BATTICALOA (Sri Lanka): Guesthouse owner K. Luxman says it has been 15 years at least since the fish in Batticaloa’s famous lagoon came out to sing.
“It is because of the heavy artillery fire, the fish are not coming,” he said, blaming Sri Lanka’s 20-year Sri Lanka civil war for the silence of the fish, who used to make sounds like a distant orchestra playing.
Nearly 17 months have passed since the island’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the government signed a truce, silencing the guns after 20 years of civil war, but residents in the ethnically mixed east say their lives are little changed.
“There is a lot of fear,” said longtime resident Amara Hapuarachchi.
While locals say they no longer face the tyranny of the security forces, they say the Tigers have exploited the new freedoms allowed under the truce to tighten their grip over the Tamil-majority population.
“There are no checkpoints now, no ID cards, no sudden roundups,” said Hapuarachchi of the area still dotted with sandbagged police posts and military security zones.
But the Tigers’ recruitment of underage soldiers has not abated, she added: “Immediately after the ceasefire agreement the child conscriptions picked up.”
Others in the community were less equivocal.
“We were better off before the peace process,” said Father Harry Miller, a Jesuit priest who is involved in a local “peace committee” that acts as both watchdog and lobby group.
“That doesn’t mean I would want the peace process to stop. We only hope that once the peace process is complete, then we’ll be better off than we were,” he said.
Nordic monitors overseeing the truce can do little to keep the Tigers in check, he said.
“Anything which is brought to the monitoring mission will be declared by name. And the LTTE has many ways of getting even,” Miller said.
With its mix of Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims — who consider themselves a distinct ethnic group — and unclear lines between government and rebel-held areas, the region has been a flashpoint in the war over a separate Tamil state in the north and east.
One group that does seem better off are the local Muslims, who clashed with the Tigers in the nearby town of Valaichchenai last July, saying the rebels pushed Tamils to attack Muslim shops that refused to pay them taxes.
Long-standing friction between the Tigers and the island’s Muslims, who comprise about eight per cent of the population but make up about one-third in the east, is hardly resolved, but at least in the Batticaloa area, the rioting seems to have worked.
But burned out buildings are still visible and the town is still divided, with the mostly Hindu Tamils living on one side of the road and Muslim shops lining the other.
Representation and safeguards for Muslims remain a concern for the community, with the rebels now demanding an interim administration for the north and east as a condition for resuming peace talks.
OUT OF THE LOOP: The Tigers suspended negotiations in April, saying not enough was being done to rebuild war-hit areas of the Tamil-majority north and east, but to residents here the impression is of the north reaping a comparative windfall of aid and attention.
The Tigers’ headquarters in the northern town of Kilinochchi is a regular stop for international visitors, and since the reconstruction of the A9 highway the island’s main north-south artery is again flowing with people and goods.
But despite their feelings of marginalization, residents say the only way forward is to continue negotiations, and most are confident the Tigers are not about to start another war.—Reuters