bomb. They began to try to pull it apart. The boy died; his sister somehow survived her injuries. (It was the first hard evidence 80

Guardian, May 25, 2009.

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that Sri Lanka had used this frighteningly efficient weapon, which is packed with mini-bombs meant to scatter far and wide on impact. Many countries have banned cluster bombs, but not Sri Lanka, or the US, which secretly advised Rajapaksa’s military to use them. As usual, another blustering government denial, this time that it used cluster munitions, including inside No Fire Zones jam-packed with terrified civilians, could not hide the hard facts presented in UN reports.)81 As the world began to question what was happening to the children in the aftermath of the war, the Sri Lankan Government had the same predictable response. A good example of it came with the case of the Australian spokesman for the UN children’s fund, UNICEF, James Elder, who had his visa cancelled for drawing attention to the plight of children. Shortly before he was labelled a terrorist sympathiser and thrown out of the country, Elder told the world: ‘Children have suffered horrendously and disproportionately. They are bearing the brunt of a conflict which is not theirs. They are being killed, they are being injured, they are horribly traumatised, and they are short of clean water and medicines’. These innocents had seen all kinds of terrible things. They suffered horrific injuries. They had watched their parents die or become separated from them. Nine-year-old Thevaki was lucky to escape with her life. ‘I don’t remember anything. I just remember the blood’, she said from her hospital bed in Vavuniya, pointing to the bandaged shrapnel wound on her head. Doctors said that the wounds would heal but the damage to her mind from enduring ten days of constant shelling, and death all around her, in Mullaitivu, was inestimable.82 Like so many children, she would look up from her hospital with pleading eyes, asking Why? It was the one question no-one could answer. 81

Ravi Nessman, ‘UN finds cluster bombs in Sri Lanka’, Associated Press, April 26, 2012. Irin agency news report, Vavuniya, February 18, 2009.

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A girl frets for her parents in a temporary hospital after being injured and separated during another savage bombing in the No Fire Zone.

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Hundreds of interned children suspected of having family links to the Tamil Tigers were separated from their parents and made to sit in the hot sun for hours awaiting interrogation.

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Left to right: A little girl seeks comfort under a blanket from the terror all around her in a temporary hospital; a boy with stomach injuries from a shell attack finds safety in his mother’s arms; a father agonises over his dead child after a direct hit on a temporary shelter in the No Fire Zone.

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Children seek shelter as Kfir jets roar overhead.

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Shrapnel from a bomb fired into the No Fire Zone renders a baby girl blind for the rest of her life.

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A terrified mother feeds her baby daughter who has sustained head injuries during a shell attack on the No Fire Zone.

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A twelve-year-old boy is lost and bewildered after a temporary hospital was heavily bombed in the No Fire Zone.

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A distraught baby girl watches over her mother in a temporary hospital.

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A young victim of a shell attack comes to terms with the loss of his arm after surgery at PTK hospital, which was bombed soon after a Tamil photographer took this shot.

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Chapter Eleven: Military Meat

The Sri Lankan military brutalised the most defenceless people in its murderous path. Along with injured and dying patients in hospitals, children in schools, and incapacitated elderly people, women were an easy target for the rampaging Rajapaksa soldiers. There is incontrovertible evidence to show they raped and slaughtered female Tamils, making no distinction between captured fighters and civilians. The US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, alerted the world to these horrific crimes, telling the UN Security Council in September 2009, that rape had been used as a tactic of war in Sri Lanka. The distressing scenes of Sinhalese soldiers gloating over the dead bodies of Tamil women in the highly acclaimed British documentaries Sri Lanka’s Killings Fields, and No Fire Zone, illustrated the monstrous depths an army can reach when it knows it is free of international oversight and operates with total impunity. During one scene, a Sri Lankan Army soldier is heard saying of one dead women that he ‘would like to fuck it again’ as his colleagues took trophy videos of the near-naked bodies of Tamil women they had just raped and murdered. Another video shows the LTTE television news reader and actress, Isaipriya, half-naked but alive as she is taken prisoner by the army in a swamp. She is later shown dead, with deep wounds across her face and clear signs she was raped before being killed. Yet the Sri Lankan Government claimed she was a fighter who was killed in battle.83 83

Video footage from Channel 4 news, London, November 1, 2013. Left: Tears of sadness overwhelm this woman as she joins a public call for news of missing family.

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Tamil women have had to bear the brunt of such sickening military violence for years; before, during and after the war. A Tamil refugee in Australia, Sugi, saw first-hand the SLA modus operandi in villages near his home in Batticaloa. The army would circle the village with one unit to make sure no-one escaped. Then another unit of soldiers would start door-knocking. Young men were taken away in vans to jail and probably torture, young women would often be raped in front of their families and if there were any nursing mothers, the soldiers would cut their breasts, sometimes right off, with knives so they couldn’t feed their babies.84

The soldiers prayed on the vulnerability of women at every turning. The story of eighteenyear-old Krishanthi Kumarsamy first alerted the world to the sinister ways of the all-Sinhalese military in Tamil regions. She was a student who went missing in 1996 soon after taking an examination at her school in Jaffna and being taken away at a military checkpoint she had to pass on her way home. Three soldiers raped her after she was whisked out of sight. She fell unconscious and when she revived, police officers and six soldiers began raping her. Her mother, a school vice-principal, heard from neighbours about her daughter’s detention at the checkpoint. She went immediately to the army base, with her sixteen-year-old son and a thirty-five-year-old male neighbour. It was later reported the three of them were strangled with a rope, hacked into pieces and buried in a hut in the camp.85 After international pressure, from organisations such as Amnesty International, was brought to bear on the government, four bodies were discovered in shallow graves in the army camp, Interview in 2012 by author with Sugi, a Tamil refugee in Australia. ‘Sugi’ is a pseudonym to protect his identity. Sri Lanka Sunday Times, November 3, 1996.

84 85

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and several soldiers were convicted. However, it did nothing to stop the rapes and murders of innocent women and girls, which remain part of the Sri Lankan Army culture today. Once the war ended, and about 300,000 Tamils were interned in concentration camps, women again became easy prey for their military overseers. They were subjected to all kinds of indignity and embarrassment. They were strip-searched and forced to go to the toilet in front of male soldiers.86 Camp soldiers would brazenly stand checking people who were queuing for security assessments as well as food and water, looking for attractive young females. They would be taken for ‘investigation’ and often not seen again. Maravan, who took some of the photographs in this book, gained detailed inside knowledge as he toured the camps in his role as a social worker. ‘So many women were taken for investigation’, he explained. The soldiers would come for them in the middle of night, and many of these women who went to these midnight investigations became pregnant. They had to go to sexual treatment centres and some were taken to safe houses run by the Catholic Church. They would be kept there until they gave birth. If they didn’t want the child they would leave it there. Many did so. There were women as young as 15. If you told them your husband was a Tamil Tiger you were raped as well.

More than four years after the war there was still a massive army presence in the Tamil regions in Sri Lanka. One reputable Indian journal, the Economic and Political Weekly, reported that there was one soldier for every five people in the north.87 Women could not walk the streets at night for fear of rape and intimidation. A Tamil woman who sought asylum in Australia Calleigh McRaith, ‘Arbitrary Detention in Sri Lanka: Internment, Rehabilitation, and Surenderees in the Prison System’, Groundviews, February 2012. 87 Economic and Political Weekly, July 2012. 86

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explained the dangers for females in the north. Durga is a widowed grandmother in her late forties from Trincomalee, an area where the Tamil Tigers enjoyed strong support. Her three daughters and her nine-year-old grandson arrived with her at the detention centre on Christmas Island in May 2013. Her husband was in the Tamil Tigers before they were married in the 1990s but she said he was not involved in combat after marriage. ‘He was taken away in a white van in 1997 and is on the missing list’, she said, adding that she was accused of organising remembrance events for Tamil Tiger war dead and has been harassed by CID officers. Last year, around October, the army took two of my daughters into custody for twenty-four hours and sexually assaulted them. When they came another time I told my daughters to hide. They took me instead. They slapped me and beat me but they didn’t do any sexual torture. They just talked sexually to me. I’m very scared about my daughters’ lives if they were sent back to Sri Lanka.88

Rape as a weapon of torture became common in Tamil life. Respected, experienced investigators of these abuses, such as Human Rights Watch, have detailed scores of these crimes, directly from the mouths of the victims. One report it issued in 2013 carried the chilling, selfexplanatory title of ‘We Will Teach You A Lesson: …’ There were seventy-five case histories in this report. One told of a thirty-two-year-old woman who, as with so many, was suspected of LTTE connections: She said she was detained by two plainclothes men who stripped her and photographed her naked. ‘They told me to confess about everything. I refused to confess as I thought they would kill me. I was beaten up and tortured continuously. On the second day a man came to Interview, through interpreter, with the author. Durga is a pseudonym to protect her identity.

