“The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew, cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down”.  

- Barack Obama, Berlin, July 24

 

We must not settle for a draw in a game we can win and are winning. As we draw closer to victory, those who wish to deny it to us will intensify their efforts.

Let us do everything that can help us win the war, and desist from anything that may prevent or divert us. We also need a vision for winning the peace. Our vision for winning the peace will play a part in helping or hindering the winning of the war. Our postwar program will affect the outcome of the war, not least by influencing the behavior of external powers (one of which actively saved Prabhakaran in 1987).

Victory is imperative and yet not inevitable. It is more than possible; it is probable. Yet, the war is not won as long as Prabhakaran is alive. As long as he is alive, he can recruit and continue to fight. People will follow him. A guerrilla war waged under Prabhakaran’s leadership is a rather different prospect from one waged by a post-Prabhakaran LTTE. From the outset of his struggle– whether one dates it back to the 1970s or the early ’80s– right up to 1990, Prabhakaran proved a maestro of guerrilla war, doing what was thought impossible in a relatively limited area of a small island His performance against the IPKF was as a classic guerrilla fighter, and his tactics since, even when waging semi-conventional war, have never lost the unorthodox guerrilla style. As long as he is alive, the dream of Tamil Eelam, a separate country carved out from ours — the only one we will ever have — will never die. That dream, our nightmare, will begin to die only when he is no more. It will remain only in the cyberspace fantasies of the Tamil Diaspora, a computer game.

For now there must only be one objective in view: the military defeat and destruction of the Tigers. Moderate devolution helps and does not hinder the war effort because it brings India over to our side or at least keeps it benignly neutral. There are two forces who do not want closer relations between India and Sri Lanka: the LTTE and pro-Tiger elements in Tamil Nadu such as Mr. Vaiko on the one hand, and sundry Sinhala chauvinists and xenophobes on the other. The latter do the job of the former.

 

The Movement for Devolution

A UN Under Secretary-General from a country which is among Sri Lanka’s staunchest friends, gave me some good advice (prompted by warm recollections of my father): draw the line, defend your core interests, make no concessions on them; but do make concessions short of those core interests so that you give your friends something to defend you with.

Our core interest is to win the war. It is one thing to resist external pressure from whichever quarter far or near, that wishes us to stop the war or retard its pace or restrict its objectives to something short of victory. That sort of pressure impinges directly on our core security interests, and must be resisted by any means necessary. However, signals that are short of that, which have nothing or little to do with the war, must be treated with sensitivity and accommodated to the fullest degree possible.

Moderate, realistic devolution is the classic case in point. Strategic wisdom has it that he who seeks to defend everything, defends nothing. Those who oppose everything and everyone gain nothing and jeopardize everything.  Those who seek to obstruct moderate devolution will almost certainly help obstruct victory in the war.

This is why the launch of the Movement for Devolution, a pro-devolution caucus of Government Ministers-Rajitha Senaratne, Douglas Devananda, Tissa Vitharana, DEW Gunasekara, Dilan Perera-who support the war, the President and devolution, is to be greatly welcomed. Devolution is too important to be left to appeasers and NGOs, while the war is too important to be left to interpretation by chauvinists.

 

Power sharing and Nation building

While Tamil separatism must be rolled back and overcome, Sinhala and Tamil nationalism have to be contained if one is to build a Sri Lankan national identity and consciousness. They can be contained only by being accommodated to some degree. Tamil nationalism can be contained only by a sufficiency of devolved power and resources. We must share power with one another so as to build a nation with and for us all.

It is a myth that devolution is advocated only by India and/or the West. When Hon Lakshman Kadirgamar sent a delegation to Pakistan in 2005 as a guest of the (Defense-funded) Institute of Strategic Studies of Dr Shireen Mazari, one of the questions we were asked by an intelligent young Minister of State for Foreign Affairs was why Sri Lanka did not learn from Pakistan’s federal model. That is not to say that we must be blind to its faults, but we must understand that it is not only Tamil Nadu, or the Tamil Diaspora influenced West, or the Christian churches or the INGOs, that wish us to share power with and grant adequate political space to the Tamil people.

