Volume 43- No. 07
by lyle e davis Editor’s Note: There is a great deal of superb reportage in the world. Some of these stories and essays, however, have to be anonymous in order to protect the author and his family from certain death. The Defeated Sri Lanka’s Tamils pick up the pieces after a war that defined—and shattered—the lives of a generation By ANONYMOUS Published : February 2012 Inside the lives of Sri Lanka’s Tamils as they emerge from a multi-decade war that defined and nearly destroyed them: The Paper - 760.747.7119
website:www.thecommunitypaper.com
email: thepaper@cox.net
February 16, 2012
“In March 2009, when Swarna was asked to take the new recruits to war, she felt a churning in the pit of her stomach. She was used to taking orders, even when every bone in her body rebelled. She had shot a Sinhalese soldier, barely 20, at point-blank range, as he kneeled in front of her, begged her, and showed with his hands rocking an invisible cradle that he had two babies. She had killed a friend who had defied orders and cost the Tigers an entire operation. ‘I can kill when I can justify it,’ she says. But this, sending children to face a real army when they could barely hold a gun, didn’t seem to fit her larger cause.” On the afternoon of 19 May, 2009, at around 1:20 pm, a ration shop
In 1987, 17 year old Niromi de Soyza, above left, shocked her middle-class Sri Lankan family by joining the Tamil Tigers in their struggle against the Sri Lankan government. Trained in combat and armed with a rifle and cyanide capsules, de Soyza took the fight to Sri Lanka's military for a year in the jungles of Vanni and the Jaffna Peninsula and was one of the rebels' first female soldiers. accountant named Sivarajan ran to the front of the winding lunch queue in the Zone 3 refugee camp to serve rice and sodhi, a watery concoction of chilies and coconut milk. Swarna, a former militant, sat in her tent nearby, yelling at her mother for having told an army man from the morning shift
The Defeated Continued on Page 2
that their family belonged to Mullaitivu, on the northeastern coast, where the war between the Sri Lankan Army and the separatists—“Tigers,” she called them— was still raging. At that moment, they got a text message on their mobile phones from the government’s information department. Addressed to all Sri Lankans, it proclaimed, in Sinhala—a language neither Sivarajan nor Swarna could read— that Velupillai Prabhakaran, the man who led a 26-year-long separatist battle for a Tamil Eelam (state), had been killed by the army in a lagoon just a two hours drive north of where they were. So when the news was announced in Tamil over a loudspeaker that