AP, via the Pioneer Press, USA
June 21, 2006
Matthew Rosenberg
www.twincities.com

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ReligionNewsBlog.com • Item 15023 • Posted: Thursday June 22, 2006  

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AP Correspondent Matthew Rosenberg is in Sri Lanka covering the recent upsurge in violence and is reporting from the rebel-controlled zone in the north.

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WEDNESDAY, June 21, 4:15 p.m. local

OUTSIDE KILINOCHCHI, Sri Lanka

We’re heading out of Kilinochchi to a Tamil Tiger rebel base. We’re on a road, though I can’t tell you which one as we’ve promised to keep details of the base’s location vague in exchange for letting us visit. But I can say that like many routes here, this one is lined with mine fields marked by sticks painted red and white.

Myself and the photographer, Manish Swarup, shout when the driver makes a move to go off the side of the road so he can pass a truck. Sure, the truck’s black exhaust is choking us, but I’ll take a small dose of asphyxiation over a big land mine blast any day.

We’ve been begging to meet rebel fighters since we arrived Monday to no avail. So when the Tigers’ political chief told me today during an interview that it’s hard for people like me who have always lived under a democracy to understand why his fighters are willing to die for a homeland for Sri Lanka’s largely Hindu Tamils, who have long faced discrimination from the predominantly Buddhist Sinhalese majority, I told him to let me meet some rebel soldiers and have them explain their motives and feelings.

So now we’re on our way to meet fighters from a movement that borders on a cult - Tigers don’t drink or smoke and those who are captured are expected to swallow cyanide rather than be taken alive. It’s agonizing death hundreds have chosen.

Some 240 others have also chosen to become suicide bombers, while thousands more died in a war notable largely for its viciousness. The Tigers may play the freedom fighter card, but they, like the government here, are known to target civilians. They also recruit children.

We won’t be back until well after dark tonight. I’ll be writing - and blogging - about the base tomorrow. Stay tuned.

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TUESDAY, June 20, 1:30 p.m. local

KILINOCHCHI, Sri Lanka

We asked to see rebels fighters - the feared cadres of the Tamil Tigers. Instead we got traffic cops.

“In 2002, we had a lot of traffic accidents here, and sometimes fatalities,” explains Rasiah Ramanathan, the chief traffic cop in “Tamil Eelam” - the de-facto state that the Sri Lanka’s rebel Tamil Tigers have set up in the areas they control in the Sri Lanka’s north and east.

“Now that we are here checking the speeds, everything is under control,” he says. A few feet away, an officer is indeed clocking speeds with a radar gun. No one is breaking the 25 mph (40kph) speed limit.

If it seems a bit off for a rebel state to have a speed limit and chief traffic cop, well, this is no ordinary rebel state. It’s got everything from a navy to an association for disabled people, who in a nod to Western political correctness are referred to as “differently abled.” And the folks who run Kilinochchi, the rebel capital, have gone out of the way to project an image of normalcy, keeping Tiger soldiers out of view.

But still, standing on the side of the only commercial strip in town - and one of the few paved roads - listening to a police officer explain how radar guns have helped the Tigers restore order is odd, to say the least.

Ramanathan, like his fellow officers, is dressed in a light blue shirt, dark blue slacks and a blue cap. On his shirt is a patch that bears a roaring tiger - the symbol of Tamile Elam - and has “Tamil Eelam Police Force” written in English and Tamil.

He tells me the latest excitement at the traffic division is a new radar gun, which uses lasers and can track cars from about 500 meters away, as opposed to the current gun, which can get a reading only from 200 meters.

Hearing that you might get the impression there are wide open roads in these parts, and Tamil speed demons are tearing them up. Don’t.

The road is narrow and bumpy. Its crumbling sides give way to packed red dirt. Most vehicles are underpowered motorcycles, which zip around the fume-spewing auto rickshaws and lumbering vans that serve as taxis throughout Sri Lanka. There are a couple of very old - we’re talking easily 40 years - Morris sedans.

This being a war and disaster zone - don’t forget the Asian tsunami recovery is still going on - there are United Nations vehicles, most of them Toyota Land Cruisers, powerful beasts painted white with ‘UN’ in light blue on the sides and tops. Each flies the flag of an agency - UNICEF, the United Nations Development Program, the World Food Program. No one is stopping them.

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TUESDAY, June 20, 5:30 a.m. local.

KILINOCHCHI, Sri Lanka

“Pee! Pee! Pee!”

Why, I wonder in my confused half-awake state, is someone pounding on my door telling me to use the bathroom.

Wait … waking up now … oh, he’s shouting “Tea! Tea! Tea!”

But Why! Why! Why! is he doing it a 5:30 a.m. It’s not even light out yet.

