Bitter Ethnic Struggle Sinks Roots Deeper in Sri Lanka

Once again, war has come to this small, beautiful place.

At 8 a.m. one June day, Thirumadi Sangupillai, 12, was running down the road in her village on Sri Lanka’s low-lying eastern coast to buy her mother some rice. She stepped on a land mine buried on the roadside, and the explosion blew off her right foot.

The bright-eyed schoolgirl with braids is now confined to a bed in Ward 12 of the Batticaloa hospital. Her left leg is healing from ugly shrapnel wounds.

“She does not really know what has happened,” says Thirumadi’s older sister, who stands guard at the bedside.

Nearby, at the workshop of Noahs Embalmers & Morticians, whose hearse transports members of the armed forces and police killed in the line of duty, employees recently sold a pair of $9 coffins of flimsy albizia wood to bury two government infantrymen slain by Tamil insurgents.

“Business is not bad,” says Oliver Fernando, 21, a woodworker.

On the other side of this Indian Ocean island no bigger than West Virginia, 12 years of war have cost unemployed fisherman Jesudasan Barnabas nearly everything he had. In his palm, he holds the key to the old English-made Somerset automobile he used to own.

The car was destroyed by a bomb dropped by government forces several years ago. His home in Gurunagar, a seaside village near the rebel stronghold of Jaffna, was bombed into ashes and rubble.

To flee the fighting that has pitted Sri Lanka’s government against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in one of the modern world’s longest stretches of ethnically motivated bloodshed, Barnabas, his wife, Maureen, and their five daughters, 8 to 16, escaped to India in 1990. They had one shoulder bag among them.

This spring, certain that peace was finally near, the Barnabases left their refugee camp in southern India. Along with 500 other Sri Lankan Tamil refugees, they crowded aboard a ship for the 24-hour voyage home.

“They said peace was at hand,” the mustachioed fisherman remembers.

But “they”--relief workers and people from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees--were wrong. Since mid-April, civil war has again flared to life in this fetching, verdant land once known as Ceylon. At least 550 government troops have lost their lives.

And no end is in sight. On Sunday, the military attacked Tamil rebel positions on the Jaffna peninsula in its first major offensive of the renewed war. Ten civilians were killed and 75,000 fled their homes, the Associated Press reported. No rebel casualty figures were immediately available.

At least 10,000 troops backed by warplanes, warships, tanks and long-range field guns took part in the assault on the guerrilla-held peninsula, said military spokesman Brig. Sarath Munasinghe.

“This has become a competition in killing between [the Liberation Tigers] and the government,” said a high-ranking member of the island’s Roman Catholic clergy, requesting anonymity for fear that his words might offend one belligerent or the other, or both.

And the ethnic polarization could deepen and spread, endangering a fragile civic peace. Already, the killing of a prominent Buddhist monk by Tiger guerrillas has ignited violence by the majority Sinhalese community in the southern city of Galle.

Twenty-two bazaar stalls, all but five owned by Tamils, were torched by a mob on June 2, the eve of the monk’s funeral. As the flames roared through the market, terrified Tamils by the hundreds sought shelter in two Hindu temples.

As for Muslims, 8% of the nation’s 17.8 million inhabitants, they are panicked by recent letters, purportedly from the Tigers, demanding that they leave their homes in Eastern province, which the rebels claim as part of their Tamil eelam , or state.

Like most Sri Lankans, the Barnabases see no hope of better times soon. They now live far from the sea, crammed into a 10-by-10-foot metal-roofed shed at a camp housing 1,200 refugee families who have returned from India.

Five miles away, in the dry scrubland outside Vavuniya in Northern province, lies the no-man’s-land between government forces and Tamil rebels. The Barnabases are afraid to cross it to go home.

“This is no life,” the idle fisherman, visibly distressed, tells a visitor. “There’s no work.”

Others in Sri Lanka, especially those in positions of authority, are prey to the bacterium of fear. The Tigers are not only successful soldiers, with dedicated fighters as young as 13--they have also committed some of the most spectacular assassinations of modern times.

At Temple Trees, the presidential compound in Colombo, the capital, antiaircraft guns have been hastily installed to protect President Chandrika Kumaratunga after reports that the Tigers had purchased ultra-light aircraft to put a squadron of airborne kamikazes aloft.

The threat to Kumaratunga must be taken seriously. The Tigers are believed to have assassinated not only her chief campaign rival in October and President Ranasinghe Premadasa in May, 1993, but former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi as well.

Gandhi, the scion of India’s first political family, was slain by a suicide bomber while stumping in the neighboring south Indian state of Tamil Nadu in May, 1991.

“If they can kill Rajiv, what is Chandrika?” government spokesman Ariya Rubasinghe asks.

In June, India asked Sri Lanka to extradite the wily and ruthless leader of the Tigers, a high school dropout from the Karayar fishing and smuggling caste named Velupillai Prabhakaran, so he could be tried in Gandhi’s murder. To placate their neighbor, Sri Lankan officials said their courts would examine the request.

But, says Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, “with Prabhakaran, the problem is obvious: how to capture him.”

The Tiger leader--the government’s most dreaded enemy and a purported Clint Eastwood buff--is said never to sleep in the same bed twice. One of the deadliest and most elusive guerrillas of modern times, he has regularly beaten and outfoxed the much larger Sri Lankan military--and humbled a 100,000-member Indian peacekeeping force sent to the island in 1987-90.

Inspired by the martial Chola dynasty of Tamil kings--and outraged by the second-class treatment often meted out by the mostly Buddhist Sinhalese to Tamils, who make up 17% of Sri Lanka’s populace--Prabhakaran began his movement in 1972.

