Then she invited some of the younger fighters in, and we talked of the war. It was an extraordinary sight: six beautiful and feminine fourteen-year-old girls, sitting relaxed and with their friends, giggling and joking, talking about guerrilla warfare as if it were O-level results, rock bands or boyfriends.
If I had assumed that, when it came to the military crunch, the Freedom Birds were something of a gimmick, I was very much mistaken. In the final days of the 1988 siege of Jaffna by the Indian Army, it was the Freedom Birds who held the main road, the most important of all the sectors. A soft-spoken young fighter who introduced herself as Comrade Dilani told the story.
‘There was a force of three hundred crack girl guerrillas dug in at the Kopi junction. The Indian Army came forward – an endless convoy of tanks and personnel carriers. Lieutenant Maladi, our leader, stood in the middle of the road and challenged them. Without even daring to raise the man-covers of their tanks, the Indians shot her dead in cold blood. When we saw this we detonated the four landmines we had prepared, and fired off our Carl Gustav rocket-launchers. In three minutes we had destroyed six brand-new Soviet T-72 tanks and a whole string of personnel carriers. Despite the constant strafing of the Indian Air Force we held our position for three days, long after most of the other strongpoints had caved in. Of three hundred, only twenty-six of us were killed. When we fight we are ruthless,’ added Dilani in her gentle, sing-song voice. ‘We have no pity.’
‘Don’t you feel that all this killing has hardened you?’ I asked. ‘That you’ll never be able to return to family life after this?’
‘Tamils of my age have suffered oppression since our birth,’ Dilani answered shortly. ‘What happened at the siege is nothing new to us.’
‘But didn’t killing all those people upset you?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t it give you nightmares?’
‘They are our enemy,’ she answered. ‘They killed our people. So we killed them. Why should we be upset?’
‘But you are – what? Fourteen? You can’t just go around killing people at that age and remain completely unaffected.’
‘They are not people,’ replied Dilani simply. She was unable to understand my point. ‘They are army. They are enemy.’
I frowned. She shrugged her shoulders.
‘We are busy,’ said Lieutenant Jaya, getting up and indicating that I should do likewise. ‘We have a war to fight.’
It was clear that my interview with the Freedom Birds had come to an end.
There was one thing that I was determined to do before I left Eelam: I wanted to get in to one of the Tigers’ jungle camps. The camps are the nerve centres of the Tigers’ operations. They are large, often holding more than a thousand guerrillas, and heavily fortified. Their locations are a closely guarded secret, and I had never heard of an outsider being allowed to see them.
On my first evening in Jaffna I went straight to the Tigers’ central office and filed a request. After a week I received my answer – a polite no. They were very sorry. They would like to help, but it was strictly forbidden. No non-Tiger was ever allowed in to the camps.
I did, however, still have one chance. Anton Balasingham was the Tigers’ LSE-trained political chief. While Prabhakaran led the Tigers’ military wing, Balasingham was the brains behind the gun. He was reputedly an intelligent man and an Anglophile; if I could talk to him, perhaps he would be willing to help me. The question was how to find him: like all the senior Tiger hierarchy his whereabouts were kept secret. I only knew that his home was in Point Pedro, a former smuggling village north of Jaffna. I decided to look there.
I found the local Tigers’ office and explained what I wanted. The local commander, a small, nervous man with a deadpan civil-servant look, asked me to sit while he radioed his superior for instructions. The superior, I was told a few minutes later, was asleep. I could wait if I wanted.
Sleepy guards lounged around on wicker chairs. I took a seat beside them. All over the walls were pictures of fallen Tiger ‘martyrs’. They were shown standing stiff and formal with their assault rifles, or weighed down by heavy anti-tank weapons, or posing with their friends over the bloody bodies of Indian soldiers. ‘All local peoples,’ said one of the guards, pointing to the pictures. ‘All killed now.’