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my room and raped me. I was raped by different men on at least three days. I can’t remember how many times’.89

The punishment continued years after the war for many Tamil women, who watched their families disintegrate before their eyes as their husbands, sons and daughters were killed or disappeared by the army. The conflict created more than 40,000 widows under 40. Four years after the war they were living daily with the fear of sexual harassment and rape in the militarised north, where an estimated 198,000 military and security forces were stationed three years after the war.90 The UN Human Rights Commissioner, Navi Pillay, joined a chorus of unheeded voices in 2013 saying she was ‘very concerned about the vulnerability of women and girls, especially in female-headed households, to sexual harassment and abuse’.91 Thousands made deputations to local officials pleading for news about their lost relatives. They tried to petition Pillay when she visited, only to be herded away and later intimidated and questioned by the military. By placing her hand to her ear to one group in Trincomalee and motioning them to whisper to her, she openly acknowledged their fears about telling their stories while plain-clothed security men watched over them. In a society warped by triumphalism and military domination, there is no news, no accountability, no truth, no justice. Just government lies and a wilful blindness from an international community that one day will be forced to face the fact that it has been complicit in genocide.

Human Rights Watch report, ‘We Will Teach You A Lesson: Sexual violence against Tamils by Sri Lankan security forces’, February 26, 2013. 90 Economic and Political Weekly, July 2012. 91 Press briefing by UN Human Rights commissioner Navi Pillay, Colombo, August 31, 2013. 89

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A group of devastated women plead for help to trace missing relatives at the Kali temple in Kurumankadu in September 2012.

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A woman lights candles at a memorial in Vavuniya in 2010 for many people killed in the area. Many of these memorials were later destroyed by the army.

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Above: Women hold coconuts as offerings to Hindu gods as a distressed woman prays for news of her missing family at the gathering at Kali temple. Right: A woman whose child was killed by the army vents her anger against the SLA war machine.

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Pregnant women and new mothers displaced by war line up for medical checks at a welfare post in Vavuniya. UNFPA Photo.

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A war-displaced woman sleeps by a road in the Vanni while her baby takes a nap in a sari suspended from a tree.

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With their wrinkled faces betraying the resignation that comes with a lifetime of war and persecution, they could be found sprawled sleeping at a bus station or an abandoned shop, or trapped in a wheelchair, going nowhere along bitumen roads or red dirt pathways. Amid the cataclysmic conclusion to the war in the north of Sri Lanka in 2009, and its aftermath, clusters of disoriented elderly people sought refuge anywhere they could; grandfathers and grandmothers, without food, a home or hope of re-uniting with their families. ‘So many old people became separated from their families, became lost, or were abandoned. You saw them every day totally adrift and disorientated. As well as horrible physical injuries, so many were suffering mental problems and they had no-one to help them’, said Maravan, the Tamil social worker who took some of the photographs in this book.92 The dignity and respect traditionally afforded to the elderly in Asian cultures became another casualty in the climax to a brutal war in which the Sri Lankan military deliberately targeted civilians. Louisa Arulamma Thambiraja, a ninety-nine-year-old great grandmother, became another desperate refugee, fleeing the advancing Sri Lankan Army as it continued on its deadly path near her home in the Killinochchi district. Unable to make the journey on foot, her sons and grandsons – she has eight sons, twelve grandsons and six great-grandchildren – carried her on a chair for most of the way. 92

Interview with the author, May 2013.

Left: This man was sharing floor space with 800 other patients in a makeshift hospital in a school in the No Fire Zone when it was bombed. He knows he’s lucky to be alive.

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Things were deteriorating by the minute, there was shelling from all sides. I never expected to survive. Every second was like a life-time there. My sons were carrying me. We could not stay in one place too long. It was very difficult. Food was hard to find. Going to the toilet was risking death. It is with God’s grace that I am here, nothing else. I don’t know how I made it out. It was terrible. There were people everywhere running scared. I just closed my eyes every time there was a loud sound. I never expected to open them. It was like a very long, very bad dream.93

The bad dream continued when the Sri Lankan Army decided that not even a woman in her one-hundredth year would be spared the horror of the internment camps at Manik Farm. This was a place where, for example, four families lived in a three-metre square room, where up to sixty people were forced to use one toilet, where queues for drinking water were as long as two kilometres and where drinking water was shut off for as long as five days because internees spoke to employees from a non-government organisation investigating camp conditions.94 It was also the place where ninety-nine-year-old Louisa Arulamma Thambiraja was interned with her family from April 2009 to January 2010. ‘Initially I slept on a mat on the ground in the refugee camp. It was difficult for me, so I arranged a few suitcases on the ground and slept on them. I found this was better’. After surviving the horror of the war, and then the hardship of nine months of internment, she was released and returned to live with relatives in Colombo, where she celebrated her hundredth birthday in February 2011. ‘I have seen things that I never thought I would in my life, so much death, so much destruction. I have heard heart-rending tales of human suffering’.95 Irin news agency report, March 1, 2010. ‘Arbitrary Detention in Sri Lanka’, report by Calleigh McRaith, February 14, 2012, University of Virginia School of Law. 95 Dushiyanthi Kanagasabapathipillai, World Pulse agency report, February 21, 2011. 93 94

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The end of the war signalled only the beginning of more pain and suffering for elderly Tamils as they found themselves locked behind barbed wire, and then, in many cases, upon release, left to exist on the streets in abject poverty and poor health. Three years after the war, there were more than 30,000 people over the age of 60 in the Vanni, the large area once controlled by the Tamil Tigers and suddenly swarming with Sri Lankan military. Many of these people were alone, without access to adequate health care and nutrition. As a sixty-one-year-old grandfather from Kilinochchi, Veeran Pandaran, said: ‘Life is certainly safer now, but we’ve been left to fend for ourselves. There is nothing to help people like me. It’s as if we are not important’.96 In July 2013 a sixty-nine-year-old Tamil woman, Kathaye, died in prison after being incarcerated for nineteen years. Her final years were marked by spinal cancer, rampant bedsores and constant rejection of her basic medical needs. She died alone, in chronic pain. Her crime was to provide food to LTTE cadres during the war in 1994. Her story was not unique. ‘The condition of thousands of Tamil political prisoners, including women, who have been languishing in prisons for more than 15 years is pathetic. Some of them are elderly and sick’, the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission in Jaffna reported in October 2013.97 An entire generation of older Tamils has known nothing but a life of death, destruction and persecution, initially through the murderous violence of government-inspired pogroms, then through almost three decades of civil war and, finally, the hellish blow from the Sri Lankan Army. Sadly, for so many who survived all this, the hardship, the misery and the torment will follow them to their graves. 96

Irin News agency, March 30, 2011. Letter from Father S.V.B. Mangalarajah, chairman, Justice and Peace Commission, Catholic Diocese of Jaffna, dated October 10, 2013, to Most Rev. Dr Joseph Spiteri, the Sri Lankan representative of the Holy See.

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The cries of pain ring out from a Hindu temple in Vavuniya.

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A husband watches over his injured wife in a makeshift hospital.

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Left to right: Two old men see no end to hardship; a displaced woman has little more than a stick for support in postwar Sri Lanka; an elderly victim of conflict, paralysed, mentally ill and abandoned, wanders aimlessly down a road in Vavuniya district.

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Left: An empty rice bag, a bottle of water and a gravel patch outside a temple are all that is left for this elderly man in Vavuniya. Above: A displaced man whose family was killed in the war beds down in a storeroom in Vavuniya.

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Part Five

Vale Truth and Justice

Left: A community leader addresses a rally organised to protest about thousands of mostly young Tamil men who have vanished after being taken away in white vans.

Chapter Thirteen: Lies, Damned Lies and Rajapaksa

A tragic war fought over almost three decades in Sri Lanka reached its catastrophic, criminal climax in May 2009. Immediately, a new theatre of conflict opened up; a battle fought for legitimacy in the international community. The Sri Lankan Government summoned its high-powered propaganda weaponry to persuade the world that its war crimes and crimes against humanity in those final weeks were justifiable because it was bravely leading the way in George W. Bush’s post 9/11 ‘war on terror’. The first step was to pay almost $5 million a year to a British public relations firm which has specialised in laundering the blood-stained images of oppressive regimes, such as Bahrain, Uzbekistan and Belarus, and murderous dictators, such as Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. Bell Pottinger began by writing president Mahinda Rajapaksa’s speeches in international forums and spinning a subtle web of deceit to try to convince the European Union it was wrong to withdraw Sri Lanka’s special access to its economic markets – which it had done because the regime wouldn’t stop torturing, raping and intimidating its own citizens.98 In order for the ‘war on terror’ pretext to gain acceptance it was necessary to paint the Sri Lankan military as humanitarian saviours and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as the architects and prosecutors of a barbaric terrorism rather than a fiercely committed, widely BBC News report, October 22, 2010.