No devolution or too little, and communities will break away. Too much devolution and they will do the same. The degree of devolution at the periphery depends on the character of the mainstream. If one implements a strictly secular Republicanism as does France, and one is a French citizen with equal rights irrespective of ethnicity, then the need for substantive devolution at the periphery is virtually non-existent (though Corsica would doubtless disagree). However, if a society insists that the culture, language and civilization of its majority must have some built-in preference, then it is unrealistic to expect that those who do not belong to that culture but are inhabitants of the country would feel themselves fully integrated and un-alienated citizens. Full integration can only take place on the basis of full equality, and a citizenship that is blind to ethnic origin, religion and language. If the State and citizenship are not blind or even-handed but biased, then it is unavoidable that there will be demands by minorities for their own political space at the periphery.

Wild illogic asks the question as to why Sri Lanka should devolve when Prabhakaran is not asking for devolution. Others equally irrationally speculate that Prabhakaran really wants devolution as an escape hatch. Worst of all some actually hold both - mutually exclusive and contradictory - views. The evidence of decades is plain. If Prabhakaran were willing to accept devolution even when he was militarily disadvantaged, he would not have waged war against the IPKF. The other argument, that devolution is unnecessary because Prabhakaran does not want it, is a model of utter irrelevance. When there is a general strike, one grants a realistic wage increase not because the most radical “wildcat” strikers want it or would settle for it but because the vast majority of rank and file workers and moderate trade unions would settle for it, thereby undercutting the extremists. When the strike is reduced to a hard core of extremists, it can be brought quickly to a close. So it is with separatist struggle and devolution.

To win the war, our successful military track has to be paralleled by a political one which proceeds with the same purposiveness and at the same speed. If our neighbors and the world think that a military victory for the Sri Lankan state is tantamount to a Sinhala /Sinhala Buddhist victory over the Tamils/minorities, we may be denied that victory by external economic and coercive pressure, as we once were twenty years ago. A moderate, rational political program containing a progressive vision for Sri Lanka’s post-war future is a necessary component for bringing this war to a successful close; for winning this war.

 

Don’t Lose the Peace

Xenophobia, cultural or otherwise, is profoundly counter-productive for winning the war as well as the peace. Scholarly and scientific research has shown that creativity and innovation in all fields takes place not so much from within the bowels of homogeneous and unchanging cultures but precisely where cultures interface, interact, exchange and cross-fertilize. Sir Arthur C Clarke correctly observed that Sri Lanka contains the greatest cultural diversity in the most compressed space, which is a source of conflict but potentially also of great creativity. Unless we embrace pluralism, learn to celebrate the treasure that is our own diversity, and tap into it as an energy source for advance, we shall certainly be unable compete regionally or globally. Worst of all we shall not be using all our cultural capacities, making the best of our endowments, making the best of ourselves.

The best performing of our youngsters, the brightest minds coming out of our universities with First classes, are migrating. Unless we can retain them by creating an environment in which the intelligent discerning internationally aware individual can flourish, we may win the war but lose the capacity to re-build, regenerate. Post war Sri Lanka must not be like pre-war Sri Lanka, because that order was so flawed as to contain the seeds of war. As we reconstruct we must restructure, transform, learning from past mistakes.

Similarly, post war Sri Lanka must be unlike wartime Sri Lanka. If ideologies of resentment and closure prevail over those of conciliation and openness, we shall be unable to manage the problem of the hemorrhage of quality human resources, which in turn will decide whether we shall develop or decline as a country.

It will serve little purpose if we win the war and lose the peace. For those who think that Sri Lanka can win the war on the basis of a program and vision of inequity between peoples, of enforced cultural homogeneity in a heterogeneous society; for those who believe that Sri Lanka can return to its pre-war order or build an unfair unequal post-war one; for those who assume that closed minds and cultural exclusivity can sustain our country in the 21st century, I have little time and no more arguments but only two words, which must be marked well: Barack Obama.

 

The American Candidate: Barack in Berlin

Barack Obama left the USA for the Middle East and Europe as a candidate described as African-American but in Europe he was re-defined and reborn as what he is: the American candidate. Leonard Cohen’s song says “First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin”. Obama seems to be reversing that trajectory of triumph. Let him speak for himself, in his own words — highly acclaimed as statesmanlike — delivered (without a note) to the two hundred thousand strong crowd in Berlin’s Tiergarten on July 24th:

 “…Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen - a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.