If I haven’t said it before, I will now - Kilinochchi really needs a decent hotel. I said as much to the spokesman for the rebel Tamil Tigers, who run the town. He just shrugged as if he knew, but hadn’t really thought of it as a priority. Fair enough, the country’s getting closer to renewing its vicious ethnic war and he’s clearly got other things to deal with.

Still, the hotel situation is an inescapable part of my current existence. The town, like Sri Lanka, is hot, and my room at 1-9 Inn is even hotter - especially during the frequent power outages, when the fan stops.

The walls are dirty and stained, the mattress is thin and grimy and the sheets are filthy (I’m sleeping in a camping sack because I suspect there are bed bugs). I can’t even begin to describe the bathroom. Lets just say I don’t go in there after dark.

That said, I know this is an incredibly poor town, and whining is ungracious. We’ve been treated well, and the hosts are bringing me a nice hot cup of milky tea every morning - even if it arrives before dawn.

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MONDAY, June 19, 5 p.m. local

KILINOCHCHI, Sri Lanka

I’ve checked into the 1-9, one of the two places to stay (for my take on the other one, check the previous post) in Kilinochchi, the main city in Tamileelam, the de-facto mini-state set up the Tamil Tiger rebels in the swaths of territory they control in Sri Lanka’s north and east.

The rooms are standard issue - dark and dusty. It’s out back in the beer garden that the bizzar-o factor comes in. Yup, you read that right - they’ve got a beer garden in the capital of a would-be country that doesn’t officially exist and has adopted a form of puritanical totalitarianism under which adultery is a crime and porn is strictly verboten. It’s fantastic back here: half the tables are covered by thatch roofs; there’s a large stone monument of some sort (to what? no one seems to know) and a beer bottle fountain that sprouts water from its top. Mixed in amid the real flowers and plants are plastic birds.

I love it. It’s a great place to work. There’s a nice breeze, the staff are helpful even if I can’t understand a word they are saying, and there’s a whole crew of old guys sucking down Sprite and arrak, a Sri Lankan booze made from coconut juice. One of them introduces himself and in broken English offers his services as a driver. He’s so drunk he’s swaying as he speaks. Thankfully, I already have a driver. He’s sitting next to me drinking water.

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MONDAY, June 19, 1:30 p.m. local

ON THE BORDER BETWEEN GOVERNMENT AND REBEL TERRITORY, Sri Lanka

Enter Tamileelam, the real and imagined homeland of Sri Lanka’s Tamils. It’s real because there’s a border (we’re at it right now), a police force, and education system, tax collectors and, perhaps most importantly of all, a military. It’s imagined because officially it doesn’t exist - Tamileelam, as the rebel Tamil Tigers call the territory they control in Sri Lanka’s north and east, is not recognized by anyone who doesn’t live in it.

In fact, just today the Sri Lankan government again insisted that Tamileelam does not exist. “Neither the government of Sri Lanka nor any other member of the international community recognizes a ‘de facto state of Tamil Eelam (homeland),’” the government’s Peace Secretariat said in a statement. “This remains a myth.”

Facts on the ground are hard to dispute, though. And the facts here say “state,” even if nobody else does.

The first member of Tamileelam officialdom we met was a woman police officer. She was dressed in Tamileelam’s smart police uniform: light blue tunic, dark blue pants and a blue cap. On her shirt was a patch that bore a roaring tiger - the symbol of Tamileelam - and had “Tamileelam Police Force” written in English and Tamil. She directed us to the immigration and customs area just off the road.

There we found a row of wood and thatch buildings. We went to the one for foreigners, which, like everything else here, was decorated with pictures of the Tamil Tiger ‘heroes’ - men and women who have given their lives for the cause by committing suicide bombings - and Velupillai Prabhakaran, the rebels’ elusive leader, whose mustachioed visage is ever present. In some scenes, the chubby rebel chief is wearing a camouflage uniform and motioning forcefully with his hand, as if giving orders; in others, he’s wearing civilian clothes and appears clean shaven. There’s one that shows him sitting at a desk, books lining the shelves behind him. His literary tastes, I can report, clearly lean toward the practical - there are a slew of computer guides, like the “PC Technicians Handbook,” and a book titled “Special Forces.”

After an official takes down our passport information, we are directed over to customs to have our vehicle searched. I’m not really sure what they’re looking for, but a sign tells us that pornography is banned.

The officer searching us is a kid with a wispy teenage mustache. He can’t be older than 16. Human rights groups have long charged that the Tigers recruit children for their security forces, and the teenager searching our car certainly seems to be exhibit A.

Once we clear customs, we get back on the road headed for Kilinochchi, the Tiger’s capital. It looks just like the road on the other side of the border - narrow and bumpy with scrub brush growing into forest on either side. But there’s one key difference: the rebel fighters on this side aren’t nearly as dug in as the government troopers on the other.