I waited in the room for five hours. I paced up and down listening to the sound of the snoring guards and the turning fan. I paced some more. The superior was still asleep. He had gone out. He was busy. Finally he awoke, and said he would call Balasingham. There was a long delay. Then he rang. Balasingham was asleep. Balasingham was out. It went on and on, like some ghastly dream, until I became certain that none of them had any intention of ever taking me to Balasingham, that they were merely stringing me along. Finally the inevitable message came through. Mr Balasingham had set off for the jungle. If I wanted to try again the next day I was welcome.
Frustrated by an entirely wasted day, I walked outside to the car and woke George. He turned the ignition key. Nothing happened. He turned it another three times, and still nothing happened. ‘Battery flat,’ he said with a yawn.
George went off to find some jump leads, and I hung around the car, fuming. I was still waiting when I saw two figures getting out of a jeep and walking towards the office. The first was a man with narrow, metal-rimmed glasses and, unusually for a Tamil, a slight paunch. With him was a tall blonde woman. I knew the pair instantly – I had seen their faces in posters on the walls of innumerable Tiger offices. It was Balasingham and his Australian wife, Adele.
He had, of course, received no messages. He was so sorry. Had I waited very long? Certainly he would be interviewed. He was very much the textbook revolutionary intellectual: quick-witted and intense, fond of gesticulation and dogmatic generalisation. He even spoke English with the statutory spy-film heavy accent. He talked of the founding of the Tigers and of its growth from a small group of friends in to what he called a ‘national freedom struggle’. We discussed his revolutionary heroes – Che Guevara, Mao Tse Tung and Ho Chi Minh, and their influence on the Tigers’ tactics. He told me about the battle of Jaffna and his subsequent flight to a safe house in southern India, of his return, the reformation of the scattered units and the long months of guerrilla warfare against the Indian Army. After two hours I gently dropped the question in to the conversation: did he think I could visit one of the camps?
It would be quite impossible, he said, to visit any of the Jaffna camps – Prabhakaran would never allow it. But I could try Amparai, in the east of the island, where his friend ‘Castro’ was the commander. If anyone would let me see a camp, it was Castro. He promised to send a message to him the next day.
That night I packed my bags and went to bed early. In the morning George and I rose at five, and were on the road before dawn.
It was a bad journey. We drove slowly along the eerie, empty roads, looking out for landmines. As we crawled, George gloomily regaled me with stories of his taxi-driver friends who had driven less carefully, and as a result had been blown up.
‘My friend Dhanapala,’ said George. ‘Always he was having girlfriends in secret. All girls – too many girls. His wife never knew. Last October he was driving to Jaffna with girlfriend when poof! Car blows up. Finished. Gone. All pieces. This man Dhanapala, he gets very bad name, going with other women and all. This, and dead too.’
To make matters worse, about fifty miles outside Jaffna, George’s car’s air conditioner overheated. First it started leaking water on to my leg, then steam billowed from under the bonnet, then it began excreting black smoke. We turned it off, but the smell of burning plastic lingered.
We reached Amparai at six that evening. Balasingham had been true to his word. Within an hour of our arrival, a message was delivered to us at the town’s one remaining hotel. It was from Castro. We were to report to his office at nine the following morning. Our transport would be waiting.
I had heard a little about Castro since I entered Tiger territory. He was regarded as the Tigers’ most brilliant young
commander, its finest general after Prabhakaran himself. He was the architect of one of the Tigers’ most chillingly efficient operations: a seaborne attack on two military camps carried out the previous November in the middle of the night. The camps were the headquarters of a Tamil militia armed and trained by the Indians to take on the Tigers. By devastating the ‘collaborators” camps and massacring those inside, Castro neutralised all the remaining pro-Indian forces. When the Indians had finally withdrawn, northern Sri Lanka fell effortlessly in to the Tigers’ lap.
I had expected some hardened guerrilla leader, and was not prepared for a shy, handsome figure of my own age. I asked him to tell me more about the attack, and he happily complied. He described the preparations, the spying and the intelligence work. He told me of the long, wet fifty-mile march through the monsoon jungle, the moonlit crossing of the lagoon and the silent belly-crawling as the guerrillas surrounded the camp and cut the wire. As he talked, I was aware of a growing sense of déjà-vu. It all sounded a bit familiar, I said. Hadn’t I seen a film of this somewhere? He smiled.
