The Age of Kali (36 page)

‘And, young man, let me tell you this. Between them they are doing a very good job.’

JAFFNA, SRI LANKA
,
1990

The band had been playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ before the helicopter gunship appeared over the crest of the hill. The noise of the rotor blades drowned out the pipes and drums, and throbbed down over the last commandos as they boarded the troopships. The hot dust rose in whirling eddies and the Generals’ medals chinked against one another as they brought their handkerchiefs up to cover their faces. After hovering for a few seconds over the departing army, the gunship passed on. It flew out across the bay, over the aircraft carrier and the destroyers, joining the four other helicopters which were criss-crossing the harbour – a formation of giant dragonflies hovering over the waters.

The ceremony had been going on for two hours. It was an indulgent display of speeches and marches-past and brass bands, designed to show that the occupying troops were going to take their time leaving, that they were not – heaven forbid – being thrown out, that the third-biggest army in the world was not withdrawing with its tail between its legs.

The speeches droned on, medals were awarded – but there was no disguising the tension which hung over the jetty. Somewhere around the bay, hidden under the jungle canopy, the Tamil Tigers were taking up their positions. Everyone was expecting a parting shot, a farewell mortar attack or the explosion of a last artfully disguised landmine, and all the way through the ceremony the Indian helicopters scoured the surrounding hills and clearings for the first burst of machine-gun fire, or the telltale flash of a rocket-launcher glinting in the sun.

It was the end of March 1990, and I had been sent south from Delhi to cover the withdrawal of the Indian Army from Sri Lanka. Although the event was getting little coverage in the Western press, it was, in its way, as extraordinary an event as the Russian retreat from Kabul, or, before that, the fall of Saigon. Once again, as in Afghanistan and Vietnam, a superpower army – India has 1.3 million men under arms – had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a small but dedicated guerrilla group. It was a remarkable achievement – at times the Tigers had been outnumbered seventy to one – but while half the journalists in London seemed to have been in to Afghanistan with the Mujahedin, and there were enough films about Vietnam to stock a fair-sized video library, the Tamil Tigers remained faceless, unsung, unknown. One reason for this was that the Tigers strongly discouraged journalists. As a result there was little in the cuttings libraries to fill me in. There were only hints, and they made me want to know more.

Firstly, it was clear that the Tigers were almost fanatically disciplined. Smoking and drinking were banned on pain of expulsion; adultery was punishable by death. It sounded an unlikely collision between the Maoist guerrilla principles of Che Guevara and the monastic ideals of the Desert Fathers; but it was clearly an effective mixture: there were few internal disputes within the Tigers, and certainly none of the petty power squabbles which fatally divided the Afghan Mujahedin. Instead the Tigers were a centralised, autocratic, almost fascistic organisation, with the senior Tiger commander, Prabhakaran, receiving a near-religious obedience from his fighters.

Secondly, the Tigers were suicidally brave. In more than a decade of continuous fighting, remarkably few of them had been taken alive. Every guerrilla carried around his or her neck a tiny phial of cyanide crystals: trapped by government troops, whole camps of Tigers had been known to swallow their phials and end their lives in two minutes of inconceivable agony.

Finally, and no less intriguingly, the Tigers were clearly completely ruthless. In the course of their campaigns they had been
responsible for some of the worst atrocities against civilians in recent Asian history. Their massacres had been compared to the most revolting excesses of the Viet Cong, even of the Khmer Rouge. Car-bombs had been left outside nursery schools; whole villages had been systematically liquidated; political rivals had been hunted down and exterminated with a terrible, single-minded savagery. It was as if the Tigers actually enjoyed killing, as if to them it was a hobby, or even an art form. Yet this unpleasant cocktail of qualities has turned the Tigers in to arguably the most efficient and successful guerrilla group operating anywhere in the world today.

As I watched the last Indian troopship pull out of China Bay, I made up my mind to extend my stay in Sri Lanka, and to try to discover a little more about the Tigers. With the Indians out of the country, their war was temporarily over. They now controlled the north and east of the island, the Tamil heartland, and were beginning to make noises about talks with the Sri Lankan government and democratic elections: maybe they would look on journalists more kindly than before. I returned to Colombo and extended my visa for another month.

The next day I rang a Tamil-speaking driver, George, and together we set off for Anuradhapura.

Anuradhapura is where the story begins – doubly so.

The Tamils and the Singhalese have been neighbours in Sri Lanka for nearly three thousand years, and throughout much of that time they have been fighting each other. The north and east of the island is the preserve of the dark-skinned Tamils: small and sharp and hard-working and Hindu. Elsewhere the island is dominated by the Singhalese, a languid and strikingly beautiful race of fair-skinned Buddhists. Anuradhapura is their city, and in its centre lies the
sacred bo tree, grown from a clipping of the tree in Bodh Gaya under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment. It was brought to Sri Lanka in about 250
BC
by the first Buddhist missionaries, and has always been one of the most sacred relics of Buddhism.

In 237
BC
the city was seized and sacked by Tamil Hindus from south India. They enslaved the Buddhists, and established Hinduism as the official religion of the island. It was Dutugümunu (101–70 BC), the Singhalese answer to King Arthur, who liberated his people at the battle of Anuradhapura. The city became the capital of a united Sri Lanka, and has remained ever since the symbol of Singhala dominance (even though, between the fourteenth century and the beginning of the colonial period, most Tamils were governed by their own independent Kings of Jaffna).

