The Age of Kali

by William Dalrymple

  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.

  The morning we set off from Anuradhapura was a bad day in respect both of George’s car and our nerves. First there was the banner headline announcing that a Tamil militia opposed to the Tigers had apparently peppered the road we were proposing to take with landmines. Then came George’s announcement that he had spent the day before washing his car: ‘All-over washing,’ he said, ‘removing oil, flushing engine, everything coming clean. Today like new engine.’

  No sooner had he turned the ignition than the effect of this washing became apparent. The car began to judder like a spin-dryer, stalled, then crawled off at the magnificent speed of nineteen miles an hour. ‘Sri Lankan petrol very bad,’ said George, somewhat unconvincingly.

  Gradually, as we headed slowly northwards, the scenery began to change. Near Anuradhapura the land had been rich and tropical: water-buffalo grazed in the drained paddy fields; Buddhist monks in orange robes strolled along holding peacock fans and yellow umbrellas; the gardens bloomed with jasmine and purple bougainvillaea. But as we moved on, the paddy gave way to arid savanna tracts broken by occasional thickets of jungle – classic guerrilla territory. Desiccated palmyra plantations replaced the tropical coconut palms. It was a no man’s land – wild country, ideal for ambushes. It has always been so: for three thousand years northern Ceylon has been disputed, and t
his savanna has always been the border country, the battleground. Holes in the road – some two or three feet deep and as wide as the road itself – were identified by George as craters left by old landmines. In several places he mentioned the names of the drivers who had been killed by the blasts. We drove on in silence.

  I don’t know where we crossed the border, but by the time we again came to human habitation we were firmly inside Tiger country. The Tiger flag – two Kalashnikovs crossed behind a roaring man-eater – hung from every telegraph pole; Tiger graffiti and Tiger murals were painted on to every wall.

  We got as far as Vavuniya before we were stopped by a roadblock. We were promptly marched out of the car by a guerrilla cradling a Kalashnikov and made to wait while a fifteen-year-old Tiger radioed for permission to let us through.

  Previous experience of the Tigers had shown that it was almost impossible to enter in to conversation with the cadres. Every guerrilla, it seemed, was given instructions not to speak to journalists or foreigners; even the most inoffensive questions were met with blank shrugs. But on this occasion I was luckier. The hut was full of bored guerrillas. Two guards in blue baseball hats lounged around with carbines on their knees, scratching their balls, fiddling with their safety catches. They were wearing the distinctive Tiger uniform – fatigues whose camouflage imitates the banding of a tiger-skin. I lured them in to conversation – using George as translator – by asking them about their guns, a subject close to the heart of every Tiger. Gradually they opened up.

  None of the Tigers in the office could have been older than twenty-five, but they all talked as if they had had years of guerrilla experience; many must have joined when they were barely out of primary school. Yet they seemed remarkably unaffected by the war. Far from it – as far as they were concerned, they’d had a good time. They talked in a strange mixture of war-comic bravado and sixties guerrilla jargon, but just occasionally a hint of real feeling slipped through. When, after two hours, we surprisingly received permission to proceed, I asked them a final question: Had there been no bad moments?

  It was one of the older boys in the room who began, a little hesitantly, to answer. He had been leading a patrol in the jungle one day in early January, he said, when they had been surprised by an Indian ambush. With him was a friend, a very poor village boy who had never had a new set of clothes in his life. Just that day he had been given his first Tiger uniform: a smart set of the new tiger-camouflage variety. The patrol leader had managed to escape, but his friend had thrown down his weapon and run for it, only to be captured. He had had no alternative but to take cyanide. ‘It must have been an old phial,’ said the boy. ‘It didn’t work properly. From where I was hiding I could see his face. It was screwed up and disfigured and there was blood and foam pouring out of his mouth. He begged the Indians to shoot him, but they didn’t. He took over five minutes to die.’

  As he spoke, there was silence in the room. As we left, I caught a last glimpse of him. Although he was doing his best to hide it, I could see that in his mind he was still looking at the face of his friend, alive and foaming at the mouth, writhing on the jungle floor.

  We passed on, deeper in to Eelam. The land grew dryer, until it could support only the palmyra trees, the bleached thickets of elephant grass and a tangle of gorse and scrub. It was uninspiring country – yet this was the setting for the Tigers’ greatest battles.

  In 1987 the seesaw of atrocities and counter-atrocities reached a new level of intensity when the Sri Lankan Army decided to move out from their handful of fortified camps and attempt to capture the entire Jaffna Peninsula. This first siege was followed by a ludicrous and darkly farcical interlude when the Indian Army arrived as a peacekeeping force. Fellow Hindus, they came, supposedly, as the protectors of the Tamils. Yet within a month they were at war with the very people they had come to protect, after an attempt to disarm the Tigers was violently resisted. In October 1987 the Indians besieged Jaffna, assaulting the town with tanks and heavy artillery.

  The Indian troops were equipped with the very latest Soviet weaponry. They advanced north towards Jaffna on five fronts, and the Tigers were driven out – but not before they had wiped out nearly half of the Indian ‘peacekeeping force’, with minimal manpower and kitchen-sink technology. They discovered, for example, how easy it was to knock out a modern armoured personnel-carrier: place a lot of plastic explosive in a roadside bucket; lead some wires from it to a radio receiver in a house a hundred yards away; then activate the mine by switching on the radio. The latest Soviet battle tank, the mighty T-72, proved little more of an obstacle: a fifty-kilogram landmine could effectively take out two or three of the monsters.

