01/12/2005

Read more about the tsunami on our regularly updated Tsunami Crisis Page.

Even before the tsunami killed 31,000 people and displaced 545,000 in Sri Lanka, a 22-year civil war had displaced 390,000.  A 2002 ceasefire between the government in Colombo and the insurgent Tamil Tigers has reduced fighting without producing a comprehensive peace agreement.  But the tsunami is forcing the hostile sides to work together, perhaps paving the way for a more sustained peace.  RI consultant Eugene Carlson reported on peace prospects from the Tamil administrative headquarters in Kilinochchi.

KILINOCHCHI, Sri Lanka—Shortly before the tsunami hit, a heroic monument was unveiled at a street intersection here in the northern stronghold of the Tamil Tigers, a group that's waged a long-term struggle for their own homeland.

The monument was erected, a plaque reads, “…in veneration of 398 Liberation Tiger fighters who attained martydom” in the 1998 battle to retake this city from the army of the central Sri Lankan government. A muscular forearm grasping a rifle rises vertically from a base of simulated fire. Directly behind the monument, an enormous water storage tower, the tallest structure in town, nears completion. The tower, financed by international donors, is replacing a small water storage system destroyed during fighting that flattened the city.

War and reconstruction. The view from this street corner is a picture-perfect snapshot of life today under the Tamil Tigers. Though the Tamil Tigers are shunned by the central government and branded by many as terrorists, a development boom is underway here in their administrative capital. Modern government buildings have sprung up, overshadowing still visible wartime rubble. The massive international humanitarian campaign to aid tsunami victims has ratcheted up this activity several fold.

Vehicles from a laundry list of humanitarian groups bounce along dusty streets. Signs on new construction indicate help from a wide range of international donors. Japan, Denmark, South Korea, Germany, UNICEF, World Food Program, Save the Children. Some operated here before the Dec. 26 disaster. Others have just arrived in town.

For now, the bustle is confined to the capital. Beyond Kilinochchi, already bleak conditions are now dramatically worse. The tsunami dealt an enormous blow to territory controlled by the Tamil Tigers, or LTTE, for Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

As elsewhere in Sri Lanka, sea coast villages here were wiped out. But there’s a special poignancy here, given the history of conflict. Mullaittivu, a large settlement on the northeast coast, was limping back from war damage. Now it lies in ruins again.

LTTE officials are now grappling with the same enormous problems faced by leaders of governments throughout the tsunami-damaged region. Problems of food, shelter, medical care, jobs, care for a new generation of orphans. Plus they must address perhaps the biggest problem of all--how to find and create new permanent housing for tens of thousands of families whose homes were destroyed by the tsunami.

For the LTTE, however, the situation is complicated. It isn’t a recognized government. Access to its territory is controlled by the Sri Lankan central government, with whom it has been waging off-and-on war for more than two decades. The Tigers inspire fierce loyalty in much of the Tamil community, including affluent Tamils overseas who fled when the fighting got serious. But the region and its people remain desperately poor.

At the same time, the tsunami offers the Tamil Tigers an extraordinary opening. The window provided by a new ceasefire appears to have opened further. Access to the north, still restricted, has expanded for humanitarian workers. But delivery of goods, including humanitarian aid, continues to move at a snail’s pace.

A national guessing game is underway. Will the Tamil Tiger’s highly organized and obsessively secret political strategists seize this new economic initiative and open access further? Will the Colombo-based national government’s current hard-line stance toward the LTTE thaw in any significant way?

The deeply-rooted mutual antagonism surfaces in awkward ways. Following last week’s tsunami summit in Jakarta, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan traveled to Sri Lanka to inspect the damage. Unfortunately for Mr. Annan, his plea for disaster assistance was completely overshadowed by the government’s widely-reported refusal to allow the Secretary General to inspect damage and refugees in Tamil Tiger territory.

Having lived for decades with war, suicide bombings, assassinations and ethnic hatred, Sri Lankans sense they could be approaching a sea change in national direction, one that literally arrived from the sea. It could significantly change the face of the country, reinvigorating the peace process. Or the present opening could come apart, returning the nation to a deadly cycle of political and military strife. The stakes are high and few care to wager on the outcome.

The political chess game continues at the national level. On the ground in Kilinochchi and elsewhere in Tamil Tiger country, the work is more mundane. Here the LTTE leaders are struggling with the Herculean task of reestablishing some sort of normalcy to a ravaged landscape. There are good signs and bad.

M.S. Ireneuss is one of the busiest men in the Tamil Tiger capital. His official title is Director of the LTTE’s newly-created Secretariat for Immediate Humanitarian and Rehabilitation Needs in the North and East. This makes him the “go-to guy” when it comes to relief operations in LTTE-controlled territory. Officials of global relief agencies are queued at his door.