 ”…I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city. The journey that led me here is improbable. My mother was born in the heartland of America, but my father grew up herding goats in Kenya. His father - my grandfather - was a cook, a domestic servant to the British…”

 ”…The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.”

 ”…Our allegiance has never been to any particular tribe or kingdom - indeed, every language is spoken in our country; every culture has left its imprint on ours; every point of view is expressed in our public squares. What has always united us - what has always driven our people; what drew my father to America’s shores - is a set of ideals that speak to aspirations shared by all people: that we can live free from fear and free from want; that we can speak our minds and assemble with whomever we choose and worship as we please.”

 Obama points the way for Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims. For the Tamils, the relevance and example should be clear: abandon projects of separatist walling-off, integrate into the mainstream, fight against discrimination and for equal rights, regard oneself as a Sri Lankan and compete as one. The African-Americans experienced slavery and segregation and still encounter racism, but Barack Obama’s example is to transcend that experience, which was historically far worse than anything suffered by Tamils. His is the model of our martyred Lakshman Kadirgamar (whose oration for devolution in the Parliamentary debate on the August 2000 Draft Constitution is cunningly ignored by Sinhalese chauvinists). It can come to the forefront only when Kadirgamar’s assassins, the Tigers, are defeated.

What is the lesson and example for the Sinhalese? Barack Obama, perhaps the most intellectually gifted politician in today’s world and potentially a philosopher-president in the Platonic sense, ushers in a new model of cultural globalization and globalized culture of and for the 21st century. He is the modern, Multiethnic, Multi-Cultural Man, emerging from the melting pot meritocracy that is America. However, this is not an exclusively American Dream. It is not essentially different from the multiracialism of Cuba’s Fidel Castro and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, or that of Jawaharlal Nehru, without whose inclusive, pluralist, secular, rational, modern leadership vision for an ancient, culturally rich society, India would not be the Asian success story and the 21st century miracle it has become.   

 

[These are the strictly personal views of the writer].

 

 

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The day after tomorrow

you write to me
of blowing snow and whiteouts.
of snow goggles and skating rinks
you tell me your cat may need clothing
and you joke about
living in the movie
‘the day after tomorrow’

I write to you
of scorching sun and blackouts.
of checkpoints and closed roads
of a play I went to see
called ‘between the devil and the deep blue sea’

You ask for news of home.
have you forgotten that
over here, no news is good news
or have black memories buried themselves
under white snowflakes

you say it is freezing there. again. You had to dig out your new car
from underneath
a mountain of snow this morning.

It’s burning here. still.  this morning old women
and new babies were dug out
from underneath
mounds of mangled metal

you say everything there is predictable. I begin to think that is a good thing.
Here, a white van has become a black Maria
and nothing is certain.

and I have decided not to postpone my reply to you
until
the day after tomorrow.

February 2008

[Editors note: Vivimarie Vanderpoorten's book of poetry "Nothing Prepares You" published in February 2007 was awarded the 2007 Gratiaen Prize on 26th April 2008]

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Watching the current SAARC jamboree unfold over television news, my young daughter asked why none of the officials were smiling. The SAARC Secretary General, Dr. Sheel Khant Sharma, was always scowling. Others didn’t have smiles on their faces either, even insincere ones. They all looked stressed out, wearing glum, miserable faces.

I could only hazard a guess. Perhaps the assorted babus have too much to worry about, as they get through their very serious and grim business of fostering regional cooperation. On the other hand, after all these years of endless meetings and declarations, they might have forgotten the simple joys of smiling and enjoying each other’s company.

Make no mistake: SAARC is a good idea hijacked by unimaginative and pompous, unsmiling babus of South Asia and run to the ground. The self-congratulatory rhetoric of the inter-governmental merry-go-round is once again deafening us as the 15th SAARC takes place in Colombo. In reality, SAARC at 23 has the mental development of a 3-year-old (if that). There isn’t, in fact, much to smile about.

The proof of the SAARC pudding is not in over-hyped Summits or crusty declarations, but in the free flow of people, ideas, creativity and culture across the political boundaries jealously guarded by governments and their militaries. Most SAARC initiatives miserably fail this test. Typical of this arrested development is the SAARC Audio-Visual Exchange, SAVE.

