by Nick Bryant
On the main road through the town, known as the Highway of Death, because it had seen so many battles between the rebels and the army, the police had even set up speed traps for errant motorists. They were manned by former paramilitaries who now wielded nothing more sinister than radar guns. There was a small courthouse with a gabled red-tiled roof, where proceedings began each morning with the singing of the Tamil anthem and the raising of their flag. Just down the road was a modern secretariat administrative building with pretty landscaping, where the Tigers hosted Norwegian diplomats and other visiting dignitaries.
By far the most impressive landmark in the town was a martyrs’ cemetery, the entrance of which was marked with a giant AK-47 driven insolently into the ground. Almost 2000 concrete tombs were laid out in regimented rows, and the only way to be granted a burial plot was to have laid down one’s life for the Tamil cause. The Tigers had pioneered the use of suicide-bomb attacks – and through them killed two world leaders, the Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa and, more audaciously, the Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. A special section of the cemetery was hence reserved for the Black Tigers, volunteers who had made what was considered the utmost sacrifice.
For this reason, the Tigers did not like to use the word ‘suicide’. They spoke instead of volunteers donating themselves to the cause and believed that suicide bombers died always with smiles of satisfaction on their faces. Nor did they look upon this sacred plot as a cemetery. Instead, they called it a sleeping arena and held that the dead bodies were seeds that would grow into trees once an independent Tamil nation had become a reality.
What they were demanding was a large, spear-tip-shaped area of land encompassing all of the disputed north and much of the western and eastern seaboards. So many people had died to achieve it that they were prepared to settle for nothing short. Sinhalese hardliners, who were always distrustful of the rebels, suspected the Tigers had entered into a ceasefire agreement so they could rebuild and regroup in preparation for a final military push for genuine statehood.
There was no shortage of volunteers determined to carry on fighting. On one visit to the cemetery, we met two young female volunteers, 24-year-old Suganthini and 25-year-old Iyali, who were dressed in their off-duty garb of grey skirts and grey checked shirts, and carrying bouquets of dark-pink rose petals. They had come to decorate the grave of their former comrade, Senthamilini, who had been killed during a face-to-face battle with the Sri Lankan Army in Jaffna, the largest and most strategically important city in the north.
As they stood at the graveside, the two young women thought of their friend’s sacrifice and explained the reasons why they were prepared to pay a blood price themselves. ‘The Sri Lanka Army killed my father in front of my eyes,’ said Iyali, who had been inducted into the Tigers at the age of 16. ‘And then they raped my sister. If my leader tells me to fight, I am prepared to die for the Tamil homeland.’ At once dignified and hate-filled, hers was the authentic voice of Tamil separatism.
Only occasionally would you catch sight of rebels in their combat fatigues – a distinctive tiger-stripe uniform with horizontal flashes of green and dark brown – and they did not take kindly to being filmed. Always, we would look for the vials hanging from a thin black string around their necks, which resembled New Age pendants but contained enough cyanide for a fatal dose. With suicide always preferable to capture, the Tigers were trained to bite into the glass vial so as to cut the skin on their inner mouth. That way, the deadly white powder would be absorbed much faster into the bloodstream.
Just as the rebels were notoriously camera-shy, so, too, was their shadowy leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran. A corpulent man with an extravagant moustache – out of his combat fatigues, he could easily have been mistaken for a Venetian ice-cream vendor – Prabhakaran had launched the violent separatist struggle in 1975, when he assassinated the then mayor of Jaffna by shooting him at point-blank range.
Since then, he had built arguably one of the world’s most pitiless and sophisticated militant organisations; one that could boast not only an army of committed fighters but also a navy and an air force capable of carrying out raids on Sri Lanka’s main city, Colombo. Each battle was filmed so the video footage could be scrutinised afterwards to identify rebels who had displayed cowardice.
Always, we went to Kilinochchi in the hope of landing the scoop of an interview with Prabhakaran, and always we came away disappointed. Only once since the start of the civil war had he made himself available for a press conference. Held in 2002, two months after the ceasefire, the conference’s security was so multi-layered that the 200 journalists who had ventured into the jungle to cross-examine him were put through a ten-hour vetting process. It was all part of his allure. Indeed, the secrecy that surrounded his movements, and the fact that he made only one public appearance each year, during the commemorations marking Black Tiger Day, added both to his mystique and to the psychosis of fear surrounding his name.
Instead of being granted an audience with Prabhakaran, we made do with his deputies. Usually, we would meet at a guest house overlooking a lagoon on the edge of Kilinochchi, where the Tigers put up visiting members of the Tamil diaspora from Canada and Britain – well-heeled donors who bankrolled the insurgency. On my first visit, they laid on a sumptuous seafood lunch, since the local fishermen always made sure to hold back the best lobster for Tiger leaders.
These kinds of encounters always presented something of a moral test. It was not so much the issue of whether we should meet rebels or militants. That was axiomatic. Whatever the conflict, we needed to hear from both sides. Far more ethically taxing was the question of whether to accept the hospitality of paramilitaries whose hands were splattered with so much blood, civilian as well as military.