“It’s a very hard task,” he acknowledged with a weary smile during a 30-minute discussion with Refugees International. The crux of the problem, he said, is long-term resettlement. With pen and paper, he sketched out his strategy using boxes and arrows and time lines, falling into the illustrative dialog of the professional planner.

Figuring how to recreate villages in new locations without upsetting traditional social patterns won’t be easy, he said.

Significantly, Mr. Ireneuss agrees with the national government that long-term resettlement strategy should take advantage of the bleak fact that housing close to the shoreline has been largely obliterated. Authorities in both north and south worried about widespread encroachment of squatters next to the water but allowed the situation to continue. Each government now says it will establish a buffer zone where none may rebuild.

How the administrations are approaching this issue is instructive. The Colombo government has floated various numbers but now says no resettlement will be allowed within 200 meters of the sea. “The government will enforce this law strictly,” President Chandrika Bandardanaike Kumuratunga said yesterday. Skeptics suggest a one-distance-fits-all policy is rife with problems and will be widely abused.

The LTTE approach will be more pragmatic, Mr. Ireneuss says, sketching more diagrams to make his point. Officials will make setback decisions on a case-by-case basis. “It could be 75 meters, 100, 200. We will be flexible,” he says. To protect the shoreline, the Tigers will also build seawalls and breakwaters in various locations.

Mr. Ireneuss holds up a single sheet of paper containing the LTTE’s 10-point plan for housing replacement. He pointed to the preamble. “The process of reconstruction cannot simply look at the replacement of the houses but includes the need…for the people to return to life with DIGNITY,” it reads.

Among the 10 points: Minimum 500 square-foot houses, two secure rooms, inside toilets, roofs built to withstand cyclones, and building costs of roughly US$10 per square foot. Mr. Ireneuss thumbed through a manual with examples of how other underdeveloped economies have restored housing after natural disasters. He said the LTTE was open and eager for proposals from outside experts but expected them to be based on proven experience and technology.

LTTE officials are putting a brave face on the task ahead but enormous hurdles remain. Many are self-imposed by the regime’s central control and suspicious ideology. As in the south, a disproportionate amount of scarce resources goes to the military. Other limiting factors stem from Colombo’s hostility and the geographic isolation of LTTE territory.

The Tiger’s home is demarcated by a meandering east-west border running east-west across Sri Lanka’s northern tier, from one coast to the other. There’s also a geographically separate narrow strip running south along the coast from Trincomalee. Taken together, the result is a de facto country within a country, comprising roughly 25% of Sri Lanka. The LTTE maintains its own military, schools, police, laws and courts. In a show of chronological bravado, the Tigers even have their own time zone – 30 minutes behind Sri Lankan national time.

There are no independent ports of entry for goods flowing in and out of LTTE territory. Exit and entry is through land controlled from Colombo. The national government has used this geographic advantage to limit or even choke off the flow of goods to the north.

Armed forces from each side patrol the borderlands. Land mines are ubiquitous. A “no man’s land” separates the frontier, punctured at a few points by roads and heavily guarded checkpoints. Crossing into Tamil Tiger country is strictly controlled and not assured. Prior approval, with passport numbers and reason for visiting, is required of all foreigners and most Sri Lankans. At the border, passports and luggage are closely inspected.

A consequence of the LTTE’s border paranoia is a huge bottleneck for the limited amount of goods that do flow north. At a customs stop seven kilometers north of the border on the highway to Kilinochchi, every truck, including those carrying relief supplies, must stop and offload its entire cargo. Customs officers paw through each item. Relief supplies pass duty free. Everything else is slapped with a stiff import tax.

While the LTTE capital bustles, much of the Tiger’s territory remains quiet, sparsely populated and desperately poor. Most people with significant incomes fled abroad or to southern Sri Lanka to escape the fighting. Left behind were the poorest of the poor plus a cadre of Tamil ideologues.

This was demonstrably clear during a visit to another LTTE-controlled area, near Muthur, south of the east coast city of Trincomalee. Lack of adequate sanitation was the chief complaint at two displacement camps. One camp had one well and three toilets for 390 people. Medicine was in short supply. At the second camp, where tents were pitched in a school yard, 394 people were using two school toilets. “We need more so people won’t go in the jungle,” said director Frances Elizabath.

Four hundred meters up the road, a rudimentary clinic provides care for the local refugee community. “Since the tsunami, medicine has stopped coming,” said K. Paranpasan, a 24-year-old medical student from Jaffna. He’s been staffing the clinic as a volunteer for seven months. Every other day, he investigates health complaints from residents of seven displacement camps, traveling between the camps on a motor bike. The other days he stays at the clinic to treat patients.

His medical log for the combined villages includes 241 cases of fever, 138 of diarrhea, 86 dysentery, and 250 respiratory and blunt trauma injuries related to immersion in the tidal wave.

The medical student looks tired.