Announced in 1986 and established a year later, SAVE was to be “a South Asian broadcasting programme covering both radio and television”. Its mandate was “increasing the awareness of each other among the peoples of the region through disseminating information on the socio-cultural, economic and technical aspects”.

SAVE connected South Asia’s state-owned, government controlled radio and TV stations to share selected content for broadcasting in each other’s countries. Some joint productions were also to be undertaken. The original plan was to air something, anything SAARCy on the 1st and 15th of each month.

Whether or not every participant station kept to this original schedule, over the years some content swapping has indeed taken place. And in true SAARC style, the SAVE Committee has met over a two dozen times in the past 20 years. All this hard work apparently pleased their masters. According to the SAARC website, “The successive SAARC Summits had lauded the smooth functioning of SAVE programme as being a useful medium for promoting a South Asian consciousness among the people in the region.”

 

Babus in a parallel universe?

So what was produced by these Himalayan labours, and where has it all gone? SAVEs founders chose relatively ’safe’ topics for coverage — such as environment, disabled persons, youth, literacy, clean water and mountains. Without a close analysis of SAVE-distributed content over the years, we can safely bet that nothing remotely critical of governments or militaries would ever have come out of this official process. These government mouthpieces diligently avoid critical issues such as the rise of religious fundamentalism and ultra-nationalism, saffronisation of politics, militarisation of whole societies and uncritical cheerleading of market economics.

Indeed, South Asia as covered by state TV and radio is so detached from reality that it could just as well be in a parallel universe. For example, the democracy struggles in Karachi, Kathmandu or Male are reported only as civic disturbances or anti-governmental mayhem. Everyone who does not completely agree with the ruling oligarchs is branded either as a traitor or terrorist.

Who would consume such perversions on the air? As it turns out, fewer people every passing year. When SAVE began, most Asian viewers had access to an average of 2.4 TV channels, all state owned. This has changed dramatically — first with the advent of satellite television over Asia in 1991, and then through the gradual (albeit partial) broadcast liberalisation during the 1990s. South Asian audiences, at last freed from the unimaginative, propaganda-laden state channels, exercised their new-found choice and quickly migrated to privately owned, commercially operated channels. Soon, Babu TVs found themselves with ever-shrinking audiences and declining revenue. For the past decade, most have survived only because governments infused them with massive amounts of tax payer money. Their public service remit is long forgotten.

A similar transformation has taken place in radio. Government channels — amplifiers of their masters’ voice — have been sidelined by a cacophony of FM channels. Meanwhile, pioneered by Nepal and belatedly followed by India and Bangladesh, community channels are carving out a further slice of what used to be Babu Radio’s monopoly on the air.

The spread of Internet and mobile telephones has further diversified South Asians’ sources of information and entertainment. While broadband internet penetration was a mere 3 per cent in 2007, this is set to expand rapidly in the coming decade, bringing online video and webcasting within the reach of millions. India alone targets 100 million broadband users by 2015.

 

Enter TV Southasia

Despite being pushed into complete irrelevance by this nuanced, complex media reality, SAVE has plodded on for 21 years.

But the need for a truly pan South Asian TV channel is greater than ever. This could balance not only the stereotypical coverage of South Asian affairs by global TV networks (for many of whom this dynamic region is India and Pakistan plus debris), but also counter the excessive nationalism of some private channels pandering essentially to their home audiences. Tribalism titillates and sells.

Against this backdrop, the April 2008 launch of TV Southasia (TVSA), co-anchored from Dhaka and Kolkata, is indeed welcome news. It is a collaborative venture of five commercial broadcasters who have joined hands to produce and share content across borders. Mercifully, there is nothing official about it: no governments are involved and certainly none of the Babu TV dinosaurs.

And if they get it right, TVSA founders - Rtv of Bangladesh, Tara Newz of India, Image Channel of Nepal, Aaj TV of Pakistan and News 1st of Sri Lanka - can tap into an enviably large combined audience: 1.5 billion people, most with access to TV.

TVSA founders are taking one step at a time, perhaps knowing very well that cross-border ventures in South Asia need to be nursed slowly and incrementally, while dealing with historical hang-ups and tonnes of red tape. They launched the channel after having produced a collaborative weekly magazine show for over a year. TVSA is beamed down from the ThaiCom5 satellite, and locally distributed by cable operators. Its medium is English, the only language understood by all countries of South Asia.