As another slab of swordfish steak was brought from the kitchen, I definitely had serious qualms. All I would say is that we were aware that our hosts were guilty of the most heinous atrocities and human-rights abuses – from no-warning attacks on Colombo, in which civilians as well as Sri Lankan troops were regularly slain, to the forced conscription of child soldiers, which was a war crime – and we made sure to bring it up in dinnertime conversation. We may have been recipients of a free lunch, but we always went in determined that they should not be as well.
Just as we spent time with the Tigers, we also made sure to meet their victims. Before that first trip to Kilinochchi, we visited a small house in the back streets of Colombo festooned with white ribbons that looked like carnival trappings. In Sinhalese communities, however, white was the colour of mourning, and the thin strips of fabric had been put up in honour of a policeman killed a few days earlier by a female suicide bomber. Launching the first rebel attack in the capital for almost three years, she had set out to assassinate a pro-government Tamil politician – the ninth time the Tigers had tried unsuccessfully to kill him.
The bomber had been intercepted at a security checkpoint outside the politician’s office and dragged into a police station next door. At that point, she detonated her suicide belt. The policeman had borne the full brunt of the explosion, and in the living room of his home his dead body was laid out under a ceremonial arch made out of two elephant tusks, with the shrapnel wounds plainly visible despite all the cosmetic reconstruction work carried out on his face.
Here, again, I should add that we also met grieving Tamil families, who claimed their children had been the victims of extra-judicial killings carried out by the Sri Lankan Army. In some instances, the army shot dead young Tamils with little or no evidence that they were paramilitaries. Then, they forced their parents to sign forms declaring their sons to be rebels as a condition of handing over the dead bodies. On both sides, this was the dirtiest of wars.
Occasionally, we found ourselves in its very midst. Once, it happened on a trip to Trincomalee, a city populated both by Tamils and by the Sinhalese community on the eastern seaboard, which was configured around one of the world’s most stunning natural harbours. It was January
2006, and with the talks process having broken down completely the Tigers had taken to expressing themselves almost exclusively through violence.
Five days before our visit, the Sea Tigers killed 13 sailors in a suicide attack on a Sri Lankan Navy vessel patrolling the coast. Just before we entered the city, the rebels launched a follow-up attack on the police checkpoint at the entrance to Trincomalee, spraying it with automatic gunfire and hurling grenades. As we drove in, with the acrid smell of explosives still putrefying the air, two military motorbikes flashed by with gun-toting soldiers perched on the back, who were setting off in search of the rebels. Another army unit waded into the jungle by the side of the road to flush them out.
Blocked from going any further, we waited in the darkness for over an hour, fully expecting a gun battle to erupt any moment – even half-hoping that it would, since it was rare to witness contact between the Tigers and the army. Eventually, however, when it was thought the danger had passed, we were allowed through the damaged checkpoint to our beachside hotel, where a pan-pipe version of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ was playing in the lobby.
We had travelled to Trincomalee because the extreme Sinhalese nationalist party, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna party, or JVP, planned a three-day strike that would completely shut down the entire city in protest at the recent upsurge in rebel action. On the first morning of the strike, the Sri Lankan Army had agreed to let us film its street patrols. Alas, we never made it to our rendezvous. As we ventured from our hotel and drove through the shuttered streets, a spotter for the JVP appeared alongside our minivan on his motorbike, saw that we were a camera crew and then accelerated ahead to inform his superiors. None of us were particularly alarmed by this, but further down the road a crowd of rowdy JVP supporters formed a human blockade and brought our vehicle to an abrupt halt.
Many of the strikers had covered their faces with scarves, while one of the ringleaders gripped a hacksaw threateningly in his right hand. Having been drinking heavily throughout the morning, almost all of them were drunk. One of the more thickset men reached through the driver’s window and yanked the keys from the ignition. Fellow strikers sprinted towards us from adjoining streets, having been alerted on their mobiles, and what started out as a knot of men quickly became a mob. Some of the strikers started kicking and punching our van, and became more threatening towards our driver and local producer, whom they had identified immediately as Tamils.
In less than a minute, the situation escalated to the point of death threats. Then came a brief lull, as the strikers seemed unsure how far they could push things. Perhaps sensing this hesitancy, a leader of sorts stepped forward: a short, wiry man older and less drunk than the others. He started shouting demands, the main one of which was for us to hand over our film.
Relinquishing footage is something we are always loath to do, and by now my cameraman, Phil – an old South Asia hand and the only BBC shooter ever to have filmed Prabhakaran – was virtually sitting on his camera. (Rarely anything other than unflappable, the only time I saw Phil lose his cool was after we had gone through the fifth or sixth layer of security to get into that loya jirga in Kabul and he realised he had left his cigarettes outside.) Still, our bargaining position could hardly be described as promising. Determined not to lose all our shots, but with grave concerns for the safety of our driver and local fixer, we suggested a compromise. We would delete the offending shots and then return immediately to our hotel.