‘You’re right. Our camps are all equipped with televisions and videos. War films are shown three times a week, and are compulsory viewing. We often consult videos like The Predator and Rambo before planning our ambushes. None of us are trained soldiers. We’ve learned all we know from these films.’
So, I thought: video-guerrillas. To Sri Lanka from Hanoi via Hollywood. It was an arresting idea: real-life freedom fighters earnestly studying Sylvester Stallone and Arnie Schwarzenegger to see how it was done.
Later I saw the camp’s video library: complete sets of Rambo, Rocky and James Bond; all the Schwarzeneggers, including Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer and Commando; most of the recent Vietnam films; and, touchingly, no fewer than three copies of The Magnificent Seven. Moralists have often speculated that much of today’s violence is inspired by violent movies. If only they knew. Here in Sri Lanka the tactics of an entire civil war – ten of thousands killed, maimed and wounded – seem to be largely inspired by imported videos.
Over-exposure to Hollywood glamour had also affected the Tigers’ dress sense. As Castro led me outside to the waiting Toyota Land Cruiser, I caught another glimpse of the Tigers’ taste for paramilitary chic. Not only were all his bodyguards wearing the new tiger-skin camouflage uniforms, the Land Cruiser had also been painted outside and upholstered inside with the same matching tiger-stripes.
We left Amparai and headed off, past the lagoon in to flat country – paddy fields edged with coconut palms. After fifteen miles we swung off the main road and came to a checkpoint protected on either side by heavily sandbagged bunkers. Despite Castro’s presence, the guards refused to let us through until they had received clearance on their radios.
We headed up a dirt track, across open country. On the way we passed three more carefully camouflaged roadblocks; at each we were stopped and checked. Then we entered the jungle, and in a minute we were there.
Again I was presented with an image very different from my expectations. This time it was the size of the camp that took me back. It was the size of a university campus: a heavily camouflaged jungle town, built in and around a forest clearing. The buildings were surprisingly solid structures of wickerwork, bamboo and thatch: arsenals and hospitals, command huts and dormitories, restrooms and conference centres, refectories and lecture rooms. Between them, sand had been scattered thickly on the ground to prevent the mud from turning to a quagmire.
It was just as well. The place was a hive of activity, buzzing with no fewer than two thousand heavily armed guerrillas. Some were attending political lectures, sitting in rapt attention as a senior Tiger harangued them with revolutionary rhetoric; others were busy with target practice or assault courses or weapons training; some were playing volleyball; others queued up for haircuts, the barbers’ chairs surreally removed from their proper place to sit between two peepul trees in the clearing.
As striking as the sheer scale of the place was the age of the guerrillas. The overwhelming majority were in their early teens – just old enough to join the Boy Scouts in England. The same had been true of many of the Tigers I had seen in Jaffna, but then I had assumed that these were just the reserves, and that the real grown-up commandos were in the camps. Here for the first time it became clear that the Indians had been defeated by a guerrilla force whose average age cannot have been a year over eighteen.
The younger the Tiger, the more anxious he was to prove himself a full-blooded guerrilla. You did not have to talk to any of them for long before they began boasting about the operations they had been on; and they were not making it up. Did I remember the copse of palmyra trees just before I left the main road, asked two boys of about thirteen. That had been the site of a big ambush earlier in the year. They had let off two huge landmines and blown up six trucks in a convoy, then they had gunned down the survivors – killed nearly fifty Indians, they said. It was wonderful. I should have been there. Another, perhaps a year younger, began telling me of the booby-traps he had laid further in to the jungle. Small anti-personnel mines hidden in tree-stumps: took off a man’s legs, but rarely killed him. Good strategy, he said: wounded Indians used up more resources than dead ones. By the end the Indians were so scared they never dared leave the roads. Cowards! Chickens!