TVSA is concentrating on talk shows, interviews, lifestyle, music, short films, sports, cuisine and quiz — genres already available on existing channels. But TVSA aims for a trans-boundary, pan South Asian outlook that others don’t usually offer. The challenge is to celebrate unity among diversity.

On its website, TVSA has spelt out its agenda. It seeks to promote values like liberalism, scientific temperament, education, heritage and cultural diversity. Significantly, it also declares what it opposes, including superstition, fundamentalism, corruption, violence, cultural hegemony and communalism - the assorted evils South Asia.

We just have to wait and see if fledgling TVSA will live up to these lofty ideals, but one thing is clear. Neither SAVE nor its parental Babu TVs could ever aspire to these heights even in their wildest dreams.

So here’s something good that the unsmiling SAARC babus can do in Colombo: finally pull the plug on SAVE, and give it an unceremonious burial. Few would notice or lament its demise.

  

Nalaka Gunawardene is a Colombo-anchored South Asian who blogs on media, society and development at http://movingimages.wordpress.com/

A shorter version of this essay appears in August 2008 issue of Himal Southasian.

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I don’t think I had the slightest inkling of a problem between the sinhala and tamil people in Sri Lanka, until July 1983. But I should have.

In the heady days of the 1977 election, a good 13 years before I could vote, I remember my father quite nonchalantly relating a story: at some time and place in Sri Lanka, strangers accosted people on the street and forced them to pronounce the sinhala word Baaldhiya (meaning “bucket”). The tamil language wasn’t familiar with the “B” sound as a starting consonant. So a tamil person would say Vaaldhiya. Tamils, thus identified, were beaten or killed. They were, literally, condemned by the difference of a consonant.

What I don’t understand, even now, is why I have no memory of being shocked or distressed by this story and why it didn’t make me acutely conscious of a deep malaise in Sri Lankan society - in my world.

The story of an LTTE landmine killing 13 soldiers in the north of Sri Lanka, on July 23, 1983, entered my consciousness in the same matter-of-fact way - as a story that stirred neither cheers nor outrage, neither joy nor sadness. It was simply something that had happened, in a world “out-there” from which I was thoroughly protected - the way that floods happened in Bangladesh or famines happened in Ethiopia, in the days before television.

On July 25, 1983 the two stories came together. They broke through the dikes of my insulated life and flooded my world. But not all at once. It was still many more years before I understood what had happened. I was still able to live for the moment, without having to worry about the future or the past - the extraordinary privilege of being a child and not being poor.

The first news I got that morning was good news: I didn’t have to go to school. My mother and father had pitted their particular extremes of anxiety and nonchalance against each other and come up with a compromise: Sohan, my older brother, would be the only one sent to school. Nilhan, my younger brother, and I would stay back. I didn’t dislike school, but I never liked waking up early morning. Sleep overtook the irrelevant concerns about why I was being allowed this indulgence.

By the time I woke up Premalal, our sinhala driver, had gone to fetch Sohan back from school. The household was in agitated conversations about sinhala mobs setting about burning tamil shops and houses. A little later, when the Morris Marina returned home with Sohan it had a clubbed bonnet. Sohan had seen many of the familiar local shops in flames as they drove through the chaos of streets over-run by violence. The mobs had stopped all the cars and demanded petrol for their arson. But the Morris Marina was a diesel vehicle, and Premalal could say Baaldhiya.

Shortly after, we heard that the mobs were moving in the direction of our house. I took up position on the balcony, curious and nervous about what would happen. We lived in Wellawatta, a locality in Colombo inhabited predominantly by tamil people. We had two sinhala neighbours; every other home and establishment surrounding us was owned by tamils. Because of this, what I witnessed from the safety of my “sinhala balcony” was all the more terrifying. The thirty foot wide lane that was Ramakrishna Road was chock-a-blocked with threatening people wielding clubs, iron rods, and knives, of various shapes and sizes. Even before we saw them we could see the signs: plumes of smoke rising from the tamil homes that had been set on fire further up the road. As we heard the eerie sounds of people screaming in fear, my mother started crying uncontrollably.

