University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna)
Sri Lanka
UTHR(J)*
Information Bulletin No. 37
Date of Release: 10th January 2005
A Tale of two Disasters and the Fickleness of Terror Politics
Contents:
Summary of Concerns
1. Introduction
2. A Sea of Change: The Untold Story of the Tidal Wave
3. 26th November – 25th December: War Fever
4. Nature Strikes: The LTTE’s response
5. Delivery is subject to weather conditions and availability of transport.
6. Hints of the Mullaitivu Scene
7. Traces of Sanity in Killinochi
8. LTTE abroad: The TRO-Pottu Amman Nexus
9. Behind the Apparent Somersault: Burning of the Refugee Camp
10. TRO -Cats Paw of LTTE Terror on the Ground
11. Wrecking of Trincomalee: Incompatibility of Sole Representation with Peace
12. Strengthening the Humanitarian Space and Ending Conflict
Summary of Concerns
In the aftermath of the Tsunami aid has poured into Sri Lanka from people and governments around the world. Sri Lanka’s North and East witnessed a spontaneous outpouring of generosity that defied communal boundaries. A schoolmistress in Batticaloa-Amparai described the impact it created, “At the bottom of their heart all Sri Lankans want to live in peace with one another. This is what the Tidal Wave taught us. What we saw is the people eager to help each other, forgetting all differences. Whatever community we belong to, there is something called Sri Lankan hospitality. The politicians should remember that when they get back to negotiations.” It was a natural human response to a massive disaster that had no political context. This help is desperately needed and gratefully welcomed. With relief and reconstruction efforts underway it is essential the process be open, transparent and accountable. We must not squander the good will of those who have so generously come to our assistance.
Both the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE have an unquestionable moral responsibility to ensure that disaster victims receive prompt and appropriate assistance and should dedicate resources and infrastructure to help them. This requires setting aside political differences, overcoming decades of neglect and bureaucratic dysfunction and allowing every available and potential source of support and assistance to contribute to the effort of rebuilding our communities. As important as anything else is the need to give hope to the people, rather than contribute to their trauma and despair.
Giving hope means a readiness to work with each other and being generous in acknowledging the good done by others. Testimonies given to us by witnesses in Batticaloa-Amparai, Trincomalee and Vadamaratchy tell the same story: personnel from the country’s armed forces – the STF, Army and Navy – in the wake of the Tsunami, left their weapons and threw themselves into the dangerous waters to rescue civilians, in some instances losing their lives. In the aftermath, neighbouring Sinhalese and Muslim communities and the armed forces stretched themselves in caring for those affected, and are still doing so.
Much of these highly remarkable developments have gone unreported or pushed to the sidelines of the news concerning the North-East. A part of the answer is the incompetence of the state media, indifference of the Colombo media and LTTE propaganda networks having established a firm foothold, at least to confuse the international media. The LTTE, and the Tamil media controlled by it, largely ignored this non-partisan outpouring of humanity and from day-one started attacking the armed forces and, contrary to authentic reports from the ground, accused them of harassment, blocking rations, stopping a Russian medical team and burning a refugee camp among other violations. It accused the Government of discrimination in the distribution of relief and waxed loud that no one was helping the Tamils. By the time the foreign media came in large numbers, they lost sight of the one-sidedness of these claims and provocations, and started talking about deep hatreds and the ethnic conflict.
This in short was how the LTTE positioned itself to make political capital of a humanitarian crisis lacking political content and to position its agency, the Tamil Rehabilitation Organisation, to act as the sole body dispensing relief in areas it controls and throughout the North-East. The troubling political implications need not be spelt out. We are concerned that the international community may forfeit this opportunity for permanent peace, a political settlement and reconciliation, by allowing their misjudgments (which have amply been in evidence these last three years), the LTTE’s ploys, and the Southern polity’s incompetence and opportunism, dictate the agenda.
The LTTE established the TRO, which became increasingly visible in the early 1990s, as a mechanism to raise money for refugee relief and has long solicited donations from Sri Lanka’s large expatriate Tamil community and is institutionally bound to the leadership of the LTTE. It has a history of discouraging independent initiatives both in Sri Lanka and abroad, and there have long been informed allegations that money the TRO collects for reconstruction has been diverted to other purposes, principally military. These allegations have been supported by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (‘CSIS warned Ottawa of terror fronts…’, National Post, 9th December 2000), and by the LTTE’s former Eastern strongman and leading insider, Karuna.