The government roads that run near Tiger territory are lined with checkpoints and every mile or so are soldiers dug into wide earthen berms, their positions lined with sandbags and covered by thatch roofs. The message is clear - there is something to be feared on the roads, which the Tigers seem to mine with impunity. Yesterday, they planted a mine that killed three policemen in an area we drove through today.

There are just as many armed men on the Tiger side. Some are young, only a few wear uniforms, but nearly all carry assault weapons and wear vests with extra cartridges of ammunition. None I see are dug in, and there are no roadblocks - if they want you to stop, they simply wave you down. It’s a daring way to guard the road of a territory that just a few days ago government jets were bombing. The fighters may not be very talkative. But their setup says they believe they have nothing to fear in Tamileelam, the land they control as if it were their own country, even if for now it’s an imagined one.

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SUNDAY, June 18, 1:30 p.m. local

PESALAI, Sri Lanka

The soldiers finally let us into Pesalai this morning, and now that I am here, it’s clear why they wanted to keep us out. Everyone is telling the same story - Sri Lankan forces, say the witnesses, came through the town the day before, shooting indiscriminately. When they reached the Our Lady of Victory Roman Catholic Church, where hundreds of frightened villagers were sheltering, they lobbed a grenade inside and killed a woman. Down on the beach, the soldiers shot dead four fisherman.

The only people we could find who are disputing the witness accounts are government officials. They’re blaming the Tamil Tiger rebels, which the government has frequently done in the past, and criticizing the media for suggesting government forces were responsible.

A statement issued by the defense ministry on Sunday called the report “yet another attempt by pro (Tiger) media to discredit the government and tarnish the image of the Security Forces.”

Why attack civilians? What’s to be gained?

The widespread belief here is that they were killed for being Tamils, a long discriminated against minority for whom the Tigers say they are fighting and for whom they want a homeland. The Tigers have not shied away from killing civilians either. They’ve targeted people from the Sinhalese majority that dominates the government and military as well as Tamils who oppose the Tigers’ brand of freedom fighting.

But in Pesalai, it’s the government, not the rebels, that’s got people worried today.

“To the government, we are all” rebels, says one man, V.P. Cruz, who snaps his fingers rapidly as talks about how the soldiers stormed through town yesterday, guns blazing.

We’re standing in the shadow of the impressive church, its four-story steeple towering over the swaying coconut palms and dwarfing the tin- and tiled-roofed village homes. The facade, bookended by towers crowned with crosses looks like something you might see in provincial Spain, or maybe an old colonial city in Latin America. It’s truly grandiose in an ordinary fishing village low-slung mud and brick houses and shacks made from thatch. A few dozen meters away, down by the beach, crows pick at fish drying in the sun.

Cruz and about a thousand other villagers are back at the church today because they heard a police patrol was coming toward town and got scared. Churches are traditionally thought of as safe havens here, and despite Saturday’s attack, it’s clearly hard to let go.

“This church is still safer than our homes,” said a 24-year-old fisherman who asked that he not be named for fear of reprisal from government reprisals.

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SATURDAY, June 17, 8:30 p.m. local

VAVUNIYA, Sri Lanka

The soldiers never lets us past their checkpoint, so now we’re putting up for the night at the Nelly Star Inn in Vanuniya, the last government controlled town before rebel territory.

The rooms seem clean, they’ve got A/C and I’m washing down a greasy chicken biryani with a cold beer while I finish up the day’s news story.

In a town on a road that many in Sri Lanka are afraid to drive at the moment, can you ask for anything more?

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SATURDAY, June 17, 4 p.m. local

VAVUNIYA DISTRICT, Sri Lanka

We were racing to the northwest coast, trying to get to a village where witnesses say this morning government forces - navy and army troopers we’re told - shot up a town, killing an elderly women at church, and four fisherman on the beach.

The details are still coming in, but it looks like there was a battle between the Sri Lankan navy and the Sea Tigers, as the rebels’ navy is known. As the two sides slugged it out offshore, the government forces came through town to secure the shoreline and in the process killed five innocents.

While five deaths in a day is sadly not that exceptional here any more, we’d decided to put off our trip to rebel territory and head to the village, Pesalai, to get a firsthand account of a government attack on civilians from the Tamil minority. Many here say such attacks happen often, but rarely do any solid details emerge so quickly. We’ve already got a reporter in a town near the village, and now myself and a photographer are trying to link up with him.

The government has already denied any role in the killings and blamed the deaths on the Tigers.

What’s creating problems for us is that the military has shut the road, leaving us stranded at an army checkpoint looking out over scrub brush and muddy tidal flats miles from where we need to be.

The officers here smile firmly at our protestations. There is a “search and clear” operation underway and it would be too dangerous for us to proceed, they explain.