98

Left: A husband cradles his son and contemplates the bleak years ahead of him.

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supported military and political force fighting for a freedom denied by decades of Sinhalese tyranny. This wasn’t going to happen only through the clever deceptions of expensive spin doctors in pin-striped suits. People speaking inconvenient truths also needed to silenced, Sri Lankan-style. A prominent journalist, Prageeth Eknaligoda, who was investigating, among other things, government corruption and the military’s alleged use of chemical weapons during the war, went missing in 2010. He has not been seen since.99 The defence secretary and brother of the president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, warned foreign journalists would face ‘dire consequences’ if they did not behave ‘responsibly’. By this, of course, he meant anyone who tried to shed some light into the dark abyss of war crimes and genocide would be labelled a terrorist lover and run out of the country. One of the country’s most-respected and experienced journalists, J.S. Tissainayagam, dared to air the dirty laundry of Tamil persecution. In 2006 he had written that the Sri Lankan military was the main killer of Tamil civilians in the war. In August 2009, he was sentenced to twenty years ‘rigorous imprisonment’ on terrorism charges. A Colombo High Court prosecutor portrayed his work in interviewing victims of military terror as ‘bringing disrepute to the government’. International pressure secured his release five months later. He immediately joined hundreds of his colleagues in exile.100 The Sri Lankan Government knew the most effective hiding place for its war crimes was beneath a propaganda deluge about the evil terrorists. This diversionary tactic was always going to find traction in a world conditioned to fear the terrorist bogey­man, which had be­ come a welcome, convenient tool for repressive regimes around the world as well as giving free rein to western imperialist ambitions in places such as Iraq. The terrorists had replaced 99

Amnesty International report, April 2013. Amnesty International report, April 2013.

100

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the reds under the beds. It was a no-brainer. In this climate the label would stick like hair to a blanket. Post 9/11, the LTTE was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in several western countries. However, the pretense of international cohesion on these declarations was exposed in a Wikileaks cable quoted in a Dutch court in 2011, where five Tamils were being tried for allegedly giving financial support to the Tamil Tigers. The cable details a conversation between two US diplomats about the LTTE proscription in some European countries. The lawyer defending the five Tamils, Victor Koppe, told the court that the discussion revealed France, the Nordic countries and the Netherlands were all reluctant to place the Tigers on the list but ultimately US pressure won through.101 Others desisted. Australia, for example, has never listed the LTTE as a terrorist organisation, although in 2007 the Australian Federal Police controversially charged three Tamil-Australians with terrorism offences for sending money to the LTTE – charges that were later dropped,102 bringing accusations that the Australian Government was acting as a proxy for the Sri Lankan Government in trying to scare the Tamil diaspora from supporting its own people. Generally, the US coercion worked and allowed the Sri Lankan Government to conceal its ruthless brand of state terror behind the cloak of counter-terrorism. Operating within the framework of the global ‘war on terror’ has meant evidence of LTTE actions towards the end of the war, which the UN says included conscripting teenagers, keeping civilians in the war zone against their will, and shooting some who tried to flee, has been dumped into a melting pot with government-directed bombing and shelling of tens of thousands Story on Radio Netherlands Worldwide, by Richard Walker, October 5, 2011. Also see Paul Moorcraft, Total Destruction of the Tamil Tigers: The Rare Victory of Sri Lanka’s Long War, Pen & Sword Books, 2013. 102 ‘Three men charged with funding Tamil Tigers freed’. ‘PM’ report by Rachel Carbonell, ABC Radio, March 31, 2010. 101

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of innocent civilians who were lured to their deaths by the promise of safety in No Fire Zones. Thus, the important distinction between the hideous state-sponsored slaughter of between 40,000 and 70,000 men, women and children and the accusations levelled at the LTTE is rarely drawn. Political discourse in the international media is constantly conflating the two, which helps dilute Sri Lankan Government culpability. In effect, the world was being asked to ignore the deliberate state-sanctioned murder of tens of thousands of innocent civilians because the opposition fighters also committed crimes. The government has been successful with its policy of labelling – as terrorists or terrorist sympathisers – anyone who investigates its behaviour or displays empathy towards the plight of Tamils. Some western journalists advocating for an independent war crimes investigation appear so concerned about the label that, in attempting to prove their impartiality, they spend a disproportionate amount of time and space dissecting the LTTE crimes. In this case, their neutrality supports the status quo, which helps provide cover and comfort for the perpetrators of state terrorism. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu says: ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor’.103 From a non-neutral perspective, while the crimes of the defeated, destroyed Tamil Tigers need to be fully analysed and investigated, there is a much more pressing need to bring the government to account, not least because it remains engaged in a genocidal campaign to extinguish the lives of those Tamils it could not massacre at Mullivaikal; a campaign that began well before the arrival of Rajapaksa, and included many government-orchestrated pogroms that saw thousands of Tamils murdered in the streets over three decades and eventually can be seen to have led to the armed uprising. 103

The Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation.

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UN resolutions calling for an independent investigation of war crimes – which includes credible allegations against the LTTE – have always been contemptuously dismissed in Colombo. Yet, if the Rajapaksa regime was so convinced that the deaths caused in what it portrayed as a zerocasualty, humanitarian operation to end the war, were insignificant when set against LTTE crimes, and that, as it claimed, an ever-diminishing band of LTTE fighters caused thousands of deaths in the No Fire Zones, why has it been so resistant to the independent international inquiry that would be able to justify its claims? The fact of its guilt is barely in dispute these days beyond the Rajapaksa cabal and its fervent band of Sinhalese chauvinist deniers. All the major western powers, including the US, UK, Germany and Canada, have called for independent scrutiny of Rajapaksa’s war crimes. In 2010, the US ambassador in Colombo, Patricia Butenis, was unequivocal about who was to blame. ‘Responsibility for many alleged crimes rests with the country’s senior civilian and military leadership, including president Rajapaksa and his brothers ….’104 Privately, at least, the US wasn’t tolerating the fantastic explanations from the Sri Lankan Government that the LTTE was responsible for the No Fire Zone deaths. In another secret cable revealed by Wikileaks, the US ambassador Robert O. Blake reported: Foreign Secretary Palitha Kohona reported to Ambassador on April 13 that during his recent visit to Washington he was shown three satellite photos of the No Fire Zone, indicating houses with roofs blown off and water-filled circular craters. Kohona questioned whether the houses could have been damaged during the 1996 military campaign when the Mullaitivu camp was attacked by the LTTE. He said he received assurances that no artillery had been directed to the No Fire Zone. Ambassador noted that credible medical sources reported large numbers of wounded with shrapnel injuries sustained around April 8–9. Ambassador 104

Secret cable provided by Wikileaks. Guardian, December 2, 2010.

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told Kohona that had these been caused by the LTTE, there would likely have been an insurrection in the No Fire Zone, given our knowledge of existing tensions stemming from the LTTE shootings of IDP’s trying to escape. 105

Guilt, though, was not the point for those western powers governed by geo-political and economic self-interest. They can always be relied upon to talk a great game on human rights at the UN – and then tailor resolutions to have the effect of a slap on the wrist with a wet tram ticket. These diplomatic contortionists have turned themselves inside out for the past three years in Geneva to ensure Sri Lanka escapes meaningful censure. Finally, when they could bend no further, they initiated an investigation into war crimes by both sides of the conflict, which will report back in 2015. The truth remains, though, there has been no real combined will to see Rajapaksa face justice. A more important issue for them was the threat the LTTE had posed to the status quo, and, therefore, to the burgeoning interest in the region from world powers. It represented a formidable challenge to established state power for almost thirty years. It had used unprecedented tactics of suicide bombings, had assassinated political leaders and had established a de facto government in the north. The ruthless upstart needed to be taught a lesson, not just to give these world powers a more stable environment in which to exert their influence in Sri Lanka but also to deter potential copycats from threatening the status quo, and powerful geopolitical manoeuvrings, elsewhere in the world. It didn’t matter that Sri Lanka was a tyrannical state. The Tamil Tigers, as a fighting force and coalescing community force, were too successful for too long for their own good. So the US secretly urged the Sri Lankan Government to use cluster bombs on the Tamils, and the Chinese gave it the money to buy them, along with white 105

Cable from US Ambassador in Colombo, Robert O. Blake, to Washington, April 13, 2009. From Wikileaks, published in Colombo Telegraph, March 26, 2012.