International donors and all concerned individuals seeking effective ways to assist survivors of this disaster should demand accountability and transparency from the TRO and all other partner agencies as a condition of cooperation. This should only be for purposes of urgent relief, avoiding measures that confer legitimacy on the LTTE’s terror machine by the back door. They should at the same time encourage and support the development of social coping mechanisms that do not rely on the LTTE, including especially independent civil society organisations and initiatives, and should continue to press the LTTE to stop threatening others who are trying to do humanitarian work. The TRO’s present demand that all major relief and reconstruction work should be entrusted to it and it alone is totally unacceptable, and has upset many donors who came to help and to work, leaving them with little alternative but to go back. We shall expand on these concerns in the sequel.
1. Introduction
The tidal wave, which devastated the southern and eastern coasts of Sri Lanka and other Asian nations killing more than a hundred thousand people, will occupy the world’s attention and the headlines for some weeks to come. Although it took some time to realise the scale of the tragedy, the world has awakened to the disaster and responded generously to the relief and reconstruction effort. The scope of the disaster is still difficult to digest: the loss of lives; the horrific stories of families torn apart and carried away by the Tsunami; the thousands of children orphaned by the wrath of the sea. The trauma of those directly affected is almost incomprehensible.
For Sri Lanka this unprecedented natural disaster comes in the train of decades of man-made disasters – communal strife and war. Among most Sri Lankans, this natural disaster has thrown up a spontaneous urge to reach out across man-made differences and help the needy and stricken. Even as the Government’s response and capability was felt to be grossly inadequate, whether in the North-East or the South, the spontaneous help from men, women and children from all walks of life made all the difference.
These are the bright spots. War is at least temporarily in abeyance. But the fault lines that were prominent before the disaster still persist. Unless we come to terms with them, the present potential for peace and unity will be lost. The alternative Tamil web site Thenee.com reflected editorially:
“Tsunami (the tidal wave) is an angel that came to teach lessons to all communities…It reduced us to a level where even the dead are indistinguishable as Tamil, Muslim, or Sinhalese. Nature taught us that in death we are all one. Even as international agencies are struggling to protect the victims [gunmen] shot dead a youth [from a rival faction] who went to Porativu [in Batticaloa] to look for his disaster-stricken family. Those trained in murder as their profession are incapable of any goodness or humanity…It takes no genius to breed hatred against our brothers. No ability or talent is required to exalt one’s pride and ego, humiliate others and earn thir hatred. Tsunami has taught us that learning to earn the love of others is the most precious lesson.”
For the LTTE the natural disaster, which crippled its war machine, has been a bitter lesson that terror is a fickle asset. Before the disaster it manipulated the international community into a programme of appeasement by threatening the discontinuation of the ceasefire. In the days following the disaster, the LTTE proclaimed a ‘national emergency’, implicitly thrusting itself as a state, and demanding international aid on its own terms.
The Tigers have done the Tamil cause the worst possible service in destroying its moral and democratic content and identifying it with terror. Today the victims under LTTE control along much of the seaboard from Vaharai to Pachchilapalai in the north need all the aid they can get to rebuild their lives.
Many Tamils all over the world and in the North-East wanted to share the agony of the tragedy not only with their own community but also with the larger community in Sri Lanka and others in the region. Those who are socially and politically conscious would like to be part of the humanitarian effort. But they feel powerless not only due to the scale of tragedy, but also because of the manipulation and control the LTTE continues to exert over any independent initiative. It is an extraordinary imposition on people in dire need. The LTTE at various levels attempts to shield survivors from human contact with outsiders for fear that it might pose a challenge to their narrow ideology. An example totally out of character with the victims’ need, and the solemnity of the tragedy that bypasses human boundaries, is the LTTE warning by loudspeaker the people of Valvettithurai to disengage from the warm discussion they were having with Prime Minister Rajapakse on relief.
Further, the social havoc the LTTE wreaked by imposing itself as the ‘sole representative’ in every sphere of life extends to relief and rehabilitation work. The LTTE has insisted that its agency, the TRO, is the only force on the ground fit to receive aid and rehabilitate the victims. It may be true that the TRO has substantially more resources at its disposal than most local initiatives, but the TRO has a very poor record of accountability. The large sums of money it collected for ‘refugees and relief’ prior to 2002 were almost certainly laundered for military purposes as indicated by the deprivations it imposed on people on the ground, even short-changing them on government relief (see our reports for that period). We give below indications of its strong links to LTTE intelligence.