This seemed not only to pacify the short, wiry man but also to greatly excite two of his young charges, who were ordered to clamber into the back of our vehicle so they could act as censors. Both peered into Phil’s viewfinder while he erased the footage, but they were too inebriated to realise that he had wiped only a few shots and was showing them a blank portion of tape as proof that he had done more. Had they asked him to fast-forward or rewind, he would have been rumbled immediately, but the sight of an empty viewfinder was enough to get not only a few thumbs-up but even a couple of appreciative slaps on the back. Finally, we shared common ground, like foreigners who had found it all but impossible to communicate until realising that they had both heard of David Beckham. Now, the mob seemed delighted, and they claimed a victory.
At these moments of intense danger, I was always amazed, and mostly amused, how the banalities of normal life could intrude. Occasionally, it would be my British credit-card company telephoning to say that they had put a bar on my card because it was being used, fraudulently, they presumed, in Sri Lanka, Kashmir or Afghanistan. Sometimes, it would be my dear mum reminding me that it was Father’s Day at the weekend. On this occasion, it was my then girlfriend and now wife, who had just spent a restless night at my apartment in Delhi and called to tell me that I could do with a new set of pillows. Home furnishings would become a high priority, I promised, if ever we made it home.
Our keys returned, we headed back to the hotel. Within the hour, however, a Sri Lankan Army unit rumbled into the driveway to tell us we had to leave immediately, since the mob was threatening again to do us serious harm. They would take us in convoy out of Trincomalee and drive us about a hundred miles west, which was beyond the reach of the strikers.
This was problematic. Though the army would offer protection from the thugs of the JVP as we drove through the empty streets of Trincomalee, we now ran the risk of becoming targets of the Tamil Tigers as soon as we left the city limits. Even on a normal day, we would have pulled to the side of the road rather than travel in convoy with the army. Now, it was much more dangerous, because the rebels knew the only traffic leaving the shutdown city for the next 72 hours would be military vehicles. It meant they could spring one of their trademark ambushes: Claymore anti-personnel mines at the side of the road – a directional weapon detonated remotely by a rebel hiding in the paddy fields or jungle that fired metal balls into a kill zone some hundred metres long.
The very soldiers underwriting our security inside Trincomalee instantly made us targets as soon as we drove outside – a classic ‘out of the frying pan into the firing line’ scenario. What made it all the more worrying was that the Tigers would never be as hapless as the JVP. As in Afghanistan, driving through the countryside was a total crapshoot, but without the benefits of American armour-plating.
Fortunately on this occasion, our luck held, and by nightfall we had made it back to the safety of Mahogany Ridge: that place beloved of foreign correspondents, more commonly known as the bar.
Heartless though it is to say of a country threatened with extinction, the Maldives always offered light relief from the battlefields of South Asia. Certainly, there was a ‘winning the lottery’ feel to the call from an editor in London suggesting I head down there at my earliest convenience to cover its slow inundation.
It was the period, pre-Copenhagen, when global-warming stories were the easiest of sells. Still, even we thought a trip to this exotic paradise was pushing things a little far. We arrived in the capital, Malé, an island city protected from the rising seawaters by a three-metre-high wall, just in time for the celebrations marking Maldivean independence from Britain in the mid-1960s.
Part commemoration, part carnival, it was a peculiarly disjointed event that featured the Maldivean army marching in ceremonial dress, hundreds of schoolchildren dressed in bumblebee outfits, and music from Barry Manilow. One minute, it was ‘Gaumii Salaam’, the Maldivean national anthem, played to a thumping martial beat; the next, inexplicably, it was ‘Copacabana’.
The country’s then president was Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, a bespectacled autocrat who had become Asia’s longest serving head of government by crushing internal dissent and imprisoning his political opponents on distant atolls. Unknown to most honeymooners and tourists, the Maldives was pretty much a police state back then, and everywhere we went government spies followed obtrusively behind, despite all the palm trees offering cover.
That night, however, the president looked more like a maracas player given the night off from a visiting cruise ship, dre
ssed as he was in slacks and a Hawaiian shirt. Due to interview him in his presidential palace the following morning, I made the mistake of interpreting his outfit as a sartorial cue. I therefore turned up looking ‘beach casual’, in sandals and a polo shirt. Regrettably, he walked through the door turned out in a grey business suit and woven silk tie: ‘head of state formal’.
The president faced one of the most wretched policy challenges of any leader in the world. As much as 80 per cent of the Maldives’ 1200 islands and atolls were no more than a metre above the waves, and government scientists predicted sea-level rises of some 90 centimetres by the end of the century. Within a hundred years, most of the Maldives was set to become uninhabitable, and plans were already in place to evacuate its entire population of 360,000 people.
The government was encouraging forestation to prevent beach erosion and pushing ahead with a plan to clean litter and debris from the country’s coral reefs, a natural barrier against tidal surges. In the country’s schools, lessons in environmental science were given the same priority as writing and arithmetic. However, as the president was all too aware, the fate of his country rested in the hands of leaders in Washington, Beijing, Delhi and the capitals of the other major polluters.
However authoritarian at home, it was a measure of the president’s powerlessness abroad that he had written to George W. Bush urging the US president to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and not even received a reply. ‘What happens here today will happen somewhere else tomorrow,’ the president told us pleadingly. ‘So it is not just the Maldives and three-hundred thousand people. It is the global population which is being affected.’