There is an image from the last Presidential Election that I have saved as the ‘wallpaper’ of my political mind; that of Elections Commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake at the post-election briefing expressing the wish that he would be allowed to retire. ‘At least now,’ I remember him saying.
This was two years after the then Chief Justice, one Sarath N. Silva, responding to Dayananda’s plea for retirement delivered a historic determination. The bench, for the record, also included Justice Dr. Shirani Bandaranayake and Justice P. Edussuriya. On the 17th of May 2003 Silva explained that subsequent to the 17th amendment to the constitution the continuance in office of the Elections Commissioner until the Elections Commission is appointed is a legal requirement.
He said that the Elections Commissioner, Dayananda Dissanayake was in a peculiar situation since Article 27 (2) of the constitution subsequent to the 17th amendment needs him to be in office and did not lay a time limit for the appointment of the Elections Commission by the President on the recommendations of the Constitutional Council.
Dissanayake was even then over 60 years of age and in poor health having suffered several heart attacks. That of course was irrelevant to the court. Silva did not observe that the delay in appointing an Elections Commission by the then president was a serious violation of the spirit of the 17th Amendment.
Six years have passed and Sri Lanka is getting ready for another Presidential Election. Dayananda Dissanayake, is still the Elections Commissioner. According to that strange court determination, he cannot retire because a full Elections Commission has not been appointed as per the 17th Amendment to the Constitution. Well, we are not going to get such a Commission until we get a Constitutional Council.
I was thinking about Dayananda Dissanayake and wondering about the conditions of his being, his work, his non-retirement and the politics that require him to be immortal.
Let me state my biases here. I think the 17th Amendment is a flawed document with too many holes in it and therefore easily subverted. I believe however that it is an important base document in correcting institutional flaws and moving towards more efficient and democratic governance structures. It contains loops that bring us to Square One on many counts. Perhaps the 17th Amendment along will not do the trick and perhaps it will not be enough to add ‘ethics’ either. Still, it cannot be rejected outright without offering an alternative mechanism to address those issues that the 17th Amendment was supposed to cure. Furthermore, since it is part of the constitution, its full implementation should be actively sought by all concerned (including the Supreme Court) in the interest of keeping constitutional anarchy at bay.
Getting back to the Elections Commissioner, I was wondering how a man gets ‘sacked’. The Supreme Court has determined that the man cannot retire. Now it seems that the Government and indeed the entire system require Dayananda Dissanayake to live forever. Dissanayake (may he live long!) while he could cite the SC decision and remain un-retired and indeed justify that status, must understand that his every living moment is an affront to the democratic spirit and an obstruction to curing process of our diseased institutions. Not his fault, of course, but he is an instrument nevertheless. What can he do about it? He can say ‘weak karma’ in explaining the punishment of being denied retiring rights.
Maybe I am being unfair. Let me assume that Dayananda is some kind of demi-god who doesn’t have to worry about being picked up by some underworld hit-squad; that he doesn’t have to worry about the repercussions of the things he does and does not. What would his options be, if he considers the public interest to be all-important?
He could commit suicide. That would force the system to do whatever it takes to get the Elections Commission constituted. It would therefore force the system to deliver the long overdue baby called the Constitutional Council. If this were to happen today, we will not be able to hold the Presidential Election. No society should be in this situation where its franchise is absolutely dependent on the ‘immortality’ of a single individual.
We have to understand that Dayananda Dissanayake, given these realities following the Supreme Court determination is clearly one of the most powerful individuals in our society. He can demand anything he likes and we should all be extremely thankful to him for not having done so. I can think of lots of people who, finding themselves in Dissanayake’s situation would have grinned and milked that particular SC determination to the maximum.
Dayananda Dissanayake is not that kind of suicide-bomber and I am not sure if we should be thankful or not. His situation, however, shows us one thing. Our system is utterly fragile. That fragility did not fall from the sky. It was legislated by Parliament, executed by various individuals who enjoyed executive powers and was legitimized by a highly politicized and short-sighted judiciary.
Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer who can be reached at malinsene@gmail.com.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Saturday, December 26, 2009
5 years after tsunami, Sri Lanka still suffers
By DEBRA HAIGHT - H-P Correspondent
BERRIEN SPRINGS - Five years after a tsunami killed hundreds of thousands of people in Sri Lanka and other Asian countries, REACH International founder Jasmine Jacob said the need for help remains, but for different reasons.
REACH stands for Render Effective Aid to CHildren and is the organization Jacob founded more than 35 years ago. The organization is based in Berrien Springs and supports orphanages, schools and feeding centers in countries around the world.
Jacob is a native of Sri Lanka and made several trips back to her homeland in the days, weeks and months after the deadly tsunami. The tsunami hit on Dec. 26, 2004, and devastated southern Asian countries including Sri Lanka and Indonesia.
Within a week of the tsunami, Jacob and a group of others including her brother, Dr. Ernesto Fernando, an Elkhart, Ind., doctor, were on their way to their homeland. "When we saw what had happened, we said, 'How can we sit here and not go?' " she said.
She said this week that the people in her homeland are suffering more from the effects of the country's long civil war with the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist group government forces defeated earlier this year, than the tsunami five years ago.
Jacob said REACH does continue to assist tsunami survivors including a young 13-year-old boy she met on one of her trips back in 2005. The boy survived a train derailment at the time of tsunami, which killed his parents.
"He's now 18 and finished with high school, he is one of the children we tried to help," she said. "He survived by climbing out and on top of the train, he's young and resilient.
"A lot of people found a way to survive after the tsunami," Jacob said. "People scavenged and found materials to build houses. They got many places in the country cleared in three months. Over there, when they lose their homes, they salvage and rebuild, it's much more simple."
"The survivors have been resilient," she said. "The people killed were mostly the parents and older people. Parents told their children to run when the tsunami hit and they got away."
In contrast, the civil war has forced many of the people into refugee camps in the last few years. Jacob said that the orphanage REACH built in Sri Lanka after the tsunami has taken in more than 20 children who had been living in the refugee camps.
"The Tamil Tigers would hide behind civilians and when they were being routed by the government, they planted land mines in the fields," Jacob said. "The government now has to clear the mines before the people can go home. Now the need is for the war survivors."
She described the Tamil Tigers as terrorists who started the practice of strapping bombs on their bodies and blowing themselves up in terrorist attacks.
"The innocent suffered," Jacob said. "The world didn't think the government could defeat the Tamil, but they did ... The Tamil would say they were being harassed when they were the ones harassing others."
Jacob also spoke about the situation she fears is worsening in another part of the world, in the African country of Tanzania. There, witch doctors prey on people's superstitions and have encouraged the killing of the country's native albino population.
"People think the albinos are a bad omen and parents themselves abandon their children," she said. "We are building an orphanage to take them so we can protect them. I hope the problem there comes to the forefront of the world's attention."
"We support orphanages, schools and feeding centers in 27 different countries, wherever children are suffering," she said. "... We keep going. God leads and we go."
BERRIEN SPRINGS - Five years after a tsunami killed hundreds of thousands of people in Sri Lanka and other Asian countries, REACH International founder Jasmine Jacob said the need for help remains, but for different reasons.
REACH stands for Render Effective Aid to CHildren and is the organization Jacob founded more than 35 years ago. The organization is based in Berrien Springs and supports orphanages, schools and feeding centers in countries around the world.
Jacob is a native of Sri Lanka and made several trips back to her homeland in the days, weeks and months after the deadly tsunami. The tsunami hit on Dec. 26, 2004, and devastated southern Asian countries including Sri Lanka and Indonesia.
Within a week of the tsunami, Jacob and a group of others including her brother, Dr. Ernesto Fernando, an Elkhart, Ind., doctor, were on their way to their homeland. "When we saw what had happened, we said, 'How can we sit here and not go?' " she said.
