Once-Thriving Tamil Town Now a War Ruin

By CELIA W. DUGGER

CHAVAKACHCHERI, Sri Lanka — A trickle of people who used to live in and around this once-tidy, bustling town have begun venturing back to its ghostly ruins, picking through rubble for family photos and other possessions abandoned in panic last year when army rockets rained destruction on their homes, temples, libraries and schools.

Even when the mortars fall silent, the shadow of civil war never lifts here in the heart of the ethnically Tamil homeland that rebels have fought for in the last 18 years. Some, like 14-year-old Rajivan Srimohan, one of the fastest runners in the ninth grade, have recently stumbled onto land mines planted in their yards like deadly garden seeds. He now lies in a hospital bed with a bandaged stump below the knee instead of a fleet foot.

For all the thousands of people who used to call Chavakachcheri home, it stands today as a crumbled monument to a fratricidal war that has killed more than 62,000 people and that is destroying the very land the government and rebels claim they are fighting to save.

“I want peace to come, but I have no hope,” said Manikam Rajaratnam, a farmer now without a farm who used to live in the area, on the Jaffna peninsula in northern Sri Lanka, a teardrop of a nation in the Indian Ocean.

The eerie landscape that begins just outside Jaffna town and goes on for miles eastward to Chavakachcheri has been shelled to ruin by both sides. Signs of life are rare. A low- slung mongoose scurried across the road. Crows perched in the naked branches of an incinerated tree. Vines and weeds crept over deserted, crumpled homes.

Most people stay away, fearing that they will step on a land mine or an unexploded shell. Occasionally, a bus loaded with civilians barreled down the road, with machine gun- toting soldiers hanging from the doors.

At intervals, soldiers — Sinhalese villagers from the south — stood as lonely sentinels in the charred remains. In the village of Kaitadi, Atumugam Subrananiam, the widowed caretaker of a Hindu temple that had been heavily damaged by shelling, has continued tending to it. “The fighting is not useful to either side,” he said. “It only destroys.”

For a brief while this year, many Sri Lankans allowed themselves to hope that a Norwegian-brokered peace plan might bring the government, dominated by the country’s Sinhalese majority, and separatist rebels from the Tamil minority back to the negotiating table. The rebels declared a unilateral cease-fire that lasted four months and showed some restraint after it ended on April 24.

But the push for talks has gone nowhere. And in recent weeks the country has plunged into political turmoil. President Chandrika Kumaratunga suspended Parliament to avoid a no-confidence vote after her government lost its majority. Then the police violently suppressed an opposition protest, killing two people and wounding dozens.

And the rebels’ period of relative quiescence ended spectacularly on July 24, the 18th anniversary of the Tamil rebellion. In the predawn hours, the rebels, who call themselves the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, staged a devastating attack on the country’s only international airport and an adjoining military air base just outside the capital, Colombo. One of the suicide bombers blew himself up right in the baggage claim area.

The attack — which destroyed or damaged half the national airline fleet, prompted the United States and Britain to advise strongly against travel to Sri Lanka and crippled this island’s tourist industry — seemed to complete the country’s collapse into despair.

“The L.T.T.E. and Chandrika should join hands and talk,” said S. Shanmugam, a displaced farmer from the Chavakachcheri area now working as a laborer in Jaffna. “Only then can peace come to this earth. But they are not doing that. And we don’t know who to blame.”

Though the rebel’s stealthy penetration of what was supposedly the country’s most rigorously guarded airport came as an embarrassing shock to the political elite, the capital, situated in the verdant, Sinhalese-dominated South, is still largely insulated from the war, except for the occasional grisly Tiger suicide bombing.

But here on the Jaffna peninsula, where almost two decades of warfare have repeatedly sent hundreds of thousands of people fleeing for their lives, recent events have stirred a sense of foreboding that the war may soon flare again.

When night falls, the streets of Jaffna quickly empty. And since a Tiger rebel exploded a Claymore mine on a recent morning in the heart of town, killing several soldiers, people are careful not to get too close to jeeps loaded with troops.

