MANKULAM (Sri Lanka): Different time, different laws, same booze.
Welcome to Tiger Territory, a vast swathe of northern Sri Lanka where separatist rebels show a defiant difference — even down to the clocks — while running a government administration set up and still partly funded by their enemy.
The parallel state runs half an hour behind the rest of Sri Lanka because the Tamil Tigers refused to follow Colombo several years ago in changing the country’s standard time.
Despite the resistance, similarities to the south abound and even extend to the only bar in the dusty, crossroads village of Mankulam in middle of the northern Wanni district.
In it, salesman Srikaran sells fake “Old Arrack”, one of the more popular brands in the country of the fiery coconut-based liquor.
“I sell about 50 bottles a week,” he said of his version. His “Old Arrack” carries a label similar to the real thing sold in the south, but is made by a Wanni company which pays an excise tax to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
Srikaran’s bar — which could never be mistaken for anything but a Third World hooch shop with a dirt floor, wire mesh instead of glass windows, and more spectators than customers — stands just off the A-9 highway.
The road reopened February 15 in an effort to build confidence ahead of expected peace talks between the government and the Tigers. The two sides have been fighting for nearly two decades over the Tamil demand for a separate state in the north and east.
DISPLACED BY WAR: “It should mean more business,” the 20-year-old Srikaran said of the partly paved road which is the main route into Wanni, home to about 370,000 Tamils, about three-quarters of whom have been displaced by the war.
“I’m a businessman, not a soldier,” Srikaran said when asked why he was not in the rebel army.
“That’s an old label,” he said when asked why the bottle cost 340 rupees (3.65 dollars) when the label said the price was 300.
Like the liquor, the government administration in Wanni is also patterned on the south but made in the north.
“The whole government machinery is functioning here, except the police and army,” said one LTTE functionary who goes by the name Daya Master.
That includes a school system with teachers paid by the government, post offices that deliver mail to the south and banks with head offices in Colombo.
Students, who study in the barest of conditions in rundown schools without electricity, take the same exams as their counterparts in the rest of Sri Lanka, but the Tigers also make sure they learn the LTTE view of the world.
“The Sri Lankan government pays for the schools. Everything is the same, but in our area they have special exams for Tamil history,” said Daya Master, a former English teacher displaced from Jaffna.
It’s the same with the banks. In addition to branches from nationwide chains, Wanni also has the Bank of Tamil Eelam.
“The banks are here, except there is a separate LTTE bank, but the same currency,” Daya Master said.
DESTROYED BUILDINGS: A police station was the sharpest-looking building seen on an hour-long drive up the A-9 to Mankulam from government-controlled Omanthai, with other structures either destroyed or roofless shells.
While the LTTE says there is little crime in Wanni, aid officials and lawyers in Colombo say the courts are far from independent.
Omanthai, about 270 kms north of the capital Colombo, is the newly opened border point where goods and people now flow into Wanni.—Reuters
