On the Grand Trunk Road (28 page)

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Authors: Steve Coll

BOOK: On the Grand Trunk Road
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“The captain says this is our lucky day—really our lucky day,” Ron answered jovially. “He thought we were the enemy. He was this close”—Ron squeezed his thumb and forefinger together—“to ordering his men to open fire. Then I heard him shouting and stopped the car. They had machine guns and grenades trained on our headlights. He was about to yell ‘fire’ when we stopped. He says this is really our lucky day.”
 
Ron was gritting his teeth but he was laughing nonetheless, so I laughed as well. The captain now felt a need to explain six or seven times what a lucky day this was for us, since he had not killed us. He even digressed into the field of astrology to describe the scale of our good fortune. Yucks all around.
 
By now I was getting annoyed. I said to Ron, “Tell him that this is certainly our lucky day, but it is also his lucky day, because killing an American reporter, even by innocent mistake, would not be a good thing for a fine officer like himself.”
 
Ron passed this thought along and the captain seemed puzzled by it. He answered in Sinhalese. “He says,” Ron explained, “that this is Sri Lanka. If they had killed us, they would have just burned the bodies. Nobody would have ever known.”
 
Right. I had forgotten about that.
 
We asked for permission to pass through. The captain said there were a few more checkpoints and that he would radio ahead that we were coming. We did not believe him. For two hours we rolled at a crawl, in silence, through the darkness. Whenever we saw a light, we stopped the car, turned off the headlights, got out, raised our hands, and surrendered. We surrendered to two old ladies sitting on their front porch. I believe we surrendered to an old man walking down the road with a flashlight. I definitely recall surrendering to a couple of dogs in somebody’s floodlit front yard. Nobody seemed to mind our errors. Sri Lankans understand fear.
 
The Sri Lankan death squads normally worked at night. They were led by people like our checkpoint captain, mid-level Sinhalese army and police officers at the front lines of the island’s counterinsurgency campaigns. From their barbed-wire military and police compounds in the jungle the officers and small squads of soldiers in civilian dress drove out in Japanese-made jeeps after sunset, yanking young men of certain castes from the streets or from cars or from their homes. Often the young men, suspected revolutionaries, were beaten and interrogated for a few hours. Then they were shot in the head at close range and burned with kerosene. Sometimes their bodies were dumped just before dawn into the muddy rivers that snake through the Sri Lankan jungles. At the Jae-la bridge just north of Colombo, morning commuter traffic into the capital would congeal each morning as drivers and bicyclists stopped to lean over the rails and count the corpses floating down the Jae-la River to the ocean. In the island’s south, where the death squads were most active during 1989 and 1990, a popular tactic was to cut off the heads of victims. Soldiers then placed the heads at dawn outside the home of the victim’s relatives as a kind of calling card. Estimates of the total number who died or disappeared in this way between 1988 and 1990 are in the tens of thousands. The death squad violence in the south peaked late in 1989 and petered out by the end of 1990. It continues at a reduced level in the north today, amid the war between the Sinhalese army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. But the vast majority of victims of the Sri Lankan death squads have not been northern Tamils allied with the suicide-charging Liberation Tigers. Rather, most of the victims have been southern Sinhalese supposedly allied with the Maoist People’s Liberation Front, known as the JVP because of its Sinhalese initials. Those who died in the south shared ethnicity and religion—but not political ideology—with their murderers.
 
Western polities are organized partially around the assumption that to pluck people from their homes in the night, shoot them, behead them, and burn their corpses at dawn is morally and otherwise intolerable. But what made the Sri Lankan death squads in the island’s south so politically peculiar was that few Sri Lankans, even those in parliamentary opposition to the national government, found it possible to draw such firm conclusions. For example, consider that Ranasinghe Premadasa, the Sri Lankan president who presided over the bloody reign of the death squads, was more popular after the terror than before. When a popular democracy in a country with a 90 percent literacy rate is prepared to endorse death squads at the polls, does it tell you that democracy is fatally flawed or that the work of the death squads represented some sort of utilitarian achievement ? You could hear both answers on the island.
 
Sri Lanka is a country that has carried to the most vivid extremes the same conflicts—over ethnicity, nationalism, religion, political ideology, social equity, economic opportunity, the nature of the state—that bedevil and occasionally threaten the stability of its larger neighbors to the north. The island is a gruesome political laboratory where the rest of South Asia observes and analyzes a possible future that it wishes at all costs to avoid. The difficulty is that the island is so rich with terrible anecdotes, intractable conflicts, and competing theories that it is possible to draw reasonable but diametrically opposed conclusions from the same evidence. By the late 1980s Sri Lankan society had become so polarized by violence and so beset by organized evil that the country, as a Colombo friend put it, quoting Czechoslovakia’s Václav Havel, had “lost its ability to distinguish between right and wrong.”
 
