UK Lanka Times - UKLanka Minute

In the late 1980’s a group of Marxists ran amok in Sri Lanka. Scores of young, disenchanted men led by a charismatic Guevara-esque leader went around attacking police stations and public buildings and calling for the bourgeoisie to cease running the lives of the proletariat. Or something along those lines. My family and I were contentedly stuck smack in the middle of this bourgeoisie-proletariat divide, getting on with our middle class lives. The government, realizing that having a chat with the Lankan Che and his cronies was not going to work, began the great crackdown throughout southern Sri Lanka, while also taking part in a not insignificant ethnic conflict in the North of the Island. The security services had a field day; everyone who was able and over the age of 16 was a target, irrespective of whether the boy was a Marxist or a pony-tailed Iron Maiden fan, which my 17-year-old elder brother was at the time. I was 9 or 10 years old but distinctly remember the crippling fear that my mother sometimes felt, whenever she heard vehicles outside the house at night or rumours began circulating that the crackdown was getting closer. I remember my brother being holed up in the house for days at a time, unable to go and practise diving in the local pool or jam with his metal-head friends.

The experience stayed with me. I grew up, the JVP became a mainstream political party but they had lost favour with my family as a credible political force as with numerous others. They were (are) perceived as just a bunch of impractical jokers who were (are) a blight on the good name of a certain Mr Guevara and everything that he stood for. There was also an anger in me that sparked up each time some ersatz, beret wearing JVPer came on TV to denounce imported beef or sliced bread.

Not unlike the JVP struggles of the late-1980’s, Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict permeated the lives of my family and peers in the 1990’s. In 1996, the terror came too close for comfort. I was playing in the garden at home just outside Colombo when our window breaking off drives were disrupted for just a moment by a heavy, distant thud. My brothers and I exchanged knowing glances before getting on with the window breaking. About half an hour later, my mother called telling us that a bunch of suicide bombers had driven a lorry laden with explosives into the security barricades in front of the Central Bank tower in the very heart of Colombo. Just for shock effect, they had first alighted from the truck firing shoulder launched missiles at the building’s facade before detonating their payload. Colombo’s financial district had been turned into a full scale war zone. 100 killed, 1500 injured. My father worked at a hotel adjoining the Bank Tower at the time. He escaped unscathed but it was too close for comfort. The good times though, never ceased. Trains, buses, outdoor markets, bus stations, nothing was out of bounds. One of my earliest memories as a journalist in Colombo was trying to get an interview with an injured old vegetable seller who had had the right half of her chest blown away in a grenade attack on an outdoor market. Life though, went on. For me, and scores of others in Colombo, it was a simple case of us against them. We were trying to get on with our lives while ‘they’ had ambitions of partaking of numerous vestal virgins as they crashed through the gates of heaven having blown themselves sky high. Or some such.

Then I grew up, travelled beyond Sri Lanka, explored and found the world as well as myself. All the while, the JVP, the war, stayed somewhere at the back of my mind. Finally, about four years ago, I came to London and saw firsthand the effects of the war in Sri Lanka. I had lived with it throughout my life but never actually saw the effects or knew enough to explore the causes. In London, I ran into people who had ‘fled’ Sri Lanka. It didn’t initially make sense to me. What would compel a man, a woman, a family, to flee a paradise isle which God had created while he was in a particularly generous mood? Then I heard their stories, the horrors, the atrocities, committed by all sides, in opportune moments. I heard and wrote of the learned Tamil professor gunned down by the LTTE while on her way back home from Jaffna University. The school girls raped by men of all creeds.

I also came across the picture on this page. A naked Tamil man, utterly helpless, stripped of all his dignity, surrounded by smug, smiling Sinhala thugs, baying for blood, thugs who probably had no connection or understanding of what had caused the rioting in Colombo in July of 1983 but went along for the ride anyway, spurred by an inhuman lust for the blood of innocents. In Colombo, my Colombo, mobs hunting down and chopping up innocent Tamil civilians, women, children who had nothing to do with the murder of 13 soldiers killed by the LTTE up north. That picture made me think of the bitterness that I felt towards having my family live in fear, in trepidation. It also made me wonder how Sri Lankan men usually blessed with an easy-going persuasion and whose lives revolved around the teachings of a man like the Buddha, could display such a degree of callous brutality as was on display on that July day in 1983. And I understood the subsequent years of strife, the thousands killed, the fear and mistrust, the posturing and the urge a human being would feel for vengeance. Suicide bombings and government crackdowns on innocent civilians never make any sense, but for the first time in my life, I was driven to explore the roots of where the problem lay.

After the boyish thugs had finished terrorizing Mumbai in November last year, the crowds baying for blood were shockingly numerous. Yet the voices of reason, who demanded caution, in spite of the terrible anger and sadness they felt, were few and far, far between. Whether you are a Sri Lankan or an Indian or a Pakistani, as a people, South Asians are incredibly emotional. Just ask our respective Cricket teams. No wonder yoga originated in our lands. But isn’t it time to take a step back in instances such as Mumbai 08 and take stock? Ask ourselves, why a perfectly healthy young man would be driven to such despair? Isn’t it time to ask ourselves why some Muslims in India or some Tamils in Sri Lanka have felt disillusioned enough to kill and maim when other Muslims and Tamils such as Shah Rukh Khan and Muttiah Muralitharen are feted?

Would I be surprised if the father, brother, son, best friend, sister, mother or cousin of the desperate man in the grainy picture sought vengeance? It’s not complicated. It’s just human nature. While we wonder why Mumbai or 9/11 or 7/7 or Colombo 1983 – 2008 happens, and seek redress, we have an obligation to explore where it all went pear shaped. Solutions may transpire.

It’s worked in South Africa and Rwanda. Why must it not work in our part of the world?