Castro had been firm that I was only to be allowed a glimpse of the camp, a taster. My last image before I was driven away was a party of ten boys carrying great lumps of raw, bloody meat in to the camp. The meat was skewered through by long wooden poles which the boys carried on their shoulders, one at each end. As I saw the meat, I suddenly thought of those pictures of the Tigers standing over the dead Indian bodies, triumphant over the bullet-mauled corpses. I shuddered. There was far too much blood here. I had seen enough.
Sitting now in Delhi six months later, thinking back on that journey, I remember one incident in particular.
It was a feast day in Jaffna, and I was late for church. I hurried through the deserted streets, past the gutted houses and the bombed-out shops, to the dusty square in front of the cathedral. It was a white-hot, sticky-hot tropical afternoon, and the plaster on the front of the cathedral had been pockmarked three inches deep by the bursts of shrapnel, grenades and fragmentation bombs. Pieces of broken stained glass lay scattered under the rose window, but the grotto of the Virgin beneath it was untouched; around her neck someone had hung a garland of orange marigolds, as if she were a Hindu goddess.
Inside, Mass was just beginning. The pews were packed, and segregated: men on the left, women on the right. The Bishop of Jaffna led a convoy of white-robed clergy up the central aisle, past the bleeding image of the Sacred Heart, and up to the altar. Everyone was singing, the schoolgirls in their white veils, the seminarians in their black serge cassocks, even the odd Tamil guerrilla, gun still strapped to his waist, and as they sung the ceiling fans whirred above the pews, round and around.
Just as the opening hymn was reaching its climax, through the singing I could suddenly hear a second sound, the noise of rotor blades, first distant, then throbbing loudly down, directly above the congregation. The sound echoed around the cathedral, and everyone looked up in instant, horrified recognition: although there was now a truce, it was just a few months since the bombardment, and everybody knew the sound of the gunships only too well. Slowly the hymn tailed off, until only two or three of the children in the choir were still singing, encouraged by the frantic gestures of the choirmaster. Then even they fell quiet.
The helicopter passed on, and the Bishop began the Mass as if nothing had happened, but the tension in the cathedral remained. Jaffna was on edge; it had already been the site of two sieges, two battles, and everyone knew the third could not be far away. Everybody in the town – Christian and Hindu – was praying for peace.
In the event, of course, their prayers were not answered. The negotiations with the Sri Lankan government were a failure: the Tigers, delighted with their victory over the Indians, became a
rrogant and demanded too much. There were violent clashes. Then, on 13 June 1990, the Tigers went too far. They pounded Sri Lankan Army camps with mortars and seized 650 Singhalese policemen on duty in Tiger-held northern Sri Lanka. The policemen have never reappeared, and are feared dead. On 20 June, the Sri Lankan Army moved out of its barracks and headed north. Jaffna was under siege again; its third assault in three years.
The Tigers themselves were usually fanatics: severe, doctrinaire and rigorously disciplined, they were rarely good company. But the Jaffna townfolk were friendly people, tired of war, and were always ready to gossip.
So now I think of the people I met in the town. I wonder what has happened to those I met at the cathedral: the shy seminarians, the Bishop’s efficient secretary, the angry choirmaster. In the shady cloisters of the cathedral I had tea with the Bishop on Easter Saturday; he looked like Robert Morley, wore a dirty cassock and nursed a large paunch. When he talked about the last Indian attack on his cathedral town he blushed bright red: ‘The Indians stopped my car fifty yards from my palace and demanded to see my papers,’ he fumed. ‘Imagine! Me – the Bishop!’
And what has happened to poor Anton Alfred, the civil servant appointed Jaffna GA (Government Agent) by the Sri Lankan authorities? He had no power in a town controlled by the Tigers, yet he was expected to keep the place working, to maintain the schools, to run the buses. He was a small man – dwarfed by his huge Victorian desk – but he was very brave. If the truce broke, he knew the Tigers would come for him; they had shot his predecessor, and would have no compunction about doing the same to him.
The Age of Kali Page 26