Even among many Tamils who abhor the Tigers’ terrorist tactics, their forced conscription of child soldiers, their extortion of funds from the Tamil community and the police-state methods they use to control people in their territory, Prabhakaran inspires respect for his dedication to eelam .

Ironically, Kumaratunga’s father--then-Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike--helped stoke the Tamils’ communal fury by passing a “Sinhalese only” law in 1956 that required government employees to know the language of the Buddhist majority. Many non-Sinhalese lost their jobs.

Two years later, Bandaranaike realized the Pandora’s box of ethnic hatreds he had opened and signed a pact with a Tamil political party to allow limited local self-government. A Buddhist monk shot him to death in 1959.

On June 29, Bandaranaike’s daughter turned 50. Inside Temple Trees, she would have had little to celebrate. She has accused the Tigers of plotting to kill her and has greatly cut back on a high-stepping, gossip-generating social life.

On the eve of her birthday, the Tigers scored their biggest victory since they broke off negotiations April 19 and resumed their attacks on government targets. A thousand of the rebels daringly staged a raid from the sea on Mandaitivu, a government island garrison in the north, and killed at least 99 of its defenders. The Tigers reported seven dead.

As news filtered into Colombo of another government setback in a conflict that has claimed at least 30,000 lives since 1983, Kumaratunga canceled her afternoon appointments. “She is not feeling well,” Press Secretary Victor Fernando reported.

It was only a few months before, thanks in large part to her boldness and new approach, that restoring peace to Sri Lanka had seemed possible. Even the Tigers, one Colombo-based diplomat reports, had an open mind during preliminary negotiations held in Jaffna with Kumaratunga’s envoys.

Kumaratunga, a widowed mother of two who had been elected prime minister in August as the head of the left-leaning People’s Alliance coalition, had a thick campaign manifesto calling for an end to 17 years of corruption and blatant abuse of power by the United National Party. But its centerpiece, which helped her rack up a landslide across ethnic lines in the Nov. 9 presidential election, was unconditional talks with the Tigers.

On Jan. 8, as government and Tiger representatives engaged in preliminary parleys, a cease-fire went into effect between government troops and the estimated 15,000 armed Tiger “cadres.”

Colombo’s embargo on the Tiger-held areas was also lifted in part. It had been so strict that sanitary napkins were not allowed to be taken into “uncleared areas” for fear the Tigers would use them as field dressings.

Once again, coveted goods flowed north by truck to Jaffna, where delighted Tamil residents dubbed them “Chandrika’s incense sticks,” “Chandrika’s tooth powder” or whatever. There was no doubt who was winning the battle for Tamil hearts and minds.

But Kumaratunga was not winning over the Tigers. Perhaps worried about the Sinhalese president’s rising popularity on their home turf, they charged that the embargo had not really been lifted and that other conditions they put forth for full-scale peace talks were being ignored.

Meanwhile, Prabhakaran’s forces were exploiting the truce to rearm and reinforce themselves. About 60,000 tons of cement, ideal material for building bunkers or pillboxes, was trucked north after the blockade was lifted. In the east, the Tigers infiltrated many cadres. In and around Batticaloa, only porously held by the government, the Tamil militants conscripted as many as 2,000 children for military service, sometimes over parents’ pleas and protests, residents said.

As for the Sri Lankan military, “I should say that the soldiers out in the field were taking a bit of a rest,” army spokesman Munasinghe admits. The complacency or overconfidence went right to the top: After Kumaratunga took office, government weapons procurement virtually stopped.

The truce pact called for each side to give the other 72 hours’ notice before the resumption of hostilities. At 10 p.m. on April 19, the Tigers delivered a letter in Colombo, Munasinghe said. A little more than two hours later, they struck.

Four suicide “Sea Tigers” swam into Trincomalee Harbor north of Batticaloa. After reaching two moored navy patrol boats, they detonated the explosives they were wearing, blowing up themselves and the vessels and killing 12 sailors.

Stunned by the spurning of her peace efforts, Kumaratunga was “badly demoralized,” recalls one acquaintance who serves in Parliament. Military leaders, some of whom had considered Kumaratunga a naive Pollyanna to begin with, now had confirmation--and more proof of Tiger perfidy.

About a week later, the Tigers, apparently using shoulder-held SAM missiles, shot down two government air force transports, killing all 97 people aboard.

Already a deadly foe on land and sea, the Tigers suddenly posed a threat to Sri Lanka’s air force. Resupply of the 20,000 government soldiers garrisoned on bases in the north immediately became much riskier.

Now the government is bent on a military victory that would force the Tigers to seek peace. It clamped the blockade back on and dispatched missions as far afield as China and the former Soviet republic of Georgia to buy arms, including countermeasures against SAMs.

Kadirgamar can conceive of just two realistic scenarios: a war to the end with the Tigers, or battles of attrition in which the government’s 100,000-strong military uses its numbers to inflict so much pain that the Tigers cave in and agree to negotiate.

In and around Jaffna, large-scale operations such as those launched Sunday could cause a blood bath among the more than 700,000 Tamil civilians, and the Tigers are said by one military source to have constructed “Normandy-like” defenses.

Whether Kumaratunga can succeed where her predecessors have not is doubted by many who have studied Sri Lanka’s army. Desertions are so rife--24,000 since 1987--that manpower-strapped generals have turned their backs on their own military code and offered amnesty if deserters return to the ranks. Morale is said to be poor.

Meanwhile, for the rest of the island, renewed war endangers the July 15 deadline Kumaratunga set for herself to scrap the powerful “executive presidency” and return the former British colony to a more traditional Westminster-style parliamentary system.