Still, the reality is that owing to the authoritarian control the LTTE exerts on the Tamil community, and its overt (very obvious to locals) control of even the government machinery in the North-East to service its ends, any humanitarian work inevitably must deal with the LTTE. Those who want to support their community independently of the TRO face various forms of pressure from slander campaigns to direct threats unleashed by the LTTE propaganda machinery, locally and internationally.
Many who have watched the long drawn-out conflict in Sri Lanka have expressed hope that the present tragedy will force an end to the political stalemate and bring peace. Indeed there is real potential for all three communities and the leaders to learn lessons from the disaster that could improve the prospects for a peaceful settlement.
Unfortunately, despite the confusion arising from the blame game, it is not clear to us that the tragedy has had any impact on the workings of the LTTE. Its dual efforts to inhibit all independent thought and action and maintain control of all material resources continue.
The clearest evidence of this is the line the LTTE is promoting in the vernacular press. Before the disaster the LTTE’s propaganda machine was hard at work building up war hysteria. In its wake LTTE’s statements have played on the desperation of survivors to encourage communal hatred and ensure the LTTE’s control over relief. Unless the LTTE changes its attitude, the victims of the recent tragedy who are among those in greatest need would suffer undue neglect.
In the current context, where effective relief and rehabilitation is so urgently necessary, the LTTE’s attitudes present a substantial challenge to the international community and to local actors intent on reconstruction and peace. Though hidden by the regime of terror, the Tamil public, both locally and abroad, was groping for an alternative, even as the ordinary Sinhalese were far in advance of peacemakers, who largely were stuck in the mud of an outmoded ethnic conflict. The tidal wave precipitated changes in attitude that were already at work deep within people.
2. A Sea of Change: The Untold Story of the Tidal Wave
To those whose memories of the armed forces are associated with the massacres and disappearances of 1990 and before, the tidal wave brought new revelations. The story was the same everywhere along the government-controlled seaboard along the East. It was spontaneous, un-coordinated and not part of conventional military training.
When disaster struck on 26th December, the Army had its camps along the Vadamaratchy coast, and itself suffered much loss. Yet many people testified to the courage and unselfishness shown by the Army in helping and rescuing people. A fisherman from Katkovalam east of Pt. Pedro who was himself rescued by the Army, testified that the Army helped all those it could and was uniformly kind to everyone. As with many soldiers, this man had been hurt when thrown against barbed wire fencing along the coast by the force of the wave.
Along the seaboard of Trincomalee town and north of it, the Navy was the only body at hand to help the civilians (mainly Tamil and Muslim). Around 8th Mile Post (Kuchchaveli Road), in the wake of the turbulence the Navy asked the civilians to run inland to Agampodai Hill, and later in the afternoon brought food and water for them.
Kamaraj, a toddy tapper who shinnied up a coconut tree in Gopalapuram had a clear view of the mischief wrought by the tidal wave. He saw a navy man braving the flood and going in to clutch at two children. Then he saw another wave, which swept all three away. In Veloor, the corpse of a naval man clutching that of a child whom he tried to save was recovered, with his shoelace caught in a fence. These are actions, which, surely, cast a new ray of hope after decades of communal strife and should be the cornerstone of a new beginning.
Similar reports came from coastal areas close to Batticaloa Town, Kallady, Amirthakali and Navalady. Testimonies were of the Army going into the water, pulling out people and getting them to safety. Strangely, what the media largely ignored was not lost on Batticaloa people abroad. A Batticaloa man said that he received telephone calls from several of his friends in Australia and New Zealand, asking him to convey their gratitude to the Army Brigadier in Batticaloa for the good work done by his men.
In the Kalmunai and Thirukkovil areas of the Amparai District, people experienced 3 waves, and when the sea was seen to be wild, warnings were shouted and people ran. A number ofold people succumbed. The STF in these areas has been commended for leaving their arms behind, going out into the water, pulling people out and getting them to safety. They worked hard also at providing transport and basic relief, and the people are very grateful for it. Food came from neighbouring Muslims and Sinhalese.
Even more remarkable was the LTTE’s behaviour. In all these areas where the LTTE had been unremarkable in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, started asserting itself subsequently, trying to take over the refugee camps and demanding that all relief material and work should be controlled by them. It launched a virulent campaign against the armed forces attacking them with blatant falsehoods.
The LTTE accused the Army through its media monopoly of burning a refugee camp in Kudathanai, Vadamaratchy, supplying bad rice to refugees and of obstructing relief. The Army cleared the road from Valvettithurai to Pt Pedro and made it usable to traffic. The LTTE claimed through its media that the Sea Tigers and the people had cleared the road.