On the Grand Trunk Road (29 page)
Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
There were few illusions in Sri Lanka about what the Liberation Front would do if it seized national power. These were not cuddly Sandinistas with a Hollywood auxiliary. Wijeweera spoke of ethnic, religious, and class conflict in the most violent terms. He endorsed and practiced political murder on a wide scale. If he took Colombo, there would be slaughter—widespread “ethnic cleansing,” as it is called today in the former Yugoslavia, as well as large-scale political retribution. Everybody in the capital knew it. It was already happening, incrementally.
At this point Premadasa’s government, in a spasm, abandoned its attempts at negotiation with Wijeweera and unleashed the death squads in full fury. According to Sri Lankan politicians, security force officers, and international human rights groups, the Colombo government deliberately recruited policemen who had lost their wives and children in bloody Liberation Front attacks, sent them into the areas of the south where the Front had made the most progress, and told them to do whatever was necessary to defeat the enemy. This method of counterinsurgency, acknowledged only in elliptical terms by its architects, such as state defense minister Ranjan Wijeratne, had begun in 1988. In July of 1989, with the state apparatus teetering, the government let it be known that it had adopted a new, modified policy: for every relative of a policeman or soldier killed by the Liberation Front, ten allies of Wijeweera would be rounded up and summarily executed.
After this announcement, to travel in Sri Lanka’s death squad country was to tour a strange landscape of slaughter and silence. This was the time of the Mitsubishi Pajero jeeps with no license plates and the midnight knocks and the burning bodies rolled up on the pristine white beaches. In the Liberation Front strongholds, young men began to disappear at a rate of four hundred to five hundred per week. Diplomats at one Western embassy in Colombo counted six thousand actual corpses. But thousands of other young Sinhalese just disappeared. Some of them undoubtedly fed the smoldering piles of ash and bone fragments that I would come across from time to time on southern roadsides, usually a few hundred yards from a security force checkpoint. When a severed head or a full corpse with a burning tire around it turned up, crowds of villagers gathered and stared, mute. The message delivered by the besieged government got around quickly.
One of the strange things about Sri Lanka was that the tourists kept coming—Italians, Germans, and East Europeans drawn by the fine sands and budget prices. They went jogging when the sun came up, literally hopping over the bodies of the dead. Both the Liberation Front and the government declared foreigners off-limits in their war, to encourage the uninterrupted flow of vital foreign exchange.
I drove with Ron one afternoon through the jungle to Kotagoda, the seaside fishing village that was Wijeweera’s birthplace. Since nearly any organization in South Asia begins with family and clan, to defeat the Liberation Front the death squads had decided to slaughter every young man they could find who traced his roots to the place where Wijeweera belonged. As a consequence, there were only old men and a few women left in Wijeweera’s village. They wandered into Kotagoda by day to do a little farming and fishing. Nobody would sleep there at night, they said. Too many severed heads. One woman had been beheaded ten days before, the villagers said. It was unusual for a woman to be murdered by the death squads but not unheard-of, they added. The villagers stood talking like this in a spectacular setting—coral sea sparkling in tropical sun, lush palms and wildflowers all around. They pointed around the horizon as if directing a tourist to a hotel. Over there, see, is where they burn most of the bodies in the night. Here is where the tide brings the corpses ashore. Down there is where most of the severed heads show up.
As we spoke, a jeep raced into the village. It stopped thirty yards down the road. It had no license plates. Armed men in civilian dress climbed out, charged up a hillside, then returned a few minutes later yanking a teenager by the collar. They threw the young man into the back of their jeep and sped off. Brazen—it wasn’t even dark yet. For all practical purposes, we had just witnessed a murder. What were we supposed to do now, call the police?
In the nearby town of Matara we drove to the headquarters of the local commander of the security forces, appropriately housed inside an old Dutch colonial fort. At the razor-wire gates were hundreds of women standing in clumps under the hot sun, some holding umbrellas. They wore colorful saris and blouses. They were the mothers of the disappeared, lined up in search of answers. Every morning they showed up at the fort at dawn, hoping for an audience with the colonel inside. It had reached the point where the colonel handed out numbered tickets to control the flow. Only the first hundred mothers got numbers, so they had to leave their homes in the jungle at two or three in the morning each day to reach Matara in time to get a ticket. Even then, the mothers said, they rarely got any answers. Occasionally a son turned out to be alive and in a detention camp on suspicion of being a member of the Liberation Front. Mostly, though, there was no news. The colonel usually said that the boy in question must have been killed by Wijeweera’s men, the mothers reported. They clustered around Ron and me, wailing and crying, thrusting forward photographs and identity cards of their missing sons.
I pushed inside the overheated, concrete building. There were more mothers inside, seated in silence on wooden chairs beneath spinning ceiling fans. After a time, the colonel invited me in. Death squads, shmeath squads—he didn’t want to talk about any death squads. But he would be glad to talk about the Liberation Front and how he was on the verge of ending their revolution.
“The Liberation Front were virtually in control when we came in,” the colonel began. “People were living in fear. They were collecting funds. They were saying, ‘Stop work. Stop buses.’ Once, when I first arrived, the presidential mobile secretariat came down here and the Liberation Front tried to disrupt it with bombs and grenades. But they have not succeeded. When we established control the fear went out from the public. You see, for an insurrection to succeed, it must have public support. But the public resented it. They did not have the public sympathy. It was forced on the public. Anybody would fear for his life. It went on and on and people started becoming disenchanted.”
I mentioned that a previous Sri Lankan government had felt once before, in 1971, that it had beaten the people’s Liberation Front with violence. They had been wrong. What made him think it wouldn’t happen all over again, this time worse than before?