She said this week that the people in her homeland are suffering more from the effects of the country's long civil war with the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist group government forces defeated earlier this year, than the tsunami five years ago.
Jacob said REACH does continue to assist tsunami survivors including a young 13-year-old boy she met on one of her trips back in 2005. The boy survived a train derailment at the time of tsunami, which killed his parents.
"He's now 18 and finished with high school, he is one of the children we tried to help," she said. "He survived by climbing out and on top of the train, he's young and resilient.
"A lot of people found a way to survive after the tsunami," Jacob said. "People scavenged and found materials to build houses. They got many places in the country cleared in three months. Over there, when they lose their homes, they salvage and rebuild, it's much more simple."
"The survivors have been resilient," she said. "The people killed were mostly the parents and older people. Parents told their children to run when the tsunami hit and they got away."
In contrast, the civil war has forced many of the people into refugee camps in the last few years. Jacob said that the orphanage REACH built in Sri Lanka after the tsunami has taken in more than 20 children who had been living in the refugee camps.
"The Tamil Tigers would hide behind civilians and when they were being routed by the government, they planted land mines in the fields," Jacob said. "The government now has to clear the mines before the people can go home. Now the need is for the war survivors."
She described the Tamil Tigers as terrorists who started the practice of strapping bombs on their bodies and blowing themselves up in terrorist attacks.
"The innocent suffered," Jacob said. "The world didn't think the government could defeat the Tamil, but they did ... The Tamil would say they were being harassed when they were the ones harassing others."
Jacob also spoke about the situation she fears is worsening in another part of the world, in the African country of Tanzania. There, witch doctors prey on people's superstitions and have encouraged the killing of the country's native albino population.
"People think the albinos are a bad omen and parents themselves abandon their children," she said. "We are building an orphanage to take them so we can protect them. I hope the problem there comes to the forefront of the world's attention."
"We support orphanages, schools and feeding centers in 27 different countries, wherever children are suffering," she said. "... We keep going. God leads and we go."
Colonial Delights
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
In 1497 a young Portuguese lad by the name of Vasco da Gama went on a sailing holiday.(It was his gap year) He rounded off the Cape of Good Hope and managed to find India. At least he was aiming for India and found India ....(unlike a certain Chris Columbus!)
Another one of his countrymen, by the name of Lorenzo de Almeida fancied a similar holiday in Goa and set off with his pals. He did round off the cape and get to the Indian Ocean but it was the wrong time of the year! Monsoons!
They were drunk as well....A storm blew up and he made a wrong right turn at the Equator (Bugger!) ending up in the natural harbour of Cola Amba Tota....in a little island that the natives called Srilanka. This being a rather mouthful the guys decided to call the place Colombo, and the island Cee-lan...
The date is the 15th of November 1505.
Seeing that the whole place was full of "bloody foreigners" Lorenzo and the boys let off a few cannon....just for fun..! The locals had never seen such behaviour....allright they did fight a bit amongst themselves and with their darker skinned bretheren of Yalpanam (Jaffna), but that was with swords and spears and arrows and elephants and boiling pitch..but this was real live ammo!
Moreover the "white guys" were drinking red stuff out of bottles labeled Vin Rouge (very definitely blood!..and didn't they eat large white chunks of Dolomite which they called Paan!?) They burped loudly and farted loudly and threw up and sang boisterous songs called Bailé..(Paan: The Sinhala word for bread is Paan).
Take me to your leader!
Lorenzo sort of liked the place and wandered along the harbour and bumped into a native who happened to be a local tout."Take me to your leader" said Lorenzo.The native didn't understand Portuguese; so he rotated his head from side to side and rolled his eyeballs and flashed a set of betel-stained teeth.
Lorenzo said "Are you a bloody moron man?". The native did a slightly different rotation of the head and said something in Sinhala which Lorenzo didn't understand. So Lorenzo rotated his head violently, rotated his eyeballs violently, stuck his tongue out and said "F***".