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phosphorous bombs, to end the war at any cost.106 As the head of the International Crisis Group, Louise Arbour, pointed out, after presenting a 2010 report detailing Sri Lankan war crimes, the international community was prepared to avert its eyes to Rajapaksa’s methods because it wanted to give him the chance to ‘finish off the LTTE for good’. The outcome, she said, has put the frightening ‘Sri Lanka option’ on the table for other governments dealing with rebel movements. ‘Don’t be too fussy about the distinctions between combatants and civilians, keep the world at bay and go for it as rapidly and as brutally as you can’, she said.107 The chronic reticence at senior management levels at the United Nations to resist Sri Lankan Government nobbling of its work in 2007 to 2009 exposed the UN’s determination to be in lockstep with the international intention to destroy the legitimacy of the LTTE, at the expense of the lives of thousands of innocent people. From letting down the air in the tyres of UN vehicles, and removing engine parts, at military checkpoints, to blocking food and medical supplies to starving, injured civilians and bombing UN food hubs and convoys,108 the Sri Lankan Government did anything and everything to frustrate attempts by the UN to carry out its mandate. UN computers were hacked, visas were withdrawn and refused, false allegations were levelled against staff in the government media, and several were expelled. But rather than stand firm against the intimidation, the UN allowed itself to be bullied into submission. As a result, it became complicit in the murders of between 40,000 and 70,000 innocent civilians. If the outside world was to intervene to save these people, it needed to know the truth. But the UN refused to issue proper casualty figures, or do much at all to level any blame in the ‘The (US) Pacific Command also recommended the use of cluster bombs’. Paul Moorcraft, Total Destruction of the Tamil Tigers. 107 Louise Arbour interview, The Globe and Mail (Canada), May 20, 2010. 108 Petrie Report, United Nations, November 2012. 106

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right direction. Worse, it deliberately released false and misleading information to appease the government. As the UN’s own inquiry said in 2012: Throughout the final stages, the UN issued many public statements and reports accusing the LTTE of committing human rights and international humanitarian law violations, and mentioning thousands of civilians killed. But … the UN almost completely omitted to explicitly mention government responsibility for violations of international law. UN officials said they did not want to prejudice humanitarian access by criticising the government …109

Thus, the government was able to get away with murder, literally. The demonisation of the LTTE, through distortion and omission, especially in the western media, was not new. The complex issue of the recruitment of so-called child soldiers by the LTTE was reduced to a simplistic campaign that misrepresented the reality and encouraged journalists to ignore the bigger picture. Indeed, as thousands of innocent children were being deliberately killed and maimed by the Sri Lankan Government, the western media, through the guidance of the UN body that aims to protect children’s interests (UNICEF), were more engaged with the subject of Tamil Tiger teenagers at the front. The issue of child soldiers received wide coverage in the western press, but only when it applied to the LTTE. As the war entered the final stages there is no doubt that Tamil teenagers were recruited by the Tigers, some forcibly, with greater urgency and in greater numbers. The use of child soldiers on the battlefield cannot be defended in any way. It is a war crime. The LTTE’s culpability has been rightfully condemned and should be fully investigated and exposed. However, all the facts haven’t always been at the forefront of this debate. A consistent omission has been the forced recruitment, often through abduction, of child soldiers by the Sri 109

Petrie Report, United Nations, November 2012.

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Lankan military and pro-government forces, including the Karuna-led faction which broke from the LTTE and joined with government forces in 2004. There were credible reports of pro-government groups scouring internment camps recruiting children on a promise of release from incarceration for the families; reports of plain-clothes intelligence police joining with army to help with night-time abductions of children in the camps; and a public call to bring ‘to justice members of the Sri Lankan armed forces and armed groups suspected of child soldier recruitment’ and to take Sri Lanka to the International Criminal Court for ‘investigation and prosecution for child recruitment’.110 A UN report in 2006 noted there was ‘strong and credible evidence that certain elements of the government security forces are supporting and sometimes participating in the abductions and forced recruitment of children’. The same report described a ‘lack of political will on the part of the Sri Lankan Government to end impunity for child recruitment and use’.111 UNICEF, and journalists, clearly had access to much of this information. However, it was not highlighted by the western media, which preferred to stay with the long-established theme about Tamil Tigers plucking babies from mothers’ arms to bolster their ranks. It is clear the LTTE was actively recruiting teenagers for years, and there’s little doubt many were taken against the will of their parents. But the definitive nature of media reports often ignored inconvenient counter-balancing arguments. For example, the numbers and the ages of these young people remained a moot point, because the evidence was always sketchy. The western media mostly relied upon UNICEF’s emotive canvassing of the issue rather than doing broader research. UNICEF always pushed the issue hard, for reasons some say were Coalition To Stop The Use Of Child Soldiers Report, July 2009. (See www.refworld.org/pdfid/4a77f93e2.pdf.) Special representative of Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict Report, United Nations, 2006.

110 111

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dubious. It rarely chose to err on the side of caution when facts were thin on the ground, or were disputed. It appeared happy to fudge things if it suited its goal of international publicity. As the war moved into its final phase, in February 2009, UNICEF again raised its concerns. ‘We have clear indications that the LTTE has intensified forcible recruitment of civilians and that children as young as fourteen years old are now being targeted’, said Philippe Duamelle, UNICEF’s representative in Sri Lanka. ‘These children are facing immediate danger and their lives are at great risk. Their recruitment is intolerable’. The UNICEF statement added that from 2003 to the end of 2008, more than 6,000 children were recruited by the LTTE. It made no mention of recruitment by pro-government forces. While UNICEF’s definition of a ‘child’ is a person under the age of eighteen, when the LTTE culture of teenage recruitment began in the 1980s, the main instrument governing child sol­diers, the Geneva Convention, deemed fifteen as the minimum age. It was not an issue until the UN lifted the age limit to eighteen in 2001112 and the western media began to take much more interest. Varying documented legal age limits confuse the issue, with fifteen being the limit for recruitment under one form of international law and eighteen under another.113 It could be said that the British Army is one of many national military forces that uses ‘child soldiers’, signing them up at fifteen, letting them join at sixteen and, according to the UN, until recently sending them into battle at seventeen. The LTTE was derided for directing seductive recruiting propaganda at teenagers. Yet it has long been standard practice for government military forces around the world to woo children with propaganda exercises, as a UN report The UN Optional Protocol on Children in Armed Conflict, 2001. ‘Island of Impunity’, International Crimes Evidence Project Report on Sri Lanka, February 2014, p.138.

112 113

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from 1999 points out. ‘Some children are recruited into a country’s armed forces, even if the country in question is in a state of peace. For example, the US Pentagon sponsors programs for approximately 400,000 high school boys and girls where children are taught to march, shoot, act and think like soldiers. More than half of all European states accept under eighteenyear-olds in their armed forces. The UK routinely sends seventeen-year-olds into combat. According to their official statistics (from January 1999) there was a total of 6676 male and female sixteen-year-olds and seventeen-year-olds and over 128,000 cadets from the ages of ten to sixteen in training schools around the country. Similarly military schools are a common feature across Latin America, Asia and Africa. No area is immune to this issue’.114 Although only anecdotal evidence is available, it suggests that most of the Tamil Tiger ‘child’ fighters were closer to eighteen than fourteen. While it’s true that many under-eighteens went into battle, many others were also wrongly categorised in UNICEF lists as being fighters when, in fact, they were parts of orphanages or other civil programs run by the LTTE, which ran a de facto government in the north of the country for many years. In her work on human rights and social issues for the LTTE in Vanni in three stints between 2002 and 2009, Dr Malathy, who emigrated to New Zealand in the 1970s, was heavily involved in seeking a solution to the child soldier issue. She has acknowledged resistance and ambivalence in some quarters of the LTTE as she worked hard to prevent the recruitment of under-eighteens. She says there were some gains – the LTTE brought in regulations against using under-age fighters and returned some to their families – but UNICEF’s blinkered approach, often driven by media considerations, hindered progress, especially when it showed so little interest in ensuring that its published lists of so-called child soldiers were accurate. 114

Cyberschoolbus, United Nations, 1999.

