Friday, May 19, 2000
Tamil Tiger Rebels 'Ethnically Cleanse'
Parts of Sri Lanka
By DEXTER FILKINS,
Times Staff Writer
KALAYANAPURA, Sri Lanka -- As Tamil
separatists sweep toward victory on the battlefield, they are
beginning to cleanse their land of the people who were once their
neighbors.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam, who have won a series of victories against Sri Lankan
forces in recent weeks, are stepping up attacks against ethnic
Sinhalese civilians living in the region that the rebels claim as
their homeland.
The Tigers are bombing schools,
wrecking Buddhist temples and shooting civilians in a campaign to
force thousands of ethnic Sinhalese from their homes. The attacks
are directed at Sri Lanka's majority Buddhist Sinhalese living in
areas dominated by the mostly Hindu Tamils.
The attacks, overshadowed by the
recent military engagements on the northern tip of this island
nation off the coast of India, portend a grim round of ethnic
expulsions as the Tigers inch closer to their goal of a separate
state for the minority Tamils.
"They want us to leave, but we
have nowhere to go," said Kadirathage Ran Keranhamy, a
Sinhalese rice farmer whose 21-year-old son was kidnapped
Saturday by Tiger guerrillas. "We are brothers. Why are they
doing this to us?"
Keranhamy lives here in
Kalayanapura, one of a cluster of Sinhalese villages in the
sprawling tropical flatlands of northeastern Sri Lanka. The
villages, populated by more than 10,000 Sinhalese, are an island
in a sea of Tamils. Kalayanapura is part of the region earmarked
by the Tigers for a future nation.
As guerrillas have rolled over
government forces on the Jaffna peninsula, the attacks on these
Sinhalese villages about 80 miles to the south have grown in
frequency and ferocity. Tiger guerrillas are stepping up their
activities as hundreds of Sri Lankan troops are moving out of
this region to help their besieged comrades.
"We just don't have enough
troops to protect the villages," said Maj. Gen. A.K.
Jayawardhana, the provincial governor.
In Kalayanapura, a hamlet of simple
brick houses and about 600 people, the Tigers come at night. They
set fire to rice crops and sweep homes with searchlights and
gunfire. Last month, guerrillas blew up a school in a neighboring
village. On occasion, the guerrillas abduct the Sinhalese men and
boys who work the rice paddies; more than 30 have disappeared in
the area since 1995. None have returned, and few bodies have been
found. An additional 15 people have died in shellings and
shootings.
More than a dozen villagers have
already packed up and left, and others say they are considering
leaving. Those who remain are so terrified of attack that they
carry their straw mats into the jungle at night to sleep.
"When the sun goes down, our
houses are empty," said Indrawathi, a 39-year-old villager
who sleeps in the jungle. "We are too afraid."
The Sinhalese villages are the
victims of the tangled myths of Sri Lanka's history and the
bloody realities of its civil war. In the 17 years since the
conflict began, more than 60,000 people have been killed. The
Tamils began their struggle after enduring years of
discrimination at the hands of the Sinhalese. The Tamils' fight
is being led by the Tigers, a fanatical guerrilla organization
that has killed some moderate Tamil rivals. The U.S. government
has declared the Tigers a terrorist group.
Though the Tamils make up less than
20% of Sri Lanka's population, the Tigers are claiming as much as
a third of the nation's land area--the northern and eastern rim
of the island. The imagined Tiger nation includes the entire
Eastern province, where the village of Kalayanapura sits.
According to estimates, Eastern province is less than half Tamil,
but the Tigers want it all.
Some of the Sinhalese who live in
Eastern province were settled as part of government-sponsored
land giveaways--a major grievance of the Tamils. But many of the
province's Sinhalese villages, including Kalayanapura, have been
settled for generations.
Some historians say that the
Tigers' secretive leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, is trying to
revive the old realms of the 13th century Jaffna kings--and then
some. The Tamil nation sketched out in Tiger propaganda overlaps
with the Sinhalese kingdoms that came later. Those kingdoms
stretched northward all the way to Kalayanapura.
"What the Tigers have done is
imagine that the Tamil kingdom is much larger than it ever
was," said K.M. DeSilva, former chairman of the history
department at the University of Ceylon and author of several
books on the conflict. "It's a myth, but whether in Kosovo
or Sri Lanka, national myths are extremely powerful."
The Tigers' dreams bear directly on
the villagers of Kalayanapura. In the Tigers' imagined nation,
the Sinhalese would be a minority. Or, if the villagers heeded
the recent shootings and kidnappings, they wouldn't be around at
all.
Sitting under the shade of a
jackfruit tree, Keranhamy, the rice farmer, recalled the day last
week when the Tiger guerrillas kidnapped his son. Keranhamy and
his son were husking rice they had harvested from their 3-acre
paddy when four men appeared just before sundown. Unlike the
villagers, who mainly wear sarongs, the four men wore trousers
and carried guns.
Keranhamy's son, Vimal, ran.
Keranhamy, a 50-year-old farmer who looks older than his years,
was too slow. The guerrillas tore a piece of his sarong to bind
his hands. Keranhamy pleaded with the Tigers in his native
Sinhala tongue, but the guerrillas didn't understand.
"I spoke to them nicely, I
told them we were brothers, and they hit me," said
Keranhamy, nursing an eye blackened by a rifle butt.
As the guerrillas began to
blindfold him, he heard gunfire. Keranhamy doesn't know who fired
the shots, but they gave him the break he needed: He dashed off
into the paddies and dived into the mud.
"I never thought I would
escape," he said.
Other Tigers were spotted by
villagers that evening. Vimal and three other villagers are still
missing. The body of one resident was found the next morning in a
paddy.
The disappearance of Vimal is not
the first time that Sri Lanka's civil war has brought tragedy to
the family. Tiger guerrillas killed Keranhamy's in-laws in 1990.
After that, he took his family away. But they returned after 10
months because Kalayanapura is their home. After Vimal's
disappearance, the Keranhamys sent their 12-year-old daughter,
Sujiva, to live with relatives in another district.
Four days after the disappearance,
Vimal's mother did not have much to say. In a long drive through
the Sri Lankan countryside, Vimalawathi stared out the car window
and silently wept.
The tragedy of the Keranhamy family
was relieved slightly by an unexpected gesture of goodwill. Among
those abducted Saturday was Pinhamy Dissanayake, a Sinhalese
villager. The guerrillas also tried to take Dissanayake's sons,
Jayawardana, 15, and Sunil, 13.
R. Rashid, a 33-year-old Muslim
laborer, asked the Tigers to spare the boys. Muslims, a minority
community in Sri Lanka, have recently been spared the
mistreatment inflicted on the Sinhalese. The guerrillas told
Rashid that they would keep the boys.
According to several villagers,
Rashid faced down the guerrillas, grabbed the boys by the scruffs
of their necks and led them away. Stunned, the Tiger guerrillas
did not shoot.
"Tell the village it will be
destroyed by May 25," the guerrillas said as they walked
away with their hostages.
Rashid, a quiet man who earns a few
dollars a week harvesting rice, said the blood drained from his
body when he confronted the guerrillas. Recalling the episode, he
tried to explain what gave him the courage to step forward to
save the boys.
"I had pity for the
boys," Rashid said. "I have children too."