The native rotated his head violently and rolled his etc and said "F***"!?. Everybody had a good laugh. Lorenzo said "That's a bloody funny accent mate!" and patted the native on the back and gave him a gold coin (actually a copper coin painted gold..)
Everybody laughed. Friendly relations were established.The natives had a few glasses of Vin Rouge with Lorenzo and his mates...and a few more glasses.... Good stuff this! Better than Ra! said the natives..Yes! we will take you to our leader (Hic!) they said..but it will be a six day round trip all inclusive..and that will be three gold coins per head..
Guided tour
Sore heads next morning. Tour guides/touts decide might as well make the most of this. The capital of the Kotte Kingdom was at Kotte..just six miles down the road. In fact, if he had been sober, the lookout in the crow's nest of Lorenzo's ship would have been able to see Kotte because there were no skyscrapers around the harbour then.....The touts take the Portuguese by a circuitous route taking several days.....Lorenzo is impressed by the size of the country..Takes three days to get from bloody Colombo to bloody Kotte!..he thinks.
Lorenzo gets on well with the King. Says "Nice kingdom you've got! Look me up if ever you are in Lisbon, mate!" Comes back to Colombo and gets his men to carve the Portuguese coat of arms on a large granite rock. Sets up a trading post. Recruits local labour. Things work while for a bit. Locals like the foreign currency! Set up Foreign Exchange booths. The price of everything goes up. Brisk trading on the Srilankan Stock Exchange. Good fun all round!
Can you hear the drums, Fernando?
Catholic missionaries arrive and put an end to the fun. Go about "converting" everybody. Build churches..Force the drunken Portuguese sailors to attend mass..Natives impressed by this..They serve wine at mass?!.. Free?!.....Might as well go for mass in the morning and then go to the tavern at night!.. No you can't, you need to be baptised first! Just needs water and a few prayers! Painless! A local tribe by the name of Warnakulasuriya, fishermen by trade and of the Karawe caste, are the first to join up. Take on the new name of FERNANDO...become violently Catholic...Others follow..Soon there are Pereras, de Silvas and de Almeidas.
The Portuguese build a fort at Colombo....Still known as Colombo Fort. They build more forts and churches at Kalutara and Galle. Portuguese now control the maritime areas...........to be continued....
**The Portuguese were rotten spellers! This was probably because they had no letter U then! For example: COLVMBO (Colombo or Cola Amba Tota), NEGVMBO ( Negombo or Meegomuwa), CALATVRE (Kalutara, my home town), PANATVRE (Panadure), Candea (Kandy or Kande Uda Rata)....
Serious note:
The date of the first visit of the Portuguese is correct as given above and Lorenzo (Dom Lourenço de Almeida) did get blown off course in the Indian Ocean. They were sailing in a fleet of eight caravels and were blown off course near the Maldive Islands by the monsoons.
They made first landfall at Galle but stopped only long enough to replenish stocks of water and food. They then sailed on to Colombo.
The RAJAVALIYA describes the visit thus:
"There is in our harbour of Colombo a race of people fair of skin and comely withal. They don jackets of iron and hats of iron; they rest not a minute in one place: they walk here and there: they eat hunks of stone and drink blood; they give two or three pieces of gold and silver for one fish or one lime; the report of their cannon is louder than thunder when it bursts upon the rock Yugandhara. Their cannon balls fly many a gawwa and shatter fortresses of granite"
PHOTO: Portuguese coat of arms from Colombo harbour. Now moved elsewhere and sadly out of bounds to the public...
The Visit To Kotte
The natives took three days to take the Portuguese to Kotte which was only 6 miles from Colombo. This is probably the first recorded instance of tourists being taken for a ride!