Why this happened is a question that arises in part from language of political morality generally muted today in the industrialized West—language used to explain, justify, or defeat revolution.
 
The People’s Liberation Front is—or more properly, was—a self-proclaimed Marxist revolutionary movement that capitalized on the grievances of impoverished but generally well-educated Sinhalese Sri Lankans who felt they had gotten a raw deal from the Nehruvian model erected on their island by the postcolonial English-speaking Sri Lankan elites. Rohan Wijeweera, the son of a small-time Sinhalese Communist politician, was the Liberation Front’s leader. He spent years studying Marxism and history in the Soviet Union. While developing the ideology of his revolutionary movement, he traveled extensively around the world and met or corresponded with representatives of China, Cuba, the South-west Africa People’s Liberation Organization in Namibia, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and various Basque separatist guerrillas. He read Che Guevara’s and Fidel Castro’s speeches and books, titles such as
Those Who Are Not Militant Revolutionaries Are Not Communists
and the tellingly phrased
History Will Absolve Me.
Wijeweera was a charismatic man of modest birth and great ambition who understood intuitively how to push the hot buttons of Sinhalese racial, ethnic, and religious culture. But as for politics, the vocation to which he devoted and ultimately gave his life, he spoke of the crucial questions only in the most wooden language of Marxist theory.
 
Justifying the mass killing he unleashed first in an aborted revolutionary strike in 1971 and then with greater effect during the late 1980s, Wijeweera said, “Counterrevolutionaries resort to violence. Therefore to ensure the safe delivery of the new social system it becomes necessary to resort to revolutionary violence against the violence employed by the capitalist class.... I am a Marxist-Leninist. I am a modem Bolshevik. I am a proletarian revolutionary. Marxism-Leninism is a clear doctrine. In no way is a Marxist-Leninist a conspirator. I, a Bolshevik, am in no way a terrorist. As a proletarian revolutionary, however, I must emphatically state that I am committed to the overthrow of the prevailing capitalist system and its replacement by a socialist system.” This sort of thing sounded as if it were copied from a borrowed revolutionary phrase book. But in all the years of his revolutionary fervor, it was the most Wijeweera ever offered his adherents as theoretical justification for following him into death. There were other emotional buttons that Wijeweera pushed at crucial moments of his revolution—buttons that aroused Sinhalese nationalism and xenophobia. But the leader’s politics were unapologetically modem and Bolshevik. He was deeply absorbed by the absurd doctrinal debates and splits within the international Communist movement. At one point, for example, he decided that isolated, tropical Sri Lanka’s future depended to a large extent on which side it backed in the Moscow-Beijing split. Wijeweera chose China, devoted many jungle speeches and propaganda pamphlets to explaining his choice, and declared himself a Maoist.
 
Why such a significant number of Sri Lankan Sinhalese were willing to follow Wijeweera into battle in the late 1980s is a difficult question. Sri Lanka had been for years a center of Trotskyite politics. Yet Wijeweera never commanded anything like a majority, even among the Sinhalese. The baseline of his support is perhaps best measured by the 273,428 votes he won in a 1982 presidential election, the only one he ever participated in. This placed Wijeweera third in the balloting, way behind the two major parties but strong enough to surprise Sri Lanka. Rohan Gunaratna, the Sinhalese historian who has published the only thorough, balanced history of the Liberation Front, writes that aside from his personal charisma, ruthlessness, and ambition, Wijeweera built a meaningful movement because he “successfully blended Marxism and racialism and created a doctrine which attracted the Sri Lankan rural educated unemployed youth,” of which there were many, as there are in all of South Asia. Wijeweera preached of paradise—free education, jobs for all—but also of revenge, the rightful taking back of the state’s resources from the postcolonial elites. Wijeweera “became the first Sri Lankan politician to come from a village background, from a family with less wealth, less influence and less education—and to challenge and to threaten the average Sri Lankan politician who came from a wealthy, influential and elitist background,” Gunaratna wrote.
 