Our house, No. 35 Ramakrishna Road, was a hundred yards away from the sea, two doors from a small hotel called Hotel Brighton and opposite the front gate of the Ramakrishna Mission (a hindu religious institute spanning a large expanse of land). Like a disorganised army of ants, the tamil people on our road began running into the Mission and to the hotel to take refuge from the impending mobs. At some point I saw the Mission close its gates and padlock them. Hotel Brighton had locked its doors much earlier. But people were desperate. I watched a pregnant woman crawling under the one foot or so gap between gate and road to get in to the Mission. Suddenly, the gates of our house were pushed open and a middle-aged woman came running in with her teenage daughter, desperate for protection. My mother quickly escorted them to a back room in the house.

I remember these events from 25 years ago with a dream-like unrealism. I still can’t quite believe that they happened and that I was there, a passive observer, safe on a balcony, while my neighbours’ houses were being broken, looted and burned. “What happened to anyone who was found in the house?” I didn’t even dare to think. The mobs surged past our house. The domestic staff shouted “meka sinhala geyak” (This is a Sinhala home). It was the protective mantra which spared us the collective fate of our neighbours. To be able to present oneself as credibly sinhala - the gaping divide between the wor(l)ds of Baaldhiya and Vaaldhiya - was once again, on that day, a matter of life and death.

My father returned from office. His car had somehow been stuffed with 11 people whom he had daringly driven to safety. In true fashion, he was to say that his main fear was not about being stopped by the mobs, but that the half million rupees in his glove compartment (from a business deal) would be stolen by one of the passengers.

He quickly made enquiries about several of our neighbours. We knew that many of the houses around us were empty and the residents had taken refuge elsewhere. “What happened to the Subramaniams?” he asked (they were our neighbours living two doors away). Donald, our immediate sinhala neighbour, spoke from his balcony to ours: “I didn’t see them leave their house,” he said.  My father hot-footed it to the Subramaniam’s house.

The mobs had already been there. The house was broken and looted, but it had escaped being set on fire. His repeated calls of “Mr. Subramaniam, Mr. Subramaniam” drew no response. But my father was never known to give up anything easily. When he returned to that house for the third time in half an hour, he heard a slight movement inside a small broom cupboard. He went close to it and explained who he was and that he had come to help. The door opened slowly and fearfully to reveal nine traumatized people spanning three generations, a third of them my age or younger. These nine people were to spend the next weeks of their shattered lives in our home.

The simple and portable possessions of the Subramaniams were moved into our house surreptitiously: first from their house into the house of our sinhala neighbour; then from his house to ours. All this over neighbourly walls, to avoid detection.

The mobs were now thinner on the ground with most of their monstrous work accomplished; but looting and burning was still an active sport and the street was as chaotic as ever. Directly facing our balcony was the home of Mr. Murugananthan, and it had been burning for many hours. Nilhan was feeling bad about an old prank of shooting a catapult on to his house and ducking under the balcony. Mr. Murugananthan’s house burnt ever so slowly. Its catapult-tested roof and walls would hold out till late the next morning before finally succumbing to the insatiable flames. A stream of thick black smoke from that house enveloped our sky: an artificial dusk and a visual testimony of the human depravity that unfolded beneath. Later, this would be known as “black July”.

One of the many paradigm altering observations for me that day was watching how the police and the army waded in through the thick of the mob, in uniform, and stood by comfortably as the carnage was being unleashed. On that day they had perverted their professions to preside over the en masse persecution of the innocent and the protection of the criminals. There they were, providing at best only lenient boundaries for the sinhala mobs, between the atrocities that were “permitted” and those that weren’t. Their orders “from above” seemed to have been minimal. On Ramakrishna Road, only the sinhala houses, the residential parts of the Ramakrishna Mission and Hotel Brighton were “protected”.

Sonny was one of the young Subramaniams. He was old enough to know better. But traumatized and dazed by the events, he ventured out on to the street, to take another look at his house and personally recover belongings. He was accosted by the police. My father strode out into their midst. The policeman turned his anti-tamil venom against my father. How dare we hide tamil people he asked? My father was too clever to claim the moral high-ground in front of perverted police power. He shrewdly cited his helplessness in the face of neighbourly obligations. “These people,” he said in sinhala, “when you give them an inch they will try to take a yard.” The policeman was slightly appeased by this show of disdain for tamils. Sonny was rescued. Nevertheless we were soon to receive a message from the police: our house had just crossed the dividing line between being “protected” and “permitted”.