According to Codrington it is highly unlikely that the Portuguese were taken in by this trick. In a bright sunny place like Srilanka, close to the equator, it is easy to get bearings from the sun. However, the story has passed into the Sinhala forkelore and language in the form of the saying; "Parangiya Kotte giya wagé" (Translation:"Just like the Portuguese went to Kotte!" ) and is used to describe a situation where complicated methods are employed instead of the simple, straightforward method.
It is generally acknowledged that the Portuguese only wanted to establish trade. They offered protection for the Kotte king. The forts were built mostly to repel the Dutch, the French and the British who started to roam the waters very soon afterwards. Opinions however differ, as to the actual intentions of the Portuguese... Mrs R.Fernando (nee de Silva) always disagrees with my views!
The Coat Of Arms
The rock with the carved Portuguese coat-of-arms was discovered in 1875 near the south-west breakwater of the harbour during expansion of the harbour (ref: Brohier). It was left in-situ for a while in the Customs premises and later moved a few hundred yards to Gordon Gardens of the Queen's House. Up until the late seventies visitors were allowed to Gordon Gardens. The Queen's House became the President's House and as such has sadly been a restricted area for a number of years.
Fernandos of Srilanka
Approx 10 percent of the population of Srilanka are named Fernando. Most of the Fernandos are of the Karawe caste and were fisherfolk originally, although most are too proud to admit to that!.(Grandad Fernando had a fishing boat!) Some are from other castes (will explain later). A large proportion of the Fernandos were originally Warnakulasuriyas. Some of us still retain the name Warnakulasuriya in our birth certificates and other legal documents.... but Fernando is easier to spell!
The Portuguese Heritage
Baila:
To this day Srilankans sing Baila, a type of lighthearted song with a Spanish style rhythm, especially when drunk....
Monuments:
The oldest church in Srilanka was the church of St Lourenço which stood at the root of the modern south-west breakwater...
One of the oldest cemeteries from the Portuguese period is known by the locals as "Liveramenthuwa" and is at Madampitiya near Grandpass. The name is an obvious corruption of Nossa Senhora do Liveramento (Our Lady of Deliverance). A shrine to Our Lady originally stood on the site.
Kayman's Gate:
Public hangings took place near the Poorte Reina (Queen's Gate, later renamed Cayman's Gate). Cayman,s (or Kayman,s) gate is still identifiable, Caymans being a reference to the crocodiles which lived in the moat...
Language:
Another Sinhala word of obvious Portuguese origin is Mesa (table).
Older males of a previous generation were addressed as Singho ( Senhor)
Parangi Leday:
Yaws, a treponemal infection similar to syphilis is known as Parangi Leday in Sinhala ("Portuguese Disease") Ranji and myself saw the last few cases of this disease among the Veddahs (aborigines) of Mahiyangana...
REFERENCES:1.Codrington, H.W., A SHORT HISTORY OF CEYLON, 1947, Macmillan and Co.,London. 2.Brohier, R.L., CHANGING FACE OF COLOMBO, 1984, Lake House Printers and Publishers Ltd, Colombo.
In 1497 a young Portuguese lad by the name of Vasco da Gama went on a sailing holiday.(It was his gap year) He rounded off the Cape of Good Hope and managed to find India. At least he was aiming for India and found India ....(unlike a certain Chris Columbus!)
Another one of his countrymen, by the name of Lorenzo de Almeida fancied a similar holiday in Goa and set off with his pals. He did round off the cape and get to the Indian Ocean but it was the wrong time of the year! Monsoons!
They were drunk as well....A storm blew up and he made a wrong right turn at the Equator (Bugger!) ending up in the natural harbour of Cola Amba Tota....in a little island that the natives called Srilanka. This being a rather mouthful the guys decided to call the place Colombo, and the island Cee-lan...
The date is the 15th of November 1505.
Seeing that the whole place was full of "bloody foreigners" Lorenzo and the boys let off a few cannon....just for fun..! The locals had never seen such behaviour....allright they did fight a bit amongst themselves and with their darker skinned bretheren of Yalpanam (Jaffna), but that was with swords and spears and arrows and elephants and boiling pitch..but this was real live ammo!
