THE Jaffna town seemed dressed for the ball. New paint glistened on name boards of shops, boutiques and hotels, while music, including the once banned ‘LTTE songs’, was being played loudly. The Government military, which was earlier seen in hundreds, had made themselves scarce even though 40,000 troops still occupy the territory.
“The area is no longer cutoff from the rest of the region. At last, our relatives and friends can come and visit without spending exorbitant amounts of money,” a owner of a communication centre in the spruced up Jaffna town said. “We desperately hope that the calm that we are getting used to would not be disrupted. We are hoping for peace,” he pointed out.
The persona of both the buildings and the people in Jaffna, as a whole, seemed different. People no longer had to have their eyes glued to their watches, to avoid the roads after nightfall following a curfew necessitated by security vigilance followed in a war scenario. It had wearied the people to desperation. The scribe remembers, on my visit to the town last year in April, how tough the conditions were. There was a full-scale war ranging and Jaffna was almost strangling with the high security imposed by the Government military.
Shanmugan — one of the caretakers of our Jaffna ‘home’ — cautioned me last year against stepping out of the bungalow belonging to RRAN, the (Rehabilitation and Resettlement Authority of the North) after 6.30pm. This time, he smilingly informed me, while helping me unload my luggage, that at last I would see Jaffna ‘without the fear’. And he was right. But a different kind of apprehension was written on the faces of the Muslims coming into the region after 12 years of languishing in refugee camps in Puttlam and Anuradhapura.
“We have been encouraged by the LTTE to come here. Most of our houses, which are at least partially intact, are now occupied by Tamils. But we have been informed by the LTTE that they would be asked to leave at a moment’s notice if we wish to relocate in Jaffna,” says M. Anwer, a retired school teacher who is returning to Jaffna after 12 years to find out the possibilities of resettling.
“We are eagerly awaiting to return to our hometown where we lived side-by-side with the Tamils,” he says, having come with his family and a few neighbours from Colombo, where he now resides, to see the famous ‘Velanai Mosque’, a historical mosque in Velanai, an island off Kayts in Jaffna. The mosque dedicated to a Sultan from Nagur, Sultan Abdul Qadir Voliyyullah Rali, India, dates back to 15th century according to the historical data inscribed on the wall of the mosque. It has within the past one month drawn hundreds of Muslims, especially former Jaffna-residing Muslims to the region.
Says M. M. Sabur, a government employee, “We want to come back but it will be a big decision for us to invest our money, earned in Colombo, in rebuilding our houses in Jaffna. We want to be sure of peace, as well as the LTTE enabling a conducive atmosphere for us to resettle and live with dignity.”
Fifty-year-old Saladeen who, in 1990, left his Jaffna home for the refugee camps of Puttlam has now returned, taking the risk of once again establishing his home here. “We have nothing. As the LTTE demanded in 1990 we vacated our houses in two hours, we left taking nothing with us. We have come back from our refugee camps with nothing. We cannot afford to make our homes elsewhere. In our hometown, Jaffna, although we have only war-ruined structures, we want to continue with the business that we were doing here,” says Saladeen, holding his one-year-old child and standing against his newly established Muslim hotel. “At present I get around 50 people per day, mostly Muslims who opt to eat from my hotel which serves mostly Muslim food,” says Salaldeen.
However, Muslims who belongs to the fishing trade are experiencing difficulty having been issued orders that they can only sell the fish to the LTTE agents. It is, however, not only the Muslims who are experiencing difficulty carrying out trade activities in the region. Smalltime Sinhala businessmen are returning to the south empty-handed, after paying the exorbitant 25 per cent tax imposed for all furniture and items brought into Jaffna to be sold.
“As an experiment, we brought 100 plastic chairs from Colombo to be sold here. The normal price of a chair is Rs450 but after we were taxed at the LTTE check post in Puliyankulam, en route to Jaffna, we had to hike the price to Rs600 per chair. As the people of Jaffna could not buy them at that price, we ended up almost giving the chairs free because we just did not want to bring them back unsold,” says an agent for a local company manufacturing furniture items.
In Velvetithurai, Jaffna, further away from the town stands the bombed version of the three-roomed house of Prabhakaran’s parents, where the LTTE leader lived for most of his childhood and youth. The house looks like any other war-torn house. One is jarred into awareness by the lettering on the intact front parapet wall, announcing that it is the house of the ‘president of Thamilelaam’. There is a LTTE flag at the entrance of the desolate house, which is full of graffiti, mostly those written in praise of the LTTE, but also a few not so complimentary terminologies and scrawled in Sinhalese by military personnel when they held the region. Attempt has been made to wipe out the uncomplimentary graffiti by a faint coat of whitewash by Tiger supporters.
Nandagopal — related to Prabhakaran through marriage — remembers how things were in the past. Prabhakaran’s father, a government surveyor and the trustee of the Hindu temple in Velvatithurai, was a popular man due to his position. They were an educated family. Prabhakaran, as a young boy, was sent to a schoolmaster to study English. The schoolmaster was a communist. Very soon, Prabhakaran deviated from being a diligent student to a diligent young communist. He began to abhor the high social status his family enjoyed, despite originating from the comparative low caste of fishermen (compared according to the Tamil caste structure).
“A quite boy and a strict vegetarian from a young age,” was how Nandagopal describes the then simple boy, who turned into a Tiger of the most ferocious kind. Apparently, Prabhakaran’s parents were not happy with his policies. “With the creation of the movement, Prabhakaran was an extreme embarrassment to his father, who was a government employee. His relatives were hounded by the intelligentsia of the Government. I was arrested in 1984, kept overnight in a prison cell and tortured merely because I was related to Prabhakaran. I would have been killed if the police hierarchy had considered me as a drunkard,” reminisces Nandagopal. It was well-known that no one even remotely affiliated to the LTTE was allowed to drink alcohol. A senior police officer, known to Nandagopal who had wanted to help him, had pointed out this fact to the police team heading investigations regarding Nandagopal.
Returning from Jaffna to Colombo, in the LTTE controlled region of Puliyankulam (in Vanni), we met four sweaty young LTTE members who wanted a short lift in our vehicle. “When there is a war, we kill the Sinhalese. Now we do not want to kill the Sinhalese. We want to be friends with the boys in the army,” said Parthivan, a 22-year-old LTTEer. All the four youths were below the age of 24. They had asked our driver quite politely whether we could drop them at their destination.
“I want to learn Sinhalese. After this (the acquiring of peace) is done, that is my ambition,” he said in a childlike manner which belies his 11-year experience of fighting for the LTTE. Hailing from Jaffna, he had joined the LTTE at the age of 11 after both his parents were killed by the military in the cross-fighting. His only option was to join the LTTE. His three colleagues with their schoolboy faces, dressed in civilian outfits but identified as LTTE members from their striped tiger caps, were more suited for a university atmosphere rather than the amphitheatre of war.
“Bye. We will meet again. It is not the Sinhala people we were fighting. It is the political structure that discriminated Tamils.” These were the parting words of Parthivan, delivered like a good faithful member of the LTTE but, nevertheless, his mannerism, his insistence along with his colleagues of shaking hands with all four (Sinhala) journalists did not make his words sound mere political rhetoric.
THE Jaffna town seemed dressed for the ball. New paint glistened on name boards of shops, boutiques and hotels, while music, including the once banned ‘LTTE songs’, was being played loudly. The Government military, which was earlier seen in hundreds, had made themselves scarce even though 40,000 troops still occupy the territory.