  It was a celebrated victory: the Tigers retreated to the jungle and the jungle villages – in classic Maoist style they mingled with the people ‘like fish in water’ – to build up their strength and wait for their moment. But driving north, I saw what I had never read about – the cost. As we crossed the Elephant Pass and headed in to the Jaffna Peninsula, the devastation increased. Buildings were fire-blackened and shattered. Smart Imperial façades gave on to gaping, gutted interiors. Whole streets were shuttered up, the plaster of the shopfronts pockmarked by fragmentation bombs and phosphorus grenades. Roofs were collapsed and twisted, signboards hung loose; shards of jagged metal – the remains of reinforced concrete – jutted out of shell craters towards the sky. There had been no attempt to clear up or rebuild: the wreckage of the town had just been left to crumble.

  Evening was approaching, and the late-afternoon half-light magnified the wreckage and increased our feeling of unease. In an apparent attempt to cheer us up, George began listing the treats and luxuries shortly awaiting us at the Hotel Elara in Jaffna: air conditioning and hot baths and television.

  George’s promises of luxury only made it worse when we arrived. The hotel – long ago it had been the best in Jaffna, and had earned three stars – did not have any televisions; nor any telephones; nor any electricity; nor indeed much of its back wall. Nor, any longer, did it have a staff – only the depressed and bankrupt manager, who welcomed us like lost sons: his first non-Tamil guests for eighteen months.

  ‘Sir,’ said George in funereal tones as we paused halfway up the stairs and looked out over the vast bomb-crater that was Jaffna. ‘You must look after me. I am a married man.’

  The other thing was the water. According to a notice headlined ‘MESSAGE TO OUR PATRONS’, it was ‘highly recommended for bathing and washing, but not for drinking’. The water was brown and metallic and smelt like sewage. If you ran the bath quarter-full, you ceased to be able to see its bottom. Lowering myself in to it that evening, I thought I would not recommend it even for sheepdip. Thenceforth I pioneered the expensive habit of washing with a sponge and a bottle of French Volvic water, with which, by some strange good fortune, the hotel was amply supplied.

  I soon realised there was something strange about Jaffna. The town, like the hotel, was in ruins, but the prevailing atmosphere was anything but degenerate or sleazy. The guerrillas – who seemed to outnumber ordinary citizens – were upright, polite and well-disciplined. Some of the younger ones had been assigned traffic-police duties, and they stalked imperiously around the road junctions like officious school prefects. There were no beggars, touts or prostitutes hanging around the hotel. The Tiger command had banned them all and created a Morality Police to arrest and punish offenders. Moral watchdogs patrolling the ruins for evidence of illicit sex: it was something I had previously seen only in Iran.

  Perhaps the most upright of all the guerrillas in Jaffna were the girls – the gloriously named Freedom Birds. After days of applying to the Tigers’ Jaffna command, I was finally given permission to visit their strongly guarded barracks. The Tigers made it clear that I should be grateful for this privilege: I was the first foreign journalist who had ever been allowed to meet them. Even George was banned; the Freedom Bird on guard at the gates strutted out of her pillbox and indicated with a flick of her machine-pistol
that I was to get out, and that George was to stay where he was.

  It is easy to see why the Freedom Birds are kept away from the public eye, strictly segregated in their own barracks. They are the stuff of Bond movies: a regiment of beautiful Tamil amazons dressed in tight-fitting khaki fatigues, with carbines strapped across their waists. But they were very far from the Bond model in at least one respect, as I soon discovered: they had all taken a vow of chastity, and were as buttoned-up as an order of cloistered nuns.

  This was something the libidinous Indian troops found out whenever they attempted to capture the Freedom Birds alive. The women carry not one, but two cyanide capsules around their neck. As my escort explained as she conducted me in to the guardroom, ‘A man can be tortured, but a woman has more to lose – her virtue.’ She led me to a table and indicated that I should sit. ‘Anyway, being captured alive is a blow to the pride of a freedom fighter. Suicide is an act of human dignity.’

  It was a typical Freedom Bird aside. They look sweet and naïve, but they can be alarmingly doctrinaire and severe. None more so than their leader, the tall and lovely Lieutenant Jaya, a political science graduate with a taste for incomprehensible Maoist jargon. ‘We are driven by the revolutionary optimism of our ideology,’ she announced soon after we were introduced. ‘We will fight state oppression and the oppression of women, male domination and caste bigotry. The people will be our vanguard.’

  After five minutes of this sort of ranting I began to understand what Lieutenant Jaya was talking about: she was trying to turn her troops in to a kind of paramilitary feminist death squad. In peacetime, she said, the Freedom Birds were engaged in a social struggle ‘to free Tamil womanhood from male imperialism’, touring the poor areas of Jaffna, talking to the women and listening to their problems. If a woman said her husband had beaten her, or insulted her, or was a notorious drunk, the Freedom Birds would take action. The Tamil men, Jaya said, were very ‘counter-progressive’: ‘It is our duty to re-educate them.’ I could just see Lieutenant Jaya indulging in a spot of re-education: visions rose before me of truckloads of manacled misogynists and recalcitrant wife-beaters being shipped off to the re-education camps, Lieutenant Jaya awaiting them, her thumbscrews and electrodes ready.