On July 25, 1983, in the midst of all the atrocities being unleashed around us, it was my father’s characteristic lack of respect for danger that enabled us as a family to show a modicum of humanness.

For years before that day Sohan and I had been playing cricket with tamil children scattered through the neighbourhood. On Ramakrishna Road cricket had joined us together, as we commandeered the streets, inconvenienced motorists, and occasionally sent the ball hurtling through the window of an irate resident. But on that day, I didn’t and couldn’t know what had happened to those with whom I had so happily bowled and batted. On that day, in July 1983, all the young cricketers of Ramakrishna Road grew up very suddenly and found ourselves in different worlds - “us” in the world of Baaldhiya and “them” in the world of Vaaldhiya.

We never again played cricket.

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More than two and a half decades later, one of my friends has asked to interview me about the ‘83 riots. I was ten years old. My family was from the Sinhala majority, with relatives who were strong figures in politics and the military. How could I reply?

July 1983

My mind goes back to how thrilled we were when our teachers suddenly told us that school was going to be closed immediately. There was no explanation; we had no understanding of why this might be and no reason to wonder. We were happy that we would not have to wait till August for our holidays.

I was even more excited because my father had just given me a fantastic present: a Kodak 110 camera and three rolls of film. I didn’t want to photograph my school or the hostel where I was staying. I wanted to do something interesting. So I had been hassling my father to know where we would be going on holiday in August.

My school was in the southern part of Sri Lanka. Established in 1870 when we were under British rule; it wasn’t just a school, more like a little village. We had a farm, a bakery and about 60 acres of land on the side of a hill. When we got the news, we all ran down to our hostel to get ready to leave. I saw my father’s car parking at the bottom of the hill. This was strange. I wondered how he had the news so quickly that we were being given a holiday.

As soon as I got to the car, before I had a chance to ask anything, Dad said, “We are going up country now”. Mum and my sister were in the back and I was in the front seat with him, so we must be on our holiday already. On the way, I was so thrilled to be using my new camera for the first time. Although it was a long journey, my Dad was very patient and stopped anywhere I asked so that I could take pictures - waterfalls, landscapes, flowers, mountains, tree shadows.

We stayed that night at the famous Ella Rest House near the Ravana waterfall. It was dark and misty. The rest house was almost empty, only two families besides ourselves. We kids were playing but I could feel that our parents were tense. They were going inside from time to time to look at the television, but we kids were not allowed to see what they were watching.

Suddenly a police jeep arrived out of the fog. The inspector got out and spoke to my father, “Here is your permit. You don’t have to observe the curfew; travel as you wish. If you need a backup vehicle let us know.”

As we set off the next morning there was a fantastic sunrise although the mountain was still blanketed in mist. I started my photo journey again. There were fewer people on the roads than the day before. The small towns we drove through had a lot of police around and groups of people were clustered here and there.

I saw a car burning ahead of us. Dad stopped and told us to stay where we were. I watched him run up to the burning car and look inside. Some local people came over and spoke to him. He came back and said, “Let’s go”.

As we passed the burning car, he slowed down and stopped for a couple seconds to look again. In that moment I took a photograph. From then onwards, every few kilometres police or army patrols stopped us and examined our papers before letting us drive on.

I kept asking my Dad, “What’s happening?”

“There’s a small conflict between Sinhala and Tamils,” he said. “They started to fight each other. But we spoke to your uncle last night and he said it will be sorted out in a few hours; not to worry.”

I knew that uncle was very big army person, so that was OK.

When we got to Nuwaraeliya - the area known as Little England because of its beautiful flowers and lovely climate - we saw buildings burning. My father’s face was getting anxious. I had seen a burning building two years before, but these fires were bigger and there were a lot of them.

We were trying to get to my auntie’s house but before we got there, a crowd stopped us. They were carrying sticks and axes. They asked my Dad in angry voices, “Are you Sinhala or Tamil?”

Dad said, “We’re Sinhala,” and told them where we were going.

“Are there any Tamils in this car?”

“Of course not, just my two kids and my wife.”

“Can you open the boot?”

