Sri Lankan Outreach Program

In this smashed and ruined city, the Sri Lankan army has launched an offensive notable less for its savagery than for its sweetness.

Troops deployed to crush a festering ethnic revolt pause to pass out cricket bats to schoolkids. They take sensitivity training and study the language of their Tamil foes. A soldiers choir serenades the locals at Christmastime.

Fifteen years of stalemate in one of the world’s most obscure and sordid wars has taught the military here a lesson that the United States learned a quarter of a century ago: You can’t win by the gun alone.

“We studied Vietnam,” said Maj. Gen. Lionel Balagalle, the commander of the Sri Lankan army’s forces here. “Wherever the Americans go--even now, I understand--they always bring their own food and their own supplies. We buy our vegetables and our supplies from the locals.

“We depend on them,” the general said, “and they depend on us.”

In ways big and small, the Sri Lankan army and government have begun to reach out to a Tamil minority alienated by decades of discrimination at the hands of the country’s Sinhalese majority. They have promised to crack down on human rights abuses by their soldiers, who are blamed for hundreds of civilian Tamil deaths.

The government’s ultimate aim is to undercut support for the Tamil guerrillas and end a war that has killed 50,000 people. Whether the effort will succeed in reversing the discrimination and neglect, which fueled support for the rebels, remains unclear.

The most visible symbol of the new strategy emerged last year, when the Sri Lankan government replaced its old-style commander in Jaffna with Balagalle--an urbane, tea-sipping general so soft-spoken that his voice in a recent interview was often drowned out by the crows outside his window.

“We need the people with us,” he said in his heavily guarded office in Colombo, the capital.

For all the army’s efforts, a tour through Jaffna, the heart of Sri Lanka’s Tamil population, reveals a community beleaguered by years of war and cynical about both the Sinhalese who dominate the country and the rebels who claim the Tamils’ trust.

“We are caught in the middle,” said V.V. Rajendrathas, a Jaffna engineer. “We can’t speak against the army--they will come and give us a beating. If we speak against the rebels, we will get shot through the ears.”

The fighting began in 1983 when the Hindu, Tamil-speaking minority, chafing under the rule of the country’s Buddhist, Sinhalese-speaking majority, tried to form a separate state in the northern third of the island nation. British colonial rule, which united the two groups in what was then called Ceylon, ended in 1948.

Since the war began, as many Sri Lankans have died in the fighting as did Americans in Vietnam, this in a nation of 18 million. A million people have fled their homes. Human rights groups have accused both the government and the main rebel army, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, of murdering hundreds of civilians.

In the past two years, suicide bombers believed to be with the Tigers have detonated two truck bombs in Colombo in an attempt to scare away tourists and cripple the capital’s economy. Other victims of Tiger bombers include Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi--killed by rebels embittered over India’s short-lived intervention in the Sri Lankan war--and Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa.

Last summer, to the delight of Sri Lanka’s democratically elected government, the United States declared the Tigers a terrorist organization. The group is contesting that designation in a Washington federal court.

A Decisive Turn

The war took a decisive turn two years ago, when the Sri Lankan army recaptured the city of Jaffna on a peninsula that juts out of the island’s northern tip toward southern India. The army is now fighting to reopen a jungle road that would link Jaffna to the Sinhalese south.

Despite the army’s success on the battlefield, the Tigers operate in about one-third of the country. A Tiger force believed to number less than 10,000 ties down 65,000 government troops.

Hence the new two-track approach: wage war and win over a minority that has long-standing grievances.

“The only lasting solution to this conflict is a political one,” said Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, who is a Tamil.

The stiffest test of the strategy will come Jan. 29, when the first municipal elections in more than a decade are scheduled for Jaffna. The Sri Lankan government wants to begin handing over civil authority as a prelude to granting the Tamils regional autonomy. Such limited self-rule, officials argue, is the only way to end the war while addressing Tamil grievances and keeping the nation intact.

“In the past, the government talked a lot, but it has never gone this far in recognizing the right of the Tamil people to conduct their own affairs,” Kadirgamar said.

In Jaffna, the government’s strategy faces a skeptical population and a city devastated by years of civil war.

Jaffna fell to the army in October 1995 after five years of control by the Tamil rebels. The army shelled the city as it advanced, and tens of thousands fled the peninsula for the mainland.

“The fires of hell burned every night,” said Father Seluarajah of St. John’s Catholic Church.

