The Seasons of Trouble (53 page)

BACK AT PETTAH
, Divyan looked for a bus to Jaffna, from where he would take a minivan home. Behind him, Maran and Tamizh leaned on other people’s luggage, their heads lolling drowsily in the afternoon heat. Other passengers stood in irate stillness in the queues. Plumes of diesel smoke hung in the warm air. Flies burrowed into the apples in the fruit shops at the entrance. Perspiring Muslim shopkeepers announced the price of grapes, plums and mangoes in Tamil and Sinhala. Their assistants walked around enticing passengers with plastic packets of chilled mineral water.

As Divyan fished his wallet out to see about the possibility of buying some bananas for lunch, the fruit sellers hurriedly started to shove their baskets of produce inside their shops and pull the shutters down. Some of them darted across the bus station and exited from the back. At first, Divyan thought it must be time for daily prayer. But some men were climbing into parked buses to hide under the seats. One Muslim shopkeeper hissed in Tamil, ‘Again they have come!’

Divyan craned his neck to see what had provoked this reaction, but he heard it before he saw it: Sinhala shouts that rose and fell like a slogan. A chorus of voices: ‘Stop the butchers!’ ‘Ban Halal!’ ‘Stop favouring Muslims!’ ‘
Jai
Sri Lanka!’

The voices came closer till a procession appeared on the street, about 200 metres from where Divyan stood. There were around fifty people, most of them male, and dressed in white. Some wore T-shirts displaying the words NO HALAL within a crossed red circle. Leading them were a half-dozen saffron-clad Buddhist monks. They filled the pavement.

The leading voice—sounding like a sharp clap—was that of a Sinhala Buddhist monk. He looked around forty years old. His thick shoulders shone with sweat. His eyes popped, and spit sprayed from his mouth as he bellowed. When he punched the air above
him, the rage seemed to shoot from his feet up to his clenched fist. On occasion, he roughly pushed back the saffron robe slipping onto his hairy arms. Behind him were a handful of other monks who looked equally angry.

The mob marched into the bus station. Divyan ordered Maran and Tamizh to stay close. Some in the group carried wide banners with curling Sinhala letters and exclamation marks. There were two small English banners on the side. ‘No Halal!’ one said in black paint. ‘Stop Muslim takeover of Sri Lanka!’ the other said. A few men split from the group and ran towards the shops that were shutting rapidly. They shouted for the owners to come out. They were yelling in Sinhala, but Divyan recognised the abusive words they were using to refer to Muslims. He knew the Sinhala Buddhist extremists were now attacking mosques and turning on the Muslims. He had not seen this new hate until this moment.

One of the mobsters thrust his agitated face so close to a youth that their noses almost touched. He was spewing abuse, and his hands scrunched the young man’s shirt collar. Cornered against a sack of coconuts, the young man let his body go limp and kept his eyes on the ground. A No-Halal T-shirt wearer smashed the glass of a bus bearing Arabic lettering and then ran into a nearby mobile shop and tore the displays down. Another one ran to a closed shutter, unzipped and pissed in front of it.

After a few minutes, the lead monk waved his hands at the scouts and the group started to leave. Five policemen, who had been watching until then, followed them, deep in discussion.

For several minutes after, the station was still. People spoke in whispers, shaking their heads. The shopkeepers did not return. Soon, as if at the flick of a switch, the buses started to come alive. The drivers revved the engines and the conductors called to passengers to hurry up and get in.

A Brief History of the Sri Lankan Civil War

SRI LANKA HAS
a multi-ethnic population of more than twenty million. Apart from the majority Sinhalese community, it is home to a long-established Tamil minority in the north and east; Tamil-speaking Muslims; Indian-origin Tamils brought by the British to work on tea and coffee plantations in the central hills; Burghers of European descent; and Veddas (aboriginal people). Between the sixteenth century and 1948, the Dutch, the Portuguese and the British successively colonised the country. In the wake of Indian independence, the British left Sri Lanka in 1948, leaving behind fractured ethnic communities.

The country’s recent history has been defined by a fierce twenty-six-year civil war, which came to an end in May 2009. The United Nations estimates that the protracted ethnic conflict left up to 100,000 dead, although the number could be a gross underestimation. The war also displaced several hundred thousand people, stunted the island nation’s economic growth and intensified ethnic hatreds. It was one of Asia’s longest-running civil wars.

After taking the reins of the country after independence, the Sinhala Buddhist majority, which had long resented the British bias towards the Tamils during colonial times, began implementing
discriminatory policies against minorities. In 1956, the government replaced English with Sinhala as the country’s official language and ignored Tamil, which was spoken by nearly 30 per cent of the population. In 1972 a new constitution declared Buddhism, the faith of most of the Sinhalese, the country’s official religion, and the greatest duty of the state the protection of Buddhism. In the following years, university admission procedures and government employment practices were repeatedly amended to deny opportunities to young Tamils.

In response, several armed Tamil nationalist groups emerged in the north during the 1970s. They were poorly armed and funded themselves through petty crime and robbing small banks. But two events in the early eighties expanded their membership. In May 1981, Sinhalese policemen and protesters set fire to the Jaffna Tamil library. The building burned for over a day, filling Jaffna town with the smoke of 97,000 Tamil books and rare manuscripts as they turned into ash. In July 1983, Sinhalese mobs provoked by the Tigers’ killing of thirteen Sri Lankan soldiers rioted in Tamil neighbourhoods in the capital city of Colombo and other towns, killing Tamils. The death toll is still hotly contested; the government maintains that only 400 died, while others put the number at around 3,000.

Thousands of Tamils began fleeing the country, seeking asylum in the UK, Canada, Norway and India. Hundreds of others picked up guns. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), founded by Velupillai Prabakaran in 1976, emerged as the strongest and most ruthless of these Tamil militant groups. The Tamil Tigers, as they were also known, demanded Eelam, a separate nation for Tamils in the north and east.

The south of the country was simultaneously lashed by a leftist insurgency led by Sinhalese peasants and youth under the banner of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or JVP. The two JVP insurrections and the state’s answering crackdown killed almost 15,000 southern youths. More than 7,000 were jailed for terrorism. By the late eighties, that leftist insurgency had been quelled.

But for the next three decades, the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan army and the Tamil Tigers continued to clash. The
extended fighting saw vicious suicide bombings; the assassination of several high-ranking ministers and political figures in both Sri Lanka and India, including Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa and former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi; and audacious guerrilla attacks on key government installations and the international airport in the capital Colombo. The only relief: periods of ceasefire brokered by Norway. Notorious for recruiting child soldiers and establishing their own laws and taxation system in controlled territories called the Vanni, in Sri Lanka’s northeast, the Tigers were also known to be the only militant outfit in the world to have a navy and air force. Over thirty countries branded them a terrorist organisation and banned them.

After four peace talks failed and both sides grossly violated the ceasefire, the Sri Lankan armed forces launched a military offensive in Tiger-held regions in 2006. By 2008, the government had forced every international and independent body, including the United Nations, to evacuate the war zone, leaving about three million Tamil civilians caught between warring Tigers and the Sri Lankan military. The UN estimates that between 40,000 to 70,000 civilians were killed by the army, and some by the LTTE too. Over 2.5 million people were displaced. By 19 May 2009, the LTTE chief Prabakaran had been killed and the LTTE eliminated.

When the war ended, some hoped that Sri Lankan society would rebuild and grow. Instead, the next five years saw the country’s prospects diminished by a government that sought to consolidate its power and limit the rights of its citizens.