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In her memoir of her time with the LTTE, A Fleeting Moment In My Country, she writes about the complexities of the issue and about her frustrations at the wilful misrepresentation by UNICEF and the western media. She gave several examples of children who were nowhere near the battlefield but were listed as child soldiers on UNICEF’s database, even when UNICEF knew it was wrong. They included a nine-year-old intellectually handicapped girl who was taken into an LTTE children’s home after being abused at home; several small children, including a seven-year-old, living in an LTTE home because the parents could not be traced after the 2004 tsunami; a seventeen-year-old truck driver in the finance division of the LTTE who was killed by a landmine. She knew many of these children well, having worked in the home. The seven-year-old was from Batticaloa. She was made destitute following the 2004 tsunami. The LTTE took many such children under their care. When the LTTE withdrew from Batticaloa in early 2007, they brought the children to Vanni, to the Senchcholai children’s home. Someone in Batticaloa gave the names of these children to UNICEF as child recruitment. They were then put on the UNICEF list. I had informed UNICEF of the background of this child. They were free to visit her. But they refused to remove her and other children like her from the list. Around 2007 western media reported that the youngest person in the LTTE was seven. The reports quoted UNICEF and referred to this child. So here the western propaganda machine was not just bending the truth, it was outright lying.

Malathy complained to UNICEF about a lack of balance in an article written by UNICEF New Zealand on child soldiers. She received an illuminating response. ‘They tried to distance themselves from the article saying UNICEF in New Zealand and other developed countries were independent bodies whose main task was to raise funds. It was obvious that the child soldier issue with the LTTE was sexy and a great fundraiser’. 200

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Malathy was strongly against the use of children in war and worked hard to turn around attitudes among LTTE hardliners. At the same time, the facts need to be acknowledged; that these soldiers were more likely to be in their late teens, the age at which many armies allow enlistment; that while many of them were conscripted, a lot were volunteers, having been seduced by Tamil Tiger enlistment propaganda and the examples of older siblings and relatives; that many hundreds were war orphans who had been looked after by the LTTE, and wrongly labelled as being part of the fighting force. Balance and perspective was lost when the western media began conveying false impressions about battalions of primary school age children being press-ganged into battle by the Tamil Tigers. At the same time it all but ignored the government complicity in child soldier recruitment as well as the state-sanctioned killings of thousands of children. It also should not be forgotten that if UNICEF’s parent body had not abrogated its responsibility to the Tamil people when it scarpered out of the north in the final months of the war, thousands of children might have been saved from grisly death at the hands of the murderous Sri Lankan military. In 2011, the UN said it had credible evidence that, as well as forcibly recruiting children, the LTTE shot civilians who tried to escape the conflict zone and used civilians as a human buffer. Another report, released in 2014 in Australia by war crimes experts and former UN investigators, indicated this was done in the vain hope that the outside world would intervene and prevent the government from exterminating people in the way it did. A senior LTTE member was reported as saying: ‘When the war grew more desperate the political wing wanted to ensure that sufficient numbers of civilians remained in the Vanni in order to force the international community to step in and broker an agreement with the Government of Sri Lanka’.115 115

‘Island of Impunity’, International Crimes Evidence Project, February 2014.

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The same report gave a graphic account from an eye-witness of the ruthless desperation that had taken hold of some Tamil Tiger fighters. ‘The LTTE opened up on them with lot of AK47s. People started falling while others ran with their baggage, some ran past (the compound). More than six or seven were taken to the hospital with serious injuries who later died. Five or six were dead on the spot’. Another perspective was captured by the-then UN spokesman in Colombo, Gordon Weiss, when writing about the chaos and mayhem of the final days of the war in his book, The Cage: ‘Merciless though this forced recruitment (of children) was, there is also compelling evidence of (LTTE) commanders and cadres who helped people escape across the lagoon by turning their backs, showing them paths to the SLA or fighting back those other cadres who fired on those fleeing’. Crimes committed by dead leaders of the defunct-LTTE cannot be ignored. They are real and the relatives of the victims deserve a full independent inquiry into everything that happened in the final months of the war. Tamils in Sri Lanka and around the world have been calling for such an investigation for several years. However, until the UN Human Rights Council finally bowed to the pressure and voted to launch an investigation, in March 2014, their pleas had been constantly rejected by global powers which were more intent on shielding the Sri Lankan Government from proper accountability. Of course, the LTTE crimes have never been the primary issue. The paramount, unresolved question centres on the quest for truth and justice for what the UN says is the pre-meditated massacre of as many as 70,000 innocent Tamil civilians by a government that remains in power and continues to perpetrate all kinds of heinous crimes. At the same time, as the Tamil struggle for a life of decency and equality continues, any proper examination of this war should go far beyond its catastrophic conclusion. In 2014 the Rome-based Permanent People’s Tribunal declared after an inquiry spanning four years that 202

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the Sri Lankan Government was guilty of genocide and that the UK and US was complicit in it.116 This significant judgement was all but ignored by mainstream western media. Genocide is a word that dares not cross the lips of western media when it comes to Sri Lanka. It doesn’t matter if tens of thousands die. Once again, it all depends on how western interests view their worthiness as victims. As Ed Herman points out in his book Politics of Genocide, the western media used the G word once for every twelve deaths during the Kosovo war but only once for every 80,000 deaths in the Iraq conflict brought about by the US invasion.117 ‘Why is it not a genocide?’ asks Dr Malathy. ‘Genocide justifies Tamil Eelam [the Tamil homeland the LTTE fought to restore]. The west is complicit in Tamil genocide. Under the Genocide Convention anyone complicit in the genocide is also culpable for that genocide. Therefore, the west will never call Tamil killings genocide’. To illustrate her point, she told of a discussion she had with a Tamil villager during her stay in the mid-2000s in Vanni. An eye-witness to a particular massacre in 1985 told me that early one morning a fighter helicopter landed in her village. The Sinhalese soldiers got out and began to randomly shoot the villagers. Flying this helicopter was a tall white man who stood and watched the shooting. I was intrigued by what she said and asked others about it. Someone gave me a book written by a European British citizen who also did very similar work in Tamil Eelam. He says in the book that the British government was fully aware of what he and many others like him were doing in Tamil Eelam, assisting the Sinhala military to kill Tamil citizens. This military assistance to Sri Lanka by the west continues to this very day.118 Report on Sri Lanka, Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, December 7–10, 2013. Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, Monthly Review Press, 2010. 118 Dr Malathy speech to New Zealand Tamil Society, Auckland, May 5, 2013. See also Malathy’s A Fleeting Moment in My Country, p.70; Tim Smith, The Reluctant Mercenary: The Recollections of a British Ex-Army Helicopter Pilot in the Anti Terrorist War in Sri Lanka, Book Guild Ltd, November 2002; North-East Secretariat on Human Rights (LTTE) August 2006 report 116 117

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By keeping the Tamil issue carefully contained within a human rights framework, a path is provided for the west to avoid its past culpability and current responsibility. As the respected Tamil activist lawyer from Jaffna University, Kumaravadivel Guruparan, noted in 2013: Without the history of Tamil oppression and the on-going structural genocide the story of the Tamils has almost no meaning. You have to look at the long-standing process of disenfranchisement from which the LTTE emerged. The language of terror paints absolutist pictures that remove the possibility of context and history. Despite the barbaric scale of Tamil civilian killings it allows the Sinhalese majority to revere President Rajapaksa. It allows the international actors like the UN Human Rights Council, the US and Indian governments, to take ambivalent positions on what happened. It is this refusal to take in the whole narrative that allows Rajapaksa to tell the world all is well now with the Tamils in his country.119

However, as Guruparan notes, even in the aftermath of the terror and genocide, the Tamil idea of nationhood has not disappeared.

on ‘Piramanthanaru Massacre, 2nd October 1985’; and Phil Miller, ‘UK veterans coach Sri Lanka in 1984’,Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka website, January 17, 2014. 119 ‘Idea of Tamil nation not dead despite aftermath of genocide: Tehelka report’, Tamilnet, April 19, 2013.

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A Hindu priest conducts rituals for the dead at Keerimalai in Jaffna, a famous Tamil holy site.

205

The victors pose for the cameras on the beach in the Vanni on May 20, 2009, two days after they had completed their military offensive and the war had officially ended. The senior commanders accused of war crimes are in the front row. They are: (fourth from left) Major-General Shavendra Silva; (fifth from left, Major-General Kamal Gunaratne; (sixth from left) Major-General Jagath Dias; (seventh from left) Major-General Jagath Jayasuriya; (ninth from left) Major-General Prasanna de Silva. JDS Photo.