In Jaffna’s third year under military control, bullet holes pockmark nearly every wall in every home. Army checkpoints, fortified by sandbags and machine guns, guard every other intersection. Residents sleep in houses without windows, walls and roofs. Children and old men hobble down cratered streets. Many are missing limbs.

At night, gunfire punctuates the silence. Elegant homes with wide verandas and terrazzo floors host squatters and Western relief workers. Forty buses, 180 phone lines and a sputtering electrical system support half a million residents. The streets lie quiet, save for the occasional clatter of a British car left behind from colonial days.

‘We Will Start Again’

Despite the hardship, tens of thousands of refugees are streaming home to Jaffna, pushing the city to the edge of chaos. Each day, they wade, swim or sail across the Jaffna lagoon from the portion of the mainland still controlled by the Tigers. The refugees are often in rags and are broke--having paid their last rupees to a Tiger cadre demanding a departure tax. As many as 300,000 people, some forced at gunpoint by the rebels to evacuate when the army advanced in 1995, have yet to return.

Sannadi Vykunthanathan, a tobacco farmer, sat under a tin roof the other day at the Gurunagar refugee camp with 35 others who had just sailed across.

Vykunthanathan, 30, and his five family members left their home in October 1995 amid shooting, shelling, burning and looting. Down to their last rupees and stricken with malaria, they have come home.

“We will start to farm again,” Vykunthanathan said. “We couldn’t stay in the camps anymore.”

Whether such people will bother to vote in this month’s municipal elections remains in doubt.

Many Jaffna residents and military officials accuse the central government of pushing too fast to hold elections--primarily, they say, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Sri Lanka’s independence Feb. 4. Jaffna is a city under siege and under occupation all at once, cut off from the rest of the country and patrolled by 35,000 troops.

“People are not in a position to think about politics,” said Thambirajah Subathiran, 37, a former guerrilla who has renounced the armed struggle to run for a seat on the Jaffna City Council. “People here lost everything. They are destroyed, mentally and physically.”

Still, Subathiran has decided that elections are worth a try, and he is one of 1,100 candidates.

The Colombo government has proposed constitutional reforms that would grant the Tamils more authority to govern their own affairs. The offices up for grabs in Jaffna confer little power, but they are seen as a first step.

Government officials are hoping for a 50% turnout at the polls, but few in Jaffna think that will happen. Some people portrayed those running as interlopers with little knowledge of how real people in Jaffna were struggling to survive.

Other Jaffna residents say they find the candidates, most of whom are former guerrillas, distasteful. They say they are torn between voting for the former guerrillas--and thus appearing to legitimize them--and boycotting the election, handing a propaganda victory to the Tigers.

The Tigers call the upcoming Jaffna elections a farce and the army foreign invaders. They vow to keep fighting until the army withdraws and the Colombo government agrees to a separate Tamil nation.

“The Sinhalese have oppressed the Tamil people, denied us education, jobs and democratic rights,” said Anton Raja, a Tiger spokesman in London. “The army has raped our women and tortured and killed our youth. We have no choice but to continue fighting until the army is evicted.”

Election Misgivings

In the face of widespread misgivings over the elections, the Colombo government says a good turnout is essential if civic life is ever to return to Jaffna. That same desire to restore peacetime order is also driving the army’s push to end human rights abuses.

In 1996, the city threatened to slip into anarchy as allegations of abuses by the military reached a crescendo with the gang rape and slaying of a Tamil girl. Independent monitors estimate that as many as 600 civilians disappeared from Jaffna in the year after the army moved in.

President Chandrika Kumaratunga has promised to investigate alleged human rights violations by the military. About 15 soldiers face charges ranging from robbery to rape.

In Jaffna, few people have faith that the soldiers responsible for killing and torture will ever go to prison--or that those who have disappeared will ever be unearthed.

“The army is no more likely to discipline itself than a husband is his wife,” said onion farmer E. Annamalai. “It’s all the same family.”

Still, some find reason to hope that the worst is over. Human rights groups such as Amnesty International say disappearances at the hands of the army dropped to about 35 in 1997, with none confirmed since August.

“Things have drastically improved since the appointment of Gen. Balagalle,” Father Bernard of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church said.

To the army, such assessments show that the new approach is working. In time, army leaders say, the military will defeat the rebels and reunite the country. But they acknowledge that military victories will be no substitute for winning over the Tamils.

“Everything comes down to the people,” said Brig. Chula Seneviratne, who commands a division in Jaffna. “Without the people, nothing is possible.”