Ethnic Divide Worsens as Sri Lanka Conflict Escalates

by Somini Sengupta, The New York Times, March 8, 2008

There are no eyes on this war. A truce between the Sri Lankan government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is over, and gone are the Nordic monitors who kept watch over it.

Security is tight, and tensions high, in Colombo. Some minority Tamils fear wrongly being arrested during checks like these.

The government has refused entry to United Nations human rights monitors. Independent journalists are not allowed anywhere near the front lines. Only occasionally does a glimpse of the war’s damage surface, as when the Red Cross confirmed that in the first six weeks of this year alone, 180 civilians had been killed, a toll it called “appalling.”

While it is impossible to gauge what is happening on the battlefield, that is where, it seems, the government has placed its bets to settle the long-running ethnic war, once and for all. As it does, the public mood in this country is more divided than in many years, like an old scratch that has festered into a gaping wound.

The new government offensive against the ethnic Tamil insurgents, who have fought for a quarter-century to carve a separate homeland from this island, has received ample public support, at least among the ethnic Sinhalese who are the majority.

The enthusiasm can be felt in the large numbers signing up for the army, or in the citizens’ groups on patrol against suspicious activity, or in the voices of ordinary Sinhalese, who continue to brave checkpoints, suicide bombings and double-digit inflation in hopes of a military victory over the rebels.

“We have economic problems, we have other problems, there is inflation, but people are tolerating it because the war is going great,” said Premaratne Dawatage, whose son is in the navy, describing the country’s mood the other day at a crowded bus stand here in the capital.

Such enthusiasm is hard to find among minority Tamils. Anxiety prevails, sometimes panic. They say they stay off the streets in the evenings for fear of arrest or abduction. They quietly produce identity cards at security checkpoints and say little when theirs are more closely scrutinized.

Tamil neighborhoods are raided at night. Few people are willing to speak their minds, for fear that any criticism of the war effort will be construed as support for the rebels, or worse, that they will be detained under stringent emergency laws.

S. Hariharasharma, 20, desperately searching for a sponsor to help him emigrate to Britain, recounted one incident, and it echoed the recollections of many young Tamils here.

He was on the bus home from the British Council library one afternoon when police officers got on and demanded to see passengers’ identity cards. He began to tremble, he said, because he knew his identity would be suspect: a young man, a newcomer from Tamil-majority Jaffna in the north, unable to speak the Sinhala language.

“Somehow I managed to hide my fear,” he said. “It is a must to be normal.”

And then, a confession: “It’s acting, it’s acting, and it’s humiliating.”

That day, the acting worked. The police checked his identity card and let him continue. By the time he reached home, no more than half an hour late, his mother was hysterical with fear. It was barely 5:30 p.m.

The unraveling of the cease-fire, which began with a series of suspected rebel attacks on soldiers nearly two years ago, was followed by the military’s seizure of rebel-held territory in the east and then, by late last year, a full military assault on Tamil Tiger redoubts in the north.

In January, President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s administration called off the 2002 cease-fire accord, which by then had become a truce in name only. Cease-fire monitors packed up and left.

Alongside the conventional war, a shadow war has been waged in government-held cities, including Colombo. In a report released Thursday, Human Rights Watch blamed the government for a string of unexplained disappearances; the victims were largely Tamils.

The United Nations, having recorded more disappearances in Sri Lanka last year than in any other country, pressed to send human rights monitors, a bid the United States and many other countries supported. Mr. Rajapaksa’s administration refused.

On Thursday, a foreign panel invited by Sri Lanka to observe a government commission’s investigations into rights abuses said it was leaving the country, frustrated by a lack of support from the government.

“There has been, and continues to be, a lack of political and institutional will to investigate and inquire into the cases before the commission,” the panel, known as the International Independent Group of Eminent Persons, said in a statement.

Sri Lankans endure disappearances, raids and explosions, like this one in Colombo in February, which caused no deaths.

Both the government and rebels tend to exaggerate battlefield casualties. Propaganda battles propaganda. Much of the public faith in the war effort relies on the pronouncements of the Sri Lankan Army chief, Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka. In an interview in February, the general, a survivor of an attack by a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber, said his forces killed nearly half of the guerrillas’ 10,000-strong cadres in the north in the past 14 months.

The rebel organization will disintegrate soon, he predicted, particularly if his forces succeed in taking out the rebel leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran. (The Defense Ministry has said it has lost barely 100 of its own troops so far this year.)

On previous occasions, General Fonseka has vowed to get Mr. Prabhakaran by the end of June, and finish off the rebellion by the end of the year. This time, he hedged.

“At the rate they are dying, they will not be able to survive for a long time,” he said. “I’m not looking at the horoscope of Prabhakaran. But as a military officer, I can say if it continues in the same way, unless some miracle takes place, and Prabhakaran becomes a superman and starts doing wonders, he will have to face reality.”

How long General Fonseka can sustain public enthusiasm with the war effort without regaining Tiger-held territory is uncertain. He acknowledged that the front lines had barely moved since the start of the new push into the north, but said he would rather kill rebels than drive his troops into rebel territory. Implicit in his remarks was that if his troops moved too fast, the Tamil Tigers could do more damage to them than it was worth.

Meanwhile, any political track to quell the rebellion seems to have been set aside. A long-awaited government proposal to devolve power to the Tamil-majority north and east has met with widespread criticism, even from onetime Tamil backers of the administration.

“They are not interested in winning the hearts and minds of the Tamil people,” said Lanka Nesiah, a retired banker and ethnic Tamil who voted for Mr. Rajapaksa in the 2005 elections but who has grown disenchanted with his government.

As the military pushes harder into the north, attacks on civilian targets here in the capital have been more frequent, and all are widely attributed to the Tamil Tigers. One of the most chilling came in early February, when a suicide bomber blew herself up at a crowded Colombo railway station, killing 16 people, including members of a high school baseball team.

The attacks sowed fear and sent a powerful message: The insurgents had people and explosives at the ready in the heart of the heavily fortified capital, despite its many checkpoints.

All over Colombo are posters calling for public vigilance. They show a map of the island nation, with an eye wide open in the middle.

“Are you alert?” it asks. “If you are, your village and your country are safe.”