In 1948, when Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) gained its independence from Britain, the old wounds reopened. With eleven million Singhalese and only three million Tamils, the advent of democracy led to the subjection of the minority: in 1956 Singhala was made the country’s official language, and Tamil was banned from government offices and road signs; to gain access to senior government jobs, Tamils had to pass a Singhala proficiency test. At the same time, prime land in the north was gradually parcelled out and colonised by Buddhists, at the expense of its Hindu owners. Early Tamil attempts at non-violent protest were brutally put down by the Special Task Force, a kind of Buddhist Gestapo.

It became clear to many young Tamils that if they and their culture were to survive, they would have to take up arms and create their own state – ‘Eelam’, or Precious Land – in the north of Sri Lanka. In 1975 Vellupillai Prabhakaran, a teenage Tamil smuggler, brought together a small group of his friends and founded the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Trained partly in southern India by RAW, the Indian intelligence service, and, allegedly, partly in Israel by Mossad, they set out to fight for an independent Tamil state.

Initially only one of a number of competing Tamil guerrilla groups, the LTTE soon established itself as among the most fanatical
and ruthless terrorist forces operating anywhere in the world. For ten years the Tigers bombed schools, garrotted Buddhist monks and wiped out whole Singhalese villages. They also waged a bloody – and ultimately successful – war against their Tamil rivals. Finally, a series of violent, often suicidal strikes and bombings led to a major anti-Tamil pogrom in Colombo in July 1983, which in turn plunged the country in to a full-scale civil war of almost Lebanese complexity. Following the riots, one of the Tigers’ first major targets, a symbolic strike at the heart of Singhala myth and national pride, was Anuradhapura.

Today the ancient city bears deceptively few scars from Prabhakaran’s attack. The great white
stupas
still rise from the green of the paddy fields, as bulky as the Giza pyramids but more refined, the domes tapering to perfect fir-cone steeples. Beyond, the jungle chokes and grips at the fallen pillars of temples and palaces half-submerged by vegetation. Those buildings which were burned or shattered in the attack have been tidied up and repainted. Only if you look very carefully can you see the bulletholes or scorch-marks, the last shreds of evidence of the massacre which violated arguably the most sacred Buddhist sanctuary in Sri Lanka.

It was seven thirty in the morning of 14 May 1985 when the Tigers arrived at the modern town on the outskirts of the Sacred Enclosure. They parked their hijacked vehicle in the middle of the bus station, calmly climbed out of the back, cocked their Kalashnikovs and began firing indiscriminately in to the crowd. Two grenades were thrown in to a waiting school bus; a shoulder-launched rocket hit another full of elderly pilgrims.

Mohammed Razik runs Paris Corner, a small tea-stall opposite the bus station. That morning he had just opened his shutters and was sitting down to read the newspaper when he heard the explosions. Thinking they were crackers, he went outside to have a look.

‘People were running everywhere. Many had fallen on the ground, either wounded or huddled screaming over the body of a relative. Smoke and flames were rising from the buses which were
on fire. The rattle of automatic weapons seemed to be coming from all directions. Then I saw about twenty guerrillas advancing slowly out of the flames of the bus stand, walking forward in a straight line, firing from the hip. Three of them were wearing uniform, the rest were in T-shirts. I saw them throw a grenade at the Bank of Ceylon – the security guard there had tried to fire his shotgun at them – before I ran out the back and jumped in to the lake.’

A few minutes later the Tigers reached the bo tree temple. While they paused outside to shoot the trinket-sellers, postcard-wallahs and a crocodile of Buddhist nuns, Dhanapala Herath, the temple sweeper, tried to close the great temple gates. The Tigers pushed them open before he managed to secure the bar.

‘They barged in and one of them raised his gun to shoot at the great Buddha image. I pushed at the gun and the shots hit the roof. Then they shot me, three times, in the legs, the arms, and shoulder.’ He paused for a second and looked down at his two amputated stumps. Then he continued: ‘I remember one thing before I lost consciousness. They were all laughing. They were not frightened or horrified at what they were doing – they were joking and giggling and enjoying themselves, as if they were at a festival.’

The massacre at Anuradhapura brought a terrible new religious passion and bitterness to the violence in Sri Lanka. The following day further riots led to hundreds of Tamil deaths all over the south of the island. Up to 1990, perhaps 150,000 people lost their lives in the fighting. For an island whose total population is barely fifteen million, that is a colossal slaughter.

North of Anuradhapura, you leave Singhalese territory. You move in to the Tamil zone, in to Eelam. No public transport passes between the two communities: that is where George comes in.

George is a charming and companionable Singhalese taxi-driver who, unusually for a southerner, speaks good Tamil. He has, however, one serious flaw: George is heavily into home engineering. His car works fine until George begins poking around under its bonnet. Then anything can happen. On a previous trip we were spending a night in a reputedly guerrilla-infested stretch of jungle. George chose this propitious moment to fiddle with his engine. The next morning, smoke billowed out of the bonnet and the carburettor exploded. It was three days before we were on the move again.