Chapter Fourteen: Celebrity War Criminals

It always takes a little time for immigrants or visitors to a new country to fine-tune their radar to a strange environment and embrace its alien ways. The former commander of the Sri Lankan navy, Admiral Thisara Samarasinghe, is a man attuned to western culture, having attended, in keeping with the post-colonial tradition, the premier British and American naval finishing schools. Yet he had considerable difficulty in aligning his habits and attitudes with those of Australia when he arrived from Colombo in 2011 to take up his post as Sri Lankan High Commissioner. This became apparent in the summer of 2012–13 when a band of Tamils and supportive activists began a campaign to raise awareness of the plight of the Tamil population under the oppressive regime of Samarasinghe’s commander-in-chief, President Mahinda Rajapaksa. That they chose the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team as the target for their discontent was an affront to Samarasinghe, a former handy cricketer, who was proud of his national team and could see no reason why anybody should be allowed to drag its good name through the mire of political combat. Samarasinghe is a man of action, as you would expect of the director-general of naval operations during the civil war in his country. Thus, he acted as soon as he discovered that an annoying bunch of protesters had arrived to spread their message that the Sri Lankan cricket team was being used to launder the image of a government accused of war crimes and a genocidal program against the Tamil population of the country.

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He had telegraphed his punches during a radio interview I shared with him on the ABC in midDecember 2012. He said he had contacted ‘authorities’ to ensure that ‘these allegations and these planned events, distributing leaflets, having demonstrations’ were not permitted to go ahead. I did not suspect that he was going to follow through on this threat in a country that, generally, allowed people to express themselves politically in the public domain. But Samarasinghe was not to be deterred, adding that these people had to be stopped because they were doing nothing but ‘taking advantage of freedom of speech and freedom of expression’.120 Come Boxing Day, the opening day of the Test match between Australia and Sri Lanka at the MCG, a senior security official at the ground came across to the rally outside Gate 2. He had taken a call from Samarasinghe the day before and was more than a trifle bemused. He wanted to know more about the high commissioner. ‘Who is this guy?’ he asked me. ‘He was giving us an earful about stopping the protest. I had to tell him this is Australia, mate’. I relayed the same message to the Australian Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, a few weeks later when men in dark glasses and well-cut suits began appearing from behind trees, and other hiding places, to take photographs of me and other protesters. When I approached one of these camerawielding spooks outside the Sydney Cricket Ground, after I noticed him snapping away at me and others at the rally, from the other side of a road, he took off like a gazelle. I caught up with him in adjacent Moore Park, peering from behind one of those Moreton Bay Fig trees that are large enough to conceal an entire cricket team. The objective of these overt photographic sessions was to frighten the Tamil diaspora from expressing grievances in full view of the Australian public. The images are often despatched to the Colombo offices of the Sri Lanka intelligence police, who then hunt up any relatives in the country and go door knocking, often at midnight for added effect. In a country where torture 120

Interview with presenter Liam Cochrane, on ABC Radio Asia Connect program, December 12, 2012.

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and disappearances of Tamils are commonplace, it’s a routine process that has done its job for many years in limiting the numbers at Tamil protest rallies in faraway places, such as Australia. I objected to these tactics after being approached by an officer from Victoria Police’s Security and Organized Crime Intelligence Unit, formerly, and more easily, known as the Special Branch. He said they could do nothing. I got much the same response from Carr’s office when I wrote to ask him why people acting on behalf of a foreign embassy should be permitted to intimidate Australian citizens on Australian soil. After three decades of palpable insecurity and self-doubt, fed by a mind-numbing sense of Tamil Tiger invincibility, the Sinhalese extremism that lit the conflict back in the 1970s has blossomed once more in the wake of the Sri Lankan military’s conquest. With it has returned the aggressive superiority that accompanies the militarization of government and civil society, and, with the help of self-interested foreign powers, men accused of horrendous state crimes, such as Samarasinghe, have been able to make a seamless shift to diplomatic life, untroubled by their dark pasts. This is not for want of trying by some dedicated legal activists who cling to the ideal that accused war criminals should face justice, not swan around the world in cushy overseas postings using diplomatic immunity to keep the prosecutors at bay. When Rajapaksa came to Australia for the 2011 CHOGM conference, a Tamil-Australian, Jegan Waran, who witnessed the deliberate bombing of hospitals and schools by the Sri Lankan military at the end of the civil war, filed war crimes charges against him in a Victorian court. The chief magistrate gave the go-ahead to the case under the state’s Criminal Procedure Act. However, the federal Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, used his discretionary power to block it, citing Rajapaksa’s diplomatic immunity and Australia’s requirement to adhere to international law, something it is happy to flout whenever it suits. 209

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The warm Australian welcome to High Commissioner Samarasinghe also extended to the dismissal of the submission from the Australian chapter of the International Commission of Jurists that, as a senior commander of the Sri Lankan navy in 2009, he bore responsibility for the navy’s shelling of thousands of unarmed civilians, and should be investigated for war crimes. There was no legal equivocation from the ICJ’s Australian president, John Dowd, QC, a former justice of the New South Wales Supreme Court and New South Wales Attorney-General, when he named Samarasinghe in a 2011 submission sent to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, the Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the Foreign Affairs Minister, Senator Bob Carr, and referred to the Australian Federal Police: ‘Those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity at the end of the Sri Lankan civil war in 2009 must not be allowed to go unpunished’, he said. This was not isolated criticism, with one or two persistent hounds barking up a tree. Australia’s former deputy high commissioner to Sri Lanka, Bruce Haigh, was one of many respected voices demanding Samarasinghe be recalled because of his role as a commander when the navy shelled Tamil civilians in the supposed No Fire Zone on a beach and attempted to stop Red Cross workers from rescuing injured women and children from these zones.121 Sri Lanka’s own Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission recorded a Tamil survivor’s graphic evidence of her attempt to escape the No Fire Zone. She told of her group of petrified civilians coming across the navy as they pushed out to sea in their small boat. They were waving two white flags and yelled ‘Aiya, Aiya’ (meaning ‘sir, sir ’). This was the signal for a flurry of shelling, which killed eight people in the boat instantly. In the light of such damning evidence, of which there was plenty more, Australia’s Foreign Affairs Department was said to be against the appointment of Samarasinghe. However, according 121

On-line Opinion, October 25, 2011.

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to Haigh’s well-sourced inside information, the AFP, and no doubt the federal government, was more concerned with enlisting the ex-commander’s help to block boats of Australian-bound Tamil asylum seekers than with confronting a suspected war criminal. As Senator Lee Rhiannon told the Australian parliament in 2013: ‘In trying to understand this decision by the AFP (to refuse to launch an investigation) what should be noted is the AFP’s close working relationship with the government of Sri Lanka to stop Tamil asylum seekers fleeing to Australia’.122 So, in such a sad, cynical assessment of priorities, the rear-admiral received safe passage to Canberra, from where he became a significant post-war propagandist for Rajapaksa.123 While Australia has shamelessly rolled out the red carpet to Samarasinghe, and become a provider of safe harbour for accused war criminals, other countries, including Germany, Switzerland and Canada, have been less inclined to go down the same slippery pole. As in the case of Samarasinghe, the Sri Lankan Government despatched many of its senior war-time military commanders to the apparent safety of the foreign service, where diplomatic immunity from prosecution would provide peace of mind and protection from those human rights defenders and activists, who had been snarling and snapping at their heels since the smoke cleared and the tragedy of the massacre at Mullivaikal became obvious to the outside world. At least four major-generals are among the fifteen battlefield commanders, among six divisions, who have been fingered as war crimes perpetrators by media and investigating authorities.124 Perhaps the most prominent is Major-General Jagath Dias, a rotund, mustachioed veteran of the Gajaba, a celebrated infantry regiment named after a legendary Sinhalese warrior king. Dias’s celebrity, though, is confined to his own island because beyond its shores it is infamy, as Adjournment speech by Senator Lee Rhiannon, June 25, 2013. Sydney Morning Herald, July 18, 2012. 124 ‘Culpable individuals accused of genocide or war crimes’, www.warwithoutwitness.com. 122 123

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the commander of the notorious 57th Division in the final days of the war, that hounds him whenever he attempts to rejoin the international military community. After being eased into the role of deputy ambassador to Germany soon after the war – a posting that also covers Switzerland and the Vatican – he found himself under siege from human rights groups that bundled up weighty dossiers on his role in the slaughter of the innocents and sent them to the German government. What set him apart from your garden-variety war criminal, and elevated him to pre-eminence among Sinhalese extremists, was a stunning allegation about his role in the death of the LTTE leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran. Boasting of his exclusivity to military intelligence sources, the Sri Lanka Guardian’s defence investigator laid before his readers a grisly story of wild-eyed, primeval revenge after Prabhakaran had surrendered to the Sri Lankan Army in the final days of the war. ‘The LTTE leader was said to have suffered the sadistic attack of having a hot metal rod shoved up his anal tunnel, and he met his ultimate death by having the upper portion of his skull chopped with an axe while he was alive and struggling with the pain of anal penetration. Major General Jagath Dias personally undertook the gruesome task after verbally abusing him in filth and manhandling him in anger’. Published photographs of Prabhakaran’s body show a deep wound in his forehead. In images released by the Sri Lankan Army, the wound is covered by a blue check cloth.125 By 2011, as European governments began to find they could no longer resist the public pres­sure caused by harbouring men such as Dias, and the Swiss prosecutor inched towards a crim­inal investigation, Dias was hastily recalled to Colombo, where he’s been forced to become a homebody because of the terrible stench that follows him every time he looks longingly to foreign shores. In 2013 the US bumped him from a training program it was running in Sri Lanka Guardian, October 24, 2009.