“We’ve taken on youth training to try to prevent future insurrections,” the colonel answered. “We’re training hundreds of young people in the army youth-training program. There’s no pay but there are one or two courses under way. We have about thirty-five hundred applicants in Matara alone. We’re teaching them secretarial skills, masonry, carpentry, and how to make garments.”
In fact, Premadasa was smarter than that. As a southern Sinhalese of low-caste birth, the first leading mainstream politician of that background in Sri Lankan history, he was well positioned to steal Wijeweera’s revolutionary thunder by challenging some of the power of the English-speaking high-caste elites whom Wijeweera held up as the implacable enemy. By his birth alone, Premadasa assured many ordinary Sri Lankans that he had their welfare at heart. He mixed free market reforms with visible welfare schemes, modernism with obscurantist, apoplectic Sinhalese nationalism. By these means Premadasa tried after 1989 to overtake Wijeweera’s original appeal and substitute a political vision grounded in a functional, if brutal and flawed, parliamentary democracy.
But Premadasa surely knew as well as anyone that it was the death squads, and not his calculated political chauvinism, that defeated the People’s Liberation Front. This was accomplished by mid-1990 and brought Sri Lanka back from the brink of revolution. The decisive event occurred on November 12, 1989, when roving security force units in plainclothes found Wijeweera in hiding in a southern village called Ulapane and arrested him. He died of multiple gunshot wounds in the early hours of the next day. His body was burned. After that, the Liberation Front began to dissolve and then to collapse. The Sri Lankan government claims Wijeweera was shot trying to escape and that he was cremated according to tradition, “under conditions of maximum security,” as the official release put it, as if a corpse might be prone to rash acts. Nobody in Sri Lanka believes this claim, there are witnesses who contradict it, and it does seem an unnecessary fiction. If it is possible to suggest that death squads have moral authority, the authority of the Sri Lankan death squads arose from the belief—held not only by Premadasa and his henchmen but by what seems in retrospect to have been a solid majority of Sri Lankans—that the mass state-sponsored murder of 1989 and 1990 was justified in the circumstances by the greater evil contained in the imminent triumph of the People’s Liberation Front. The climactic act of this essentially popular campaign of national murder now appears to have been the summary execution of Wijeweera himself, an event most Sri Lankans actually celebrated.
Premadasa did not speak in these terms because it remains the official position of Sri Lanka’s parliamentary democracy that state-sponsored paramilitary death squads operating beyond the reach of law represent a political crime. Premadasa and the Western governments that poured hundreds of millions of dollars in public and private capital into the Colombo government throughout the death squad campaign must operate instead by the tacit understanding that while the death squads were acceptable this one time because of the extremity of the Liberation Front threat, they are not acceptable in principle. This allowed Premadasa to posture as a man of peace and it allows squeamish Western governments to posture about their commitment to the protection of human rights. Premadasa suppressed the full truth about how the death squads won the war in the south because he controlled the government and found his approach politically expedient; the Western governments generally side-step the full truth about the death squads because Sri Lanka is too obscure to make it necessary to do otherwise, and because now that the war in the south is won, they wish to get on with the business of rescuing Sri Lanka from itself and profiting from Premadasa’s commitment to international capitalism. In the jungles are the ghosts of at least twenty thousand murder victims. The Colombo government and its outside sponsors are not morally capable of exorcising them.
To neighboring South Asian governments the lesson is clear enough. If you are prepared to cope with some public-relations irritations, you can get away with state-sponsored murder on the subcontinent in the late twentieth century if you succeed in arguing that national survival is at stake, if you succeed in painting your opponents as a greater evil than your own government, and if you are otherwise prepared to cooperate with the larger international priorities of the West. And another lesson has been reaffirmed: Death squads, properly calibrated with the will of a beleaguered majority, can be a decisive means to tactical victory.
After the death squads had finished their work in southern Sri Lanka, I sat down for a few hours one afternoon in Colombo with Neelan Tiruchelvam, a lawyer and research analyst whose ability to articulate questions of political morality in a country that seems to have so little of it is truly astounding. I asked about the legacy of state murder.
“There are very deep scars, I think. In the southern areas there are so many people who are victims of violence or people who have been tortured and who are still struggling to reconstruct their lives. There is very little support for them in terms of emotional support, legal support. But what is very, very strange about Premadasa’s government and its relationship to those areas where there was the greatest oppression is that in the most recent local government elections, the government did better in those areas than in previous years. This shocked people. Part of the explanation is, I think, the way the Liberation Front itself behaved. They were so ruthless that the restoration of some degree of normalcy was welcomed.”
What about the argument, the lesson of the war for many Sri Lankans, especially those in power, that the death squads were a necessary and even justifiable evil?
“Well, as far as the government is concerned, they won’t apologize for what happened. There are lots of people, I think, in the middle class also who would say that. That is, we had no other choice. But I find it difficult to accept the inevitability of repression in any situation, even one as bad as what happened here with the Liberation Front. But they say, Well, you are only able to talk like this because we went in and cleared the ground for you to survive. So it’s an extraordinary instance. I don’t see a parallel in history.... It’s extremely dangerous as an example. People are genuinely convinced this is the right thing to do.”
I was in a hotel room in Istanbul, Turkey, on May 1, 1993, the day an unidentified young Sri Lankan man with high explosives strapped to his body approached Premadasa at a political rally in downtown Colombo and pushed a detonator. The suicide bomber, Premadasa, and about a dozen others died instantly in a massive explosion. The news came through on CNN, whose announcer mourned the loss of a great Sri Lankan statesman who had dedicated his life to the unity of his fractious island. The death squads were not mentioned. The story passed from American television screens within a day—another ethereal, violent mystery of the East.
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