Moreover the "white guys" were drinking red stuff out of bottles labeled Vin Rouge (very definitely blood!..and didn't they eat large white chunks of Dolomite which they called Paan!?) They burped loudly and farted loudly and threw up and sang boisterous songs called Bailé..(Paan: The Sinhala word for bread is Paan).
Take me to your leader!
Lorenzo sort of liked the place and wandered along the harbour and bumped into a native who happened to be a local tout."Take me to your leader" said Lorenzo.The native didn't understand Portuguese; so he rotated his head from side to side and rolled his eyeballs and flashed a set of betel-stained teeth.
Lorenzo said "Are you a bloody moron man?". The native did a slightly different rotation of the head and said something in Sinhala which Lorenzo didn't understand. So Lorenzo rotated his head violently, rotated his eyeballs violently, stuck his tongue out and said "F***".
The native rotated his head violently and rolled his etc and said "F***"!?. Everybody had a good laugh. Lorenzo said "That's a bloody funny accent mate!" and patted the native on the back and gave him a gold coin (actually a copper coin painted gold..)
Everybody laughed. Friendly relations were established.The natives had a few glasses of Vin Rouge with Lorenzo and his mates...and a few more glasses.... Good stuff this! Better than Ra! said the natives..Yes! we will take you to our leader (Hic!) they said..but it will be a six day round trip all inclusive..and that will be three gold coins per head..
Guided tour
Sore heads next morning. Tour guides/touts decide might as well make the most of this. The capital of the Kotte Kingdom was at Kotte..just six miles down the road. In fact, if he had been sober, the lookout in the crow's nest of Lorenzo's ship would have been able to see Kotte because there were no skyscrapers around the harbour then.....The touts take the Portuguese by a circuitous route taking several days.....Lorenzo is impressed by the size of the country..Takes three days to get from bloody Colombo to bloody Kotte!..he thinks.
Lorenzo gets on well with the King. Says "Nice kingdom you've got! Look me up if ever you are in Lisbon, mate!" Comes back to Colombo and gets his men to carve the Portuguese coat of arms on a large granite rock. Sets up a trading post. Recruits local labour. Things work while for a bit. Locals like the foreign currency! Set up Foreign Exchange booths. The price of everything goes up. Brisk trading on the Srilankan Stock Exchange. Good fun all round!
Can you hear the drums, Fernando?
Catholic missionaries arrive and put an end to the fun. Go about "converting" everybody. Build churches..Force the drunken Portuguese sailors to attend mass..Natives impressed by this..They serve wine at mass?!.. Free?!.....Might as well go for mass in the morning and then go to the tavern at night!.. No you can't, you need to be baptised first! Just needs water and a few prayers! Painless! A local tribe by the name of Warnakulasuriya, fishermen by trade and of the Karawe caste, are the first to join up. Take on the new name of FERNANDO...become violently Catholic...Others follow..Soon there are Pereras, de Silvas and de Almeidas.
The Portuguese build a fort at Colombo....Still known as Colombo Fort. They build more forts and churches at Kalutara and Galle. Portuguese now control the maritime areas...........to be continued....
**The Portuguese were rotten spellers! This was probably because they had no letter U then! For example: COLVMBO (Colombo or Cola Amba Tota), NEGVMBO ( Negombo or Meegomuwa), CALATVRE (Kalutara, my home town), PANATVRE (Panadure), Candea (Kandy or Kande Uda Rata)....
Serious note:
The date of the first visit of the Portuguese is correct as given above and Lorenzo (Dom Lourenço de Almeida) did get blown off course in the Indian Ocean. They were sailing in a fleet of eight caravels and were blown off course near the Maldive Islands by the monsoons.
They made first landfall at Galle but stopped only long enough to replenish stocks of water and food. They then sailed on to Colombo.