A defense ministry official didn’t bother with excuses when he spoke with a colleague: “Of course we’re not letting you in. You’re biased!”

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SATURDAY, June 17, 2:15 p.m. local

VAVUNIYA DISTRICT, Sri Lanka

The border between Tiger-land and the rest of Sri Lanka is surreal precisely because it’s like any other border in the world.

During nearly two decades of civil war, the Tamil Tigers carved out a mini state in the country’s north and east. And by all accounts, in the four years since they signed a cease-fire with the government - a truce that these days looks meaningless - they’ve set out to furnish what they hope one-day will be their homeland with all the trappings of a real country, albeit run by some puritanically totalitarian regime. I hear they’ve got censors to keep out all pornography, courts that try people for infidelity and even traffic cops that hand out speeding tickets. I find the last fact hard to imagine here because it seems like almost anything goes on the roads of South Asia. But I am assured it is true.

We’re still on the government side, however, and even here there are troops thumbing passports, riffling through luggage, searching trucks. For a government that insists it will never let the country be divided, the border kind of makes it look as if they already have.

I ask an army officer why all the fuss. He, like most soldiers in Sri Lanka, is under orders not to speak to the press, but he’s willing to talk as long as I don’t name him. That’s fine I tell him, and he gives me what’s a pretty standard answer in Sri Lanka on either side of the divide - he blames the other guys. “They have a border, so we have to have a border. We cannot just let them move freely if they do not let us move freely.”

In truth, the government has good reason to keep a close eye on who and what is coming out of Tiger territory. The Tigers pioneered the use of suicide bombers, managing to kill one of Sri Lanka’s leaders during the war, along with late Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi, who sent peacekeepers here. Eventually the Indian peacekeepers found themselves battling the Tigers and pulled out. A Tiger suicide bomber also nearly killed former President Chandrika Kumaratunga, who lost an eye but not her life.

Along with the suicide bombers, the Tigers are also masters at the roadside remote-controlled bomb. Three days ago, they were blamed for hanging two mines from a tree, detonating them when a bus packed with commuters and schoolchildren drove by. Sixty-four people were killed, and I caught the next flight to Sri Lanka.

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FRIDAY, June 16, 11 a.m. local time

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka

After a day in Colombo, I’m packing for the long drive tomorrow to the territory controlled by Tamil Tiger rebels, a de-facto mini state in northern Sri Lanka. I’ve never been before, but I’m told it has all the trappings of a real country - tax collectors, stamp wielding immigration officers and, amazingly in this part of the world where anything seems to go on the road, even police speed traps.

I’m here because of the bombing of a packed bus on Thursday morning that killed 64 people. The government promptly blamed the Tigers, and within hours air force jets were bombing rebel territory and the army was lobbing artillery shells at insurgent positions.

The bloody back-and-forth was just the latest spasm of violence here. Four years after the two sides signed a cease-fire, the agreement is clearly in tatters. At least that’s the view from Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka and the economic, political and cultural center of the country’s Sinhalese majority, most of whom are Buddhist.

Now we’re gonna find out how the situation looks from the rebel side, territory that the Tigers one day hope will be the foundation of a state of the country’s Tamil minority, most of whom are Hindu.

We’ve been told the road to Kilinochchi, the heart of the rebel state, has been spared bombing and shelling in the past two days and is safe to drive. A few buses are running along it, we hear, and the Tigers told us to come on up, we’d be welcome. Of course, they’ve said that to other journalists, who arrived to find that while welcome, no one was willing to say much.

I’ve also been advised not to expect many amenities - unlike Colombo where, upon arrival, I almost picked up a new iPod because I’d left mine at home in New Delhi, where I am based (thinking of my next credit card statement, the impulse soon passed). Look at a map, and Colombo may seem like a million miles from where you are reading this, and in many ways it is - the streets are crowded with rickshaws and roadside statues of Buddha dot the city, some garishly decorated with lights that blink festively throughout the night. But in other ways, it is, like many South Asian cities, a modernizing metropolis where hotels offer broadbrand connections, and you can have pizza or Japanese noodles for lunch.

In Kilinochchi, I’m told the order of the day will be uncertain phone service and a rundown guest house.

So I’m packing all my cool foreign correspondent gear - like a handheld satellite phone, known in the biz as a Thuraya, and my silk sleeping sack, good to keep the bed bugs away in shady hotels. Of course, there’s also a flak jacket and helmet, although that’s the kind of equipment you hope you don’t have to use.

I’ve also picked up a copy of the Lonely Planet guide for Sri Lanka. Kilinochchi warrants two paragraphs, one of which is about how to get the bus there. “Theoretically” the guide advises, one could take the Tiger-run bus (yes, the Tigers have their own bus service).

Thankfully, we’ve hired a car to make the trip.

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