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New Zealand because of the war crime allegations. Then the International Committee of the Red Cross told him ‘thanks but no thanks’ when (please do not snigger) he was assigned by his superiors to attend a workshop in Sydney, Australia on health situations in dangerous environments. The theme of outrageous effrontery carried on to New York, where Major-General Shavendra Silva, the 58th Division commander accused of ordering the bombing and shelling in the No Fire Zones, was appointed to a UN committee in 2012 on how best to run peace-keeping missions. He inadvertently got the nod for the job because he had been Sri Lanka’s deputy permanent representative at the UN since 2010 when he was whisked off to the world’s largest, and most effective, diplomatic protection bubble. That the same man was on a UN blacklist of suspected human rights violators, which was urgently pointed out by the UN Human Rights Commissioner, Navi Pillay, after she learned of his appointment to the committee, became a serious public embarrassment. So, while UN officials flapped around in search of a solution, he and his government were politely asked if he would be so kind as to not turn up to the first session. Nothing doing, responded the majorgeneral, who duly arrived, front and centre, for duty on day one. It was reported that as he sat in a corner, trying to make a contribution, his fellow committee members averted their eyes and ears, and pretended he wasn’t in the room. Like the boy in the corner with the dunce’s cap. Eventually the chair, Canadian Louise Frenchette, laid it on the line to him, and he walked out alone, never to return. She later issued a statement saying that ‘his participation is not appropriate or helpful’ and he had been barred from future sessions.126 Yet, unbowed, Silva remains a fixture at the Sri Lankan UN Mission, along with permanent representative Dr Palitha Kohona. BBC News Asia, February 23, 2012.

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They have worked as a double act for some time now. Indeed, it was Dr Kohona who, when foreign minister, was accused of complicity in a war crime in that he facilitated the surrender of several LTTE leaders through intermediaries in Europe, only to see them murdered.127 Once they had surrendered, led by senior political wing chiefs, Nadesan and Pulivan waving a white flag as they came into army custody on the morning of May 18, 2009 at the Wadduvakal Bridge, Major-General Silva was one of three officers seen escorting them off to their deaths.128 The fact that Dr Kohona and Silva are both accused war criminals has never been of any consequence to visiting foreign ministers, such as Australia’s Julie Bishop and Britain’s William Hague who, as they often do when in the city that never sleeps, joined them for cocktails and canapes, and plenty of bonhomie, in the lead-up to Colombo’s hosting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in November 2013. It was Hague’s office in London that also tried to resist as best it could the pressure to act on information it had received about Major-General Prasanna De Silva, whose specialty in the final days of the war was alleged to be commanding troops that, among other targets, deliberately bombed and shelled the wounded and the dying in hospitals in the No Fire Zone. De Silva became another Sri Lankan irritant to a foreign government because human rights activists and lawyers wouldn’t stop letting people know the sordid history of this man. The UK government’s resistance to this pressure finally collapsed and, once a file on his alleged crimes was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan Police, De Silva was high-tailing it back to Colombo. Sydney Morning Herald, April 4, 2011. International Crimes Evidence Project, February 2014.

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The capacity for retribution within the highest ranks of the Sri Lankan military was boundless and, although it could hardly be gazumped by Major-General Dias’s alleged treatment of Prabhakaran, the commander of the 53rd Division, Major-General Kamal Gunaratne, had a good shot at it when he came across the LTTE leader’s twelve-year-old son. Gunaratne has earned the title, not just of accused war criminal but of child killer, from investigations that point to his involvement in the death of Balachandran Prabhakaran. In 2013, investigative journalists working with Britain’s Channel 4 revealed photographs that showed the boy sitting on a box in a sand-bagged army bunker, seemingly in the custody of the Sri Lankan forces. He was wearing black and khaki shorts, and bare from the waist up, with a blue check blanket draped across his shoulders. He was eating from a small packet of biscuits, or a similar snack, peering out of the bunker, looking as if he is wondering what might happen next. What happened next is shown in another photograph. The boy is on the ground, dead, still in his shorts and with five bullet holes in his bare chest. Burn marks around one of the bullet holes suggest he was shot at close range. The images also exposed the Sri Lankan Government’s earlier lie that the boy had been killed in crossfire during battle. Apparently, the man who knows the full, chilling story is Major-General Gunaratne, for it is he who is said to have carried out orders from Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa to kill the boy. In 2012, one Sri Lankan report from an experienced political columnist said Balachandran had surrendered at 7.30 a.m. on May 19, 2009 to a group of eight soldiers, after being separated from his family amid the Mullivaikal carnage. Gunaratne questioned him and then rang the Defence Secretary in Colombo, who ordered his execution based on a belief that he could be a future Tamil Tiger leader and could not be jailed because of his age. 215

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Top left: Balachandran Prabhakaran, twelve-year-old-son of the LTTE leader, is shown under guard after being taken into custody by the Sri Lankan army on May 19, 2009. The metadata shows this photograph was taken at 10.14 a.m. JDS Photo. Bottom left: He is eating a snack and has a drink at his side. It is his last meal. JDS Photo. Above: This photo, taken less than two hours later, at 12.01 p.m., by the same camera, shows the boy dead, with five bullet wounds in his chest. JDS Photo.

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The Defence Secretary had ordered Gunaratne to personally supervise Balachandran’s killing and to destroy the body. These details have been revealed by an army officer to a foreign government since he is now being accused over the telecast of footage of Balachandran’s murder in a Channel 4 film. The army officer had said that he did not want to be held accountable for sins committed by others.129

It came as no surprise to learn Gunaratne took up the post as deputy ambassador to Brazil not long after the photographic proof of this child murder became public. Running for cover – the major-generals would probably call it a tactical retreat – has become an acquired habit among the Sri Lankan diplomatic corps in the post-war years. Two who don’t have to run are siblings, Mahinda and Gotabaya Rajapaksa, brothers-in-warcrimes, men who rejoice in the immunity provided by world powers. They do as they like in their tyrannical backyard. No-one is safe. Not even, as noted, the war-time hero and army chief, General Fonseka. While Fonseka went off to prison, his successor’s star was soon in the ascendancy. After being appointed Army Commander, Major-General Jagath Jayasuriya was then elevated to chief of the defence staff, a reward for obedience and his part, as Army Commander in Vanni, in the end of the war. As he proudly signed over to the new commander in 2013, there was so much gold and braid on his uniform that it appeared to be a significant feat for him to stand tall and salute his men. It was one of those images, presented loyally and unstintingly by pro-government media, to feed the hero worship of their war-time generals, and keep at bay those ever-more frequent stories that they are, in fact, something very different in the eyes of others. Increasingly the world is becoming aware that it is these same people who are responsible for the hideous murders of tens of thousands of people, the horror of which is captured in the 129

www.dbsjeyaraj.com, February 22, 2013.

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words of a survivor of one single multi-barrel rocket attack, on March 25, 2009, next to a Hindu temple in Pokkanai, one of hundreds launched under the command of one of these heroes. In minutes, twenty rockets had rained from the sky. Mothers were crying and there were a lot of dead children. The bodies were seriously damaged and some of them were missing heads and limbs. Several tents had burned down. Over 75 people were injured. They didn’t think that area would be targeted because it was purely a humanitarian settlement. The area was thickly populated by tents and there were no permanent houses. When I arrived many had already been taken to hospital. Only people with minor injuries were left.130

European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) report on Sri Lanka, May 2013.

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After a century of wars in which millions of lives were crushed like so many ants under foot, there is no sign that we might have paused to reflect upon this catastrophic force that has been allowed to flourish in human society. Almost a decade and a half into the new millennium the evidence keeps mounting that governments have become better and more efficient at killing innocent people by the thousands, and the world has become so much more willing to turn the other cheek as it happens. Why do we allow it to happen? Is it because we are represented by politicians who are more Machiavellian than Machiavelli ever was and we are informed by media corporations which are far more adept at concealment, misrepresentation, fear-mongering and manipulation than ever before? And does this make us more resistant to involvement in our neighbour’s troubles, more inured to the sight of tragedy, more dismissive of the cries of our fellow humans, more likely to shut ourselves away in our First World cocoons? The Tamil population of south Asia’s teardrop island has been crying out for decades for the outside world to relieve its suffering. The only response has been trickery and deceit from foreign governments, and a total absence of awareness from populations conditioned to tune out from the plight of others. These governments, for selfish reasons, have virtually ignored the Sri Lankan Government’s war crimes and persecution of Tamils. Weak UN resolutions sending mild rebukes to the Rajapaksa Left: An elderly woman is overwhelmed by grief during a post-war gathering in Vavuniya. The sorrow of not knowing what happened to relatives is slowly destroying the survivors.