They asked me and my sister: “Baba, are you Sinhala?”

My Dad went around to open the boot and said something to the gang I did not hear. The crowd got quiet and some of them came round to apologise to my mother for troubling us. They explained, “We have to chase these Tamils out of the country.”

When we got to auntie’s place all the adults were very nervous. The house was a big one that had been built during the British time. It had an attic and in the attic three Tamil families were hiding. They were absolutely silent, including their kids, and shaking. Mum and auntie took food up to them. We knew the kids and always played with them when we came here but, we weren’t allowed to go up and they weren’t allowed to come down. Everyone was very quiet and upset.

Usually when up country at night, you hear the soft wind in the trees. Sometimes you can hear a car climbing up or going down the hairpin roads. But that night we heard terrible sounds: flames whooshing, heavy things crashing and falling, glass exploding, cracking and snapping sounds; noisy and scary. Nobody slept much.

Some groups of people came several times in the night looking for the Tamil families upstairs. They were suspicious that my uncle and auntie were hiding them because they knew they were friends.

“Bring them out. Bring them out.”

“Do you have any cans of petrol?”

“Give us some Arak.”

My Dad made a call to someone and after a while police came to protect the house. He was also on the phone to Colombo. Two of his tea lorries were still in the city after making a delivery. He told his driver where to pick up two Tamil families that were our friends, how to hide them in the back of the lorry amongst the tea chests and to take them immediately to our estate in Deniyaya.

After a few days the violence died down but the Tamil families that had been hiding upstairs were still terrified. They had the clothes they had fled in but everything else was lost; they had run for their lives and had no lives to go back to. The adults talked amongst themselves about how shocked they were, they knew all the people involved but what had caused this, why had this happened?

I too was asking why over and over again and I begged my Dad to take me out to see. We drove through Nuwaraeliya. The big wooden pillars of the old mansions were still smouldering; the air was full of smoke and unfamiliar smells. Where the estate workers had lived even the chickens and goats were lying around dead. When we got to the little town of Kandapola, there was nothing but charred rubble; it was completely destroyed. I didn’t take any more pictures of flowers and landscapes.

When we were back at auntie’s house, the television showed that Wellawatte, the mainly Tamil area of Colombo, had been burned to the ground, all of it. My Dad was very upset. He had studied at St Peter’s school there and knew the district and lots of people who lived there.

After a few more days we went back to our home down south. The two tea chest families were still at our house. My Dad took me with him as he went around visiting our family’s close Tamil friends. They were all staying with different Sinhala families and they had all lost everything. They were spending hours on the phone getting in touch with relatives in Canada, India and elsewhere, arranging to leave the country. My father told me, “Be sure you learn both Tamil and English or you will never understand this country”.

I was pressuring Dad to let us leave with them. We didn’t leave but all our Tamil friends did. The mothers gave their jewellery and other little treasures to my Mum to keep for them. For the first time in my life I lost a lot of my friends all at once; they had to go with their parents. We promised that we would always write letters and not forget each other.

I was impatient to see my photographs but had to wait until the shops opened again. One evening my Dad brought them back. I didn’t look much at my landscapes and flowers. I was keen to see my burning buildings. But suddenly there was the photograph of the burning car. I had not seen at the time: the person inside, the person burning. From the moment I saw that image my life changed, I changed, everything changed. It dragged me across the boundary and I was no longer a child; from that moment I became an adult. That photograph stayed with me until 26th December 2005 when it was taken by the tsunami.

I’ve been trying to remember how all this occurred for my ten-year-old mind. It is difficult but a good exercise to try to go back into that sensibility. Of course, I already knew that for a boy with my family background there were only three possible careers. I would be a tea planter, a politician or a military officer.

But that photograph of the man burning in his car changed everything. From then on, I was focused on current events. Though still a kid, I went to the library to read adult newspapers and books. My friends were no longer my own age but all older than me. I had to know what was happening and had to talk with people who were also concerned about what was going on around us. My teachers sometimes criticised me for not playing with other boys my age, not being interested in cricket, reading obsessively.

So my next effort is to reconstruct the events of July 1987, our Black July five years later; but not in a remembered teenage state of mind. From now on, I shall have to speak from here, from my mind of 2008.

For more articles on July 1983, please click here.

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