Everyone here knows that war often comes with a sudden unexpectedness, like a monster jumping out of a closet in a horror movie.

By early last year, the rebels had gained a foothold on the peninsula, and their aim was to take Jaffna, which they regard as the cultural capital of the Tamil nation. Former residents of Chavakachcheri said they believed that the army would fight to fend off a rebel attack.

But one day last summer, the army began a hasty pullout, firing hardly a shot. They left the town nakedly exposed. People knew what that meant and ran. Once it fell to the rebels, Chavakachcheri itself became the object of a government onslaught.

“We thought they would protect us,” said Mr. Rajaratnam, the farmer. “But suddenly the army withdrew and started shelling. We were caught in the middle and had to flee with nothing.”

The rebels quickly advanced to the outskirts of Jaffna itself. But the government had spent more than $350 million on powerful new weapons and turned them on the Tigers and Chavakachcheri. Meanwhile, the Tigers planted the area with land mines before they withdrew. By the end of the year, the army had “liberated” the area, but destroyed it in the process.

People here are feeling squeezed — between an army in which soldiers are rarely punished for harassing civilians, and a Tamil rebel force that has executed its Tamil critics, recruited Tamil children as fighters and exercised brutal control over the areas it holds.

People want out of that vise. Many are bewildered and angry that President Kumaratunga, who promised that she would try to make peace with the Tigers when she was first elected in 1994, did not seize the moment to restart talks this year.

Mrs. Kumaratunga has recently assured diplomats in Colombo that she could end the civil war “with consummate ease” if she could just get Parliament to adopt a new constitution giving the Tamils greater autonomy to rule themselves in the north and east, the state-run newspaper reported.

But she does not have the votes — and she has lost the trust of many Tamils, whose support she would need if any constitutional solution was to be accepted here.

Some of Jaffna’s most influential community leaders and intellectuals say Mrs. Kumaratunga is playing a dangerous game in Jaffna. She promises to grant the Tamils greater power to govern themselves, but has installed a former Tamil militant that many of them regard as a thuggish opportunist to do her bidding on the peninsula.

Eight months ago, she appointed Douglas Devenanda, a member of Parliament and leader of the Eelam People’s Democratic Party, as the minister in charge of doling out tens of millions of dollars to rehabilitate the ruins of the peninsula.

“You must visit the theater where Douglas Devenanda is staging his drama,” Nadarajah Raviraj, the mayor of Jaffna, said sarcastically.

The hundreds of supplicants who come daily to plead for Mr. Devenanda’s patronage must pass through layers of heavily armed soldiers, as well as his own armed guards, then wind through a maze to the cavernous balcony where he holds court in his party headquarters.

Mr. Devenanda explained one recent evening that his job in the war effort was to win the hearts and minds of the Jaffna people. He also aims to win their votes and more seats in Parliament.

Just that day, he said, dozens of people representing a community of fisher folk had come asking for fishing gear, road repairs and clean drinking water. He gaily held up a petition with hundreds of signatures and chuckled appreciatively as he explained that his visitors had said all who signed were supporters of his party.

Mr. Devenanda said he had granted their requests on the spot. Other Tamil leaders are like coffin makers, he said: “they want people to suffer.” He, on the other hand, he said, is getting them what they need.

But some of those other leaders say Mr. Devenanda’s largesse goes only to those who kowtow to him. The Rev. Alphonsus I. Bernard, the rector of St. Patrick’s College who said he believes that the Tigers are fighting for the rights of Tamils, said Mr. Devenanda has refused to release about $55,000 for the reconstruction of St. Patrick’s because Father Bernard has refused to go hat in hand to ask for it.

“The president thinks she can buy people,” Father Bernard said. “That’s what Douglas Devenanda is trying to do. But he doesn’t know that people are cursing him.”

Perhaps it will turn out that Mrs. Kumaratunga’s gamble pays off. A war-weary people may decide that the bricks to rebuild their homes are more important than self-determination. But it is also possible that Mr. Devenanda’s Tammany Hall-style politics, deadlock in Colombo and the seemingly endless war itself will push more despairing Jaffna residents into the arms of the Tigers.

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