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regime and, in effect, asking it to investigate its own war crimes and crimes against humanity, have done nothing but give the people who committed the atrocities the green light to continue their persecution. While the 2014 UN Human Rights Council vote to empower its commissioner, Navi Pillay, to undertake an investigation of war crimes and crimes against humanity between 2002 and 2009 was heralded as a significant step, the scope and value of her work will be limited by Sri Lankan Government resistance to her presence and the fact that any report will inevitably be buried at the Security Council, where China and Russia have consistently employed their threat of veto to block any censure of the Rajapaksa regime. The only pathway to justice is through the International Criminal Court. This requires either the Security Council, or at least one nation, to refer the regime to the ICC for prosecution. In the current climate, the chances of either are virtually nil. The new resolution also does nothing to stop the continuing abuses against Tamils. Four years after the war ended and tens of thousands of Tamils had been deliberately killed, the democratic nations such as the US, India, Australia and the UK, were lining up to show support for the perpetrators of these crimes. They sent the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting to Colombo in 2013, and they despatched financial aid – Australia gave $43 million in 2012–13 – supposedly to rebuild the war-torn north and east. Much of it has been used to carry on the ethnic-cleansing and genocide against Tamils, as have the two new vessels Australia donated in November 2013 to help the Sri Lankan navy stop asylum seekers from fleeing torture and other forms of persecution. Under the military occupation of the north, vast tracts of Tamil land have been stolen and handed to Sinhalese settlers from the south. Of the entire Sri Lankan land mass of 65,000 square kilometres, Tamils inhabit about 19,000 square kilometres, 40 percent of which was occupied by the army after the war.131 Government soldiers were offered five acres apiece to settle in the north. Weekend Leader (Sri Lanka), August 4, 2011.

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Sinhalese settlers were also given financial inducements and encouraged to build permanent houses. Tamils were not permitted to construct permanent housing. Instead they were given six bamboo poles and six sheets of tin for roofing in a post-war rehabilitation package. In 2012, the Tamil politician, M.A. Sumanthiran, told parliament: The military in Jaffna, in particular, is involved in large-scale land-grabbing. I am personally aware the military has been visiting people’s private residences, asking for their deeds; telling them to come to the army camp … [P]eople have been told that if they don’t go to alternate places their food supply will be cut short …132

Almost 1500 villagers took court action to try to prevent a 26 square kilometre stretch of land in the north, equivalent to two-thirds of the land occupied by the capital Colombo, from being taken by the military.133 The process of ethnic-cleansing is blatant. Tamil streets and towns have been re-named in Sinhala, Tamil Hindu temples have been bulldozed and replaced by Buddhist stupas. Tamil Christians and Muslims, in particular, have not been spared, with cultural practices, such as halal food and veiled hair and faces and places of worship, being targeted by government-backed extremist Buddhist groups. The clear objective is to wipe out Tamil identity. As they lose their homes and their identity, they also lose their health. In 2013, malnutrition rates across the island were listed at 29 percent. The rate in the north-east, where most Tamils live, was 50 percent. This fits with a rate of 59 percent of people in the same region living below the poverty line.134 The sickness in Sri Lankan society goes much deeper. It extends to the heart of power, where a president, who has engineered constitutional changes to give himself unlimited tenure, acts Speech to parliament by M.A. Sumanthiran, June 8, 2012. Colombo Telegraph, May 15, 2013. 134 Report by Sri Lankan Ministry of Health specialist, Dr Murali Vallipuranathan, October 2013. 132

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with total impunity in crushing dissent and feathering his nest. In January 2013 he sacked the highest judicial officer in the land, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, because she blocked attempts to extend the power of the Rajapaksa clan. She was replaced by a close advisor of the president with no previous experience at this level of the judiciary. He has inserted himself and his vast extended family into the country’s commercial life to the point where, on the streets, his name is synonymous with corruption. In July 2013 a new activist group of retired government officials revealed that Rajapaksa had pocketed about $140 million from a power station deal he organised with Chinese money. ‘If you can’t work the way I want, you better get out’, Rajapaksa was reported to have told Chinese officials who were initially shocked by his demand for a 50 percent commission on the deal. 135 There has been no suggestion he has done any deal with gambling magnate James Packer, whose inherited pathological desire to accumulate wealth and power extends way beyond his depressing window-less, clock-free Australian establishments, where thousands of addicts can gamble away their homes, their jobs and their families twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Packer wants to be casino king of the world. So, as part of his Asian expansion, he went to Colombo. To skipper his propaganda team, he recruited the Australian cricket captain, Michael Clarke, whose spruiking about the jobs benefits to poverty-stricken Sri Lankans makes Packer sound like he’s driven more by philanthropy than profit. Of course, this form of ‘entertainment’ and the Rajapaksa regime are a perfect fit, and a few token gestures expressing concern from Buddhist political activists are easily waved off. In May 2014, the government indicated it would give approval to the $450 million joint venture after previously saying it had reservations about casinos operating in the country. Government Servants Against Corruption press release, July 29, 2013.

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Since he came to power in 2005, Rajapaksa, with a vast family network of about 600 relatives in government, has been able to assemble a profitable, noxious dictatorship, thanks to the nodding approval of the west, and the enthusiastic backing of China. Through this grim reality, though, there are a few cracks from which some light has appeared. The Sri Lankan media, which exists in a stifling environment of fear and self-censorship, has learned not to be critical of the president. Most defiant journalists are either dead or in exile. One of the living is the Hong Kong-based editor of the Sri Lanka Guardian website, Nilantha Ilangamuwa, whose column about Rajapaksa in May 2013 was as blunt as it gets: Some call it the land of murder. It is also known as the land of rape; the land of robbery; the land of corruption; the land of criminals and the land of liars. We think we have leaders but in reality we do not. What we have is tyrants. The man on top of the hierarchy has created social fear in order for us to accept him as leader.136

Rajapaksa is on the end of a long line of extremist Sinhalese leaders who have, for more than sixty years, persecuted Tamils. But none have exhibited quite the same determined bloodlust to wipe out a section of his own people. He is personally responsible for the deaths of an estimated 70,000 Tamils, and probably many thousands more, at the end of the war in 2009. Since the war ended his military has killed, disappeared, and destroyed the lives of additional thousands. The Bishop of Mannar, Rev. Dr Rayappu Joseph, has compiled a list of 146,000 missing Tamils. During a telephone conversation in December 2012, he asked me to warn Australians that Tamil asylum seekers being returned to Sri Lanka were suffering a ‘pathetic plight’, being branded as ‘traitors’ and enduring incarceration, threats and intimidation. ‘It is highly dangerous for the asylum seekers from the north and east to be sent back to Sri Lanka’, Nilantha Ilangamuwa, ‘Land Of Murder’, Sri Lanka Guardian, May 3, 2013.

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he said. The advice was ignored by the Australian Government, which deported back to danger more than 1000 Sri Lankans in 2013 and continued the deportations in 2014. From the smouldering ruins of death and destruction in 2009, and the unrelenting persecution of the post-war period, the Tamil people pleaded for help from the rest of the world. Some significant global figures listened. ‘Absence of war is not peace; the saying is true of Sri Lanka’, wrote South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former Irish president Mary Robinson in 2013. ‘While its civil war ended four years, and roads have been rebuilt, human rights protections are getting weaker. The personal tragedies of the conflict’s victims have yet to be acknowledged and accounted for. The climate for reconciliation does not yet exist’.137 The brazen post-war triumphalism of the Sri Lankan Government makes reconciliation one of those fictional notions inked on UN documents, that have little credibility in the real world. To their eternal shame, political leaders around the world have wilfully turned away from another genocide, just fifteen years after owning up to ignoring Rwanda and saying it must never happen again. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, appreciates this sentiment, having listened to four years of gut-wrenching evidence of genocide as president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda between 1999–2003. Significantly, she said ten years later: ‘Rwanda’s lessons were not implemented in Sri Lanka’.138 Once again, the Tamil people have been left alone to seek truth and justice. They are daunted by the task ahead but they do not despair. There is always one thing that despots forget as they go about their business of murder and terror. You can kill thousands of people, but you can never kill the human spirit. Joint letter written by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson to The Times (London), March 2013. Response to a question after a speech by Pillay to the London School of Economics, February 2013.

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