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Sri Lanka: After the war, winning the peace
Sydney Morning Herald - April 25, 2009
Matt Wade, Colombo – His realm once covered one-third of Sri Lanka and boasted a well-equipped army, a navy and an air force. But the Tamil Tiger supremo, Velupillai Prabhakaran, now controls just eight square kilometres of sand and swamp in the north-east of the island and his guerilla army is on the brink of collapse.
Rumours have swirled in Colombo that the feared guerilla leader, who rarely appears in public, was smuggled out of Sri Lanka months ago. But the army says he remains with his dwindling band of cadres, and now moves constantly around the narrow strip of land still in rebel hands to avoid bombardment.
But the prospect of capturing the elusive Prabhakaran has been overshadowed this week by the accusation he is holding tens of thousands hostage.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a proscribed terrorist group in more than 30 countries including Australia, is renowned for its ruthless tactics.
It invented the suicide jacket, pioneered suicide bombing tactics and pressed children into battle. It has assassinated two national leaders – the Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa and former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
As the Tigers have retreated over the past few months they have also been accused of corralling tens of thousands of Tamil civilians and using them as human shields.
Satellite photos released by the US this week showed the huts of more than 120,000 people living rough on the beach in rebel-held territory. They were hemmed in by defensive earth barriers constructed by the Tigers using mechanical diggers.
But on Monday the Sri Lankan Army used explosives to destroy a section of one of these fortifications and thousands of people began to pour out. The scale of the exodus caught everyone by surprise.
By Thursday the Government said more than 100,000 people had crossed from rebel territory to Government-held areas, overwhelming the systems in place to deal with people displaced by the war.
"The Government has been saying for a long time that there were only about 70,000 people inside the no-fire zone," said the United Nations spokesman in Sri Lanka, Gordon Weiss. "That was clearly wrong."
Having realised the scale of the refugee crisis, the Government has pleaded for international assistance.
Despite the huge numbers involved, the fate of those who fled the heavy fighting between troops and Tamil Tiger cadres is shrouded in mystery.
The Government has long banned independent observers and reporters from the war zone, so the world has had to rely on official footage of the mass escape.
A few refugees were interviewed and spoke of how happy they were to have escaped terrible conditions in rebel territory. But mostly the refugees were silent, wading through water carrying their possessions and waiting in long lines to be processed by the army.
Even MPs who represent Sri Lankan Tamils know little about those who fled. "Nobody knows what is happening," one Tamil MP, Suresh Premachandran, told the Herald.
"Who can tell how many thousand left and how many thousand reached government areas? We are telling the Government to allow human rights organisations to be able to monitor what has been going on."
Mr Premachandran said that even though he is a parliamentarian, the army had never allowed him into camps for those who have previously fled Tiger-held areas.
The casualty toll from the mass escape is also unknown, although aid agencies estimate hundreds may have died and more than 1000 were wounded.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of civilians remain in grave danger in the combat zone. Dr Alan Keenan, a Colombo analyst for the International Crisis Group, said the north of Sri Lanka was currently reeling from "overlapping crises". "We are not talking about just one disaster here," he said.
The refugees who fled from the Tamil Tigers this week will be vetted by the army and taken to special camps, mostly near the town of Vavuniya. Conditions in these camps, at least initially, will be bleak.
"People are exhausted, people are hungry, and people are sick," said James Elder, the spokesman for UNICEF in Sri Lanka. "Some of the camps are overflowing and new arrivals include infants who are suffering from dysentery, malnourished children and women, and people with untended wounds from the fighting.
"The worst thing that can now happen for people who have survived the war is for them to die from preventable [causes] in the camps."
Once the basic needs of the refugees are dealt with, these camps are likely to be problematic. Given the Orwellian title of "welfare villages", these camps will be used to weed out those associated with the Tigers.
"These internment camps exist so that the Government can process people and determine who is a danger and who is not," Weiss said.
Eventually all the camps will have schools, banks and parks, but they will be surrounded by barbed wire and the movement of residents will be heavily restricted. Critics have already branded them concentration camps.
For many of the refugees, it will be the first time they have not lived under the rule of the Tigers, who not long ago controlled about 15,000 square kilometres in the country's north and east and ran a parallel government.
However, the tide started to turn when the Government abandoned a much-flouted ceasefire early last year and laid the groundwork for a military build-up to deal with the Tamil rebellion.
This shift in government tactics coincided with new anti-terrorism laws in some Western countries which curtailed the Tigers' capacity to raise funds among the wealthy Tamil diaspora.
Additionally, more stringent joint patrols by the Sri Lankan and Indian navies, searching for vessels smuggling arms from South-East Asia, reduced supplies to the rebels.
After a slow start to its military campaign last year, the Sri Lankan Army started to make significant advances from September. Early this year the Tigers' administrative capital, Kilinochchi, and the strategic Elephants Pass on Sri Lanka's northern peninsula, fell to the Government.
Sri Lanka's Foreign Secretary, Palitha Kohona, said his country had taught the world an important lesson in fighting terrorism.
"For the first time the regular military force of a democratically elected government has succeeded in defeating a terrorist force," he said. "This victory was earned not only in the battlefield but also in the hearts and minds of the people."
But the country has paid a great cost. About 75,000 people have been killed during the 25-year civil war. The UN estimates nearly 6500 civilians have been killed and 14,000 wounded in the past three months.
Military spending soaks up 20 per cent of the national budget. A recent academic study calculated that Sri Lankans would be 30 per cent richer if not for the war.
Once the army finally prevails on the battlefield, the political problems that have underpinned this brutal conflict will persist.
Kohona acknowledged that the Government faced a difficult job in "winning the peace". He said the Government would return those in camps to their homes as soon as possible.
But Keenan is sceptical as to how quickly the military will allow people with sympathies for the Tigers to return.
"The primary goal of this government has been a military victory and it is security issues that define the policies," he said.
"I think they are going to be very reluctant to send these people back to their villages in large numbers given that so many of them, out of necessity, have connections to the [Tigers]."
Keenan said Western governments providing support for rehabilitation in the north of Sri Lanka must ensure the human rights of those in the camps are protected.
"If the donors want to be spending their money wisely and justly they need to be putting some conditions [on their donations]," he said.
The Tigers started fighting for a separate homeland for ethnic Tamils in the early 1980s, complaining they had been discriminated against by the country's Sinhalese Buddhist majority. That dream now seems more distant than ever.
But if the Government does not find ways to reassure Tamils in the north that their aspirations will be met, tensions are bound to simmer.
Despite facing defeat in the conventional war, the rebel group hinted this week that it would take its struggle underground. "The methods may vary but Sri Lanka will never be able to live in peace, as it imagines a military victory will bring," it said.
Sri Lankans will be hoping that the military conflict does not turn into an underground terrorist campaign that drags on indefinitely.
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