Wijeweera’s “success” remains disturbing to many members of neighboring South Asian elites, in part because he operated in social and economic conditions that were not fundamentally different from those in, say, India or Pakistan or even Bangladesh. If you ask Sinhalese Sri Lankans to short-list the inequities and failings of the Nehruvian state that fed the rise of Wijeweera and his brutal Liberation Front, you will hear a list of problems found to one degree or another across all of the subcontinent. You will hear about the divisive language problem on the island, and the greedy mendacity of the Colombo elites, and the historical cycles of ethnic and religious conflict, and the lingering problems of caste and landed feudalism, and the high unemployment rates, and the inequitable economic consequences of the island’s government-dominated mixed socialist and capitalist system. All this combined in southern Sri Lanka to give birth to a generation of idle, intelligent, ambitious young people susceptible to rebellious ideology and to manipulation by a man like Wijeweera. Most of the serious writing in Sri Lanka about the reasons for the Liberation Front’s rise concentrates on specific, avoidable mistakes the Colombo government made—the decision to segregate Sinhalese and Tamil language education in 1956, the ambivalence about democracy during the early 1980s, the decision to ban the Liberation Front in 1984 on the pretext that Wijeweera led the horrible anti-Tamil riots in Colombo in 1983, when in fact it was the government’s own thugs who led these attacks. These errors were indeed serious and they strengthened the Liberation Front. But once the revolutionary movement began, the dynamics of insurgency and counterinsurgency also influenced its development. The Sri Lankan security forces cracked back with brutal violence, creating martyrs, which further inspired the revolutionary movement. At the same time, the movement’s adherents discovered that in impoverished, insecure societies such as those in South Asia there is unusual profit in revolution—with a gun and a bandana and a threatening pamphlet, you can walk into any shop in town and extort decent amounts of money, even if you don’t know Marx from Engels.
 
Every South Asian insurgency is unique. But the several dozen under way in the region today do have in common a backdrop of postcolonial state failures. And many share a pattern of violence—an internal dynamic of insurgency and counterinsurgency—that dates to the colonial period and before. Modern South Asian governments are quick and thorough when deploying force to defeat prospective revolutions, as were the British, who taught their successors what they know. Arguably Sri Lanka’s counterinsurgency campaign against Wijeweera and his People’s Liberation Front is distinguished not so much by the fundamental conditions in which it occurred as by its extreme brutality. At a moment of exceptional weakness in the history of the independent Sri Lankan state, Wijeweera and his followers nearly brought the whole house down. They were defeated in a bloodbath the likes of which South Asia has not seen since the partition of Pakistan. This is the aspect of Wijeweera that does, and should, interest the rest of South Asia most today. Whether it is the Indian government in Punjab and Kashmir, or the Pakistan government in Baluchistan and Sind, or the Bangladesh government in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the present, often structurally weak subcontinental regimes wrestle continually with how they should calibrate counterinsurgency in order to prevail and survive. Particularly, they wrestle with the question of force versus negotiation. And when they look to Sri Lanka, they find ambiguous lessons about the uses of death squads.
 
In the summer of 1989 Wijeweera and the People’s Liberation Front had the Sri Lankan state on its knees. The entire capital of Colombo seemed to feel the way I did kneeling on the dirt road that night near Madhu: frozen, waiting for the sound of the end. When you drove in from the airport, the only people on the streets were soldiers. On that thirty-mile stretch there were perhaps fifty checkpoints and roadblocks manned by jittery teenagers. Wind came in off the ocean and blew trash all about the roads, much of it dire propaganda posters pasted up by the invisible cadres of the Liberation Front and then torn down by the security forces to tumble in the abandoned streets. There were no cars or buses—the Liberation Front had banned them as part of a general strike it called in anticipation of the state’s imminent overthrow, and its cadres had shot dead enough drivers to put the point across. In the previous year Wijeweera, after two decades of planning, had taken his revolution to the edge of the envelope. His followers threw hand grenades into buses and shops to kill those who refused to pay extortion money. They carried out random assassinations of civil servants, policemen, and soldiers. They infiltrated the ranks of national police and the army, distributed pamphlets, and delivered secret lectures about the coming revolution. To demoralize those in the security forces who would not go along, Wijeweera ordered his men to enter the homes of policemen while they were off at work, slaughter their wives and children with knives and guns, and then leave the bodies to be discovered when the policemen came home. As these gruesome attacks multiplied, the demoralization of civil society worsened. By late July, the end seemed near. Sri Lanka would fall to the Liberation Front—this was no longer Wijeweera’s pipe dream, it was a serious possibility. The Front issued propaganda declaring that they were soon going to do to the families of army officers what they had already done to the families of the police—that is, murder them in cold blood—if the officers did not resign. The army was the ticket to national power and it seemed in danger of crumbling from within.

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