The RAJAVALIYA describes the visit thus:
"There is in our harbour of Colombo a race of people fair of skin and comely withal. They don jackets of iron and hats of iron; they rest not a minute in one place: they walk here and there: they eat hunks of stone and drink blood; they give two or three pieces of gold and silver for one fish or one lime; the report of their cannon is louder than thunder when it bursts upon the rock Yugandhara. Their cannon balls fly many a gawwa and shatter fortresses of granite"
PHOTO: Portuguese coat of arms from Colombo harbour. Now moved elsewhere and sadly out of bounds to the public...
The Visit To Kotte
The natives took three days to take the Portuguese to Kotte which was only 6 miles from Colombo. This is probably the first recorded instance of tourists being taken for a ride!
According to Codrington it is highly unlikely that the Portuguese were taken in by this trick. In a bright sunny place like Srilanka, close to the equator, it is easy to get bearings from the sun. However, the story has passed into the Sinhala forkelore and language in the form of the saying; "Parangiya Kotte giya wagé" (Translation:"Just like the Portuguese went to Kotte!" ) and is used to describe a situation where complicated methods are employed instead of the simple, straightforward method.
It is generally acknowledged that the Portuguese only wanted to establish trade. They offered protection for the Kotte king. The forts were built mostly to repel the Dutch, the French and the British who started to roam the waters very soon afterwards. Opinions however differ, as to the actual intentions of the Portuguese... Mrs R.Fernando (nee de Silva) always disagrees with my views!
The Coat Of Arms
The rock with the carved Portuguese coat-of-arms was discovered in 1875 near the south-west breakwater of the harbour during expansion of the harbour (ref: Brohier). It was left in-situ for a while in the Customs premises and later moved a few hundred yards to Gordon Gardens of the Queen's House. Up until the late seventies visitors were allowed to Gordon Gardens. The Queen's House became the President's House and as such has sadly been a restricted area for a number of years.
Fernandos of Srilanka
Approx 10 percent of the population of Srilanka are named Fernando. Most of the Fernandos are of the Karawe caste and were fisherfolk originally, although most are too proud to admit to that!.(Grandad Fernando had a fishing boat!) Some are from other castes (will explain later). A large proportion of the Fernandos were originally Warnakulasuriyas. Some of us still retain the name Warnakulasuriya in our birth certificates and other legal documents.... but Fernando is easier to spell!
The Portuguese Heritage
Baila:
To this day Srilankans sing Baila, a type of lighthearted song with a Spanish style rhythm, especially when drunk....
Monuments:
The oldest church in Srilanka was the church of St Lourenço which stood at the root of the modern south-west breakwater...
One of the oldest cemeteries from the Portuguese period is known by the locals as "Liveramenthuwa" and is at Madampitiya near Grandpass. The name is an obvious corruption of Nossa Senhora do Liveramento (Our Lady of Deliverance). A shrine to Our Lady originally stood on the site.
Kayman's Gate:
Public hangings took place near the Poorte Reina (Queen's Gate, later renamed Cayman's Gate). Cayman,s (or Kayman,s) gate is still identifiable, Caymans being a reference to the crocodiles which lived in the moat...
Language:
Another Sinhala word of obvious Portuguese origin is Mesa (table).
Older males of a previous generation were addressed as Singho ( Senhor)
Parangi Leday:
Yaws, a treponemal infection similar to syphilis is known as Parangi Leday in Sinhala ("Portuguese Disease") Ranji and myself saw the last few cases of this disease among the Veddahs (aborigines) of Mahiyangana...
REFERENCES:1.Codrington, H.W., A SHORT HISTORY OF CEYLON, 1947, Macmillan and Co.,London. 2.Brohier, R.L., CHANGING FACE OF COLOMBO, 1984, Lake House Printers and Publishers Ltd, Colombo.
The Waiter from Hell
By Gene Perret
Remember when eating out was a relaxing experience? Someone else cooked for you, served you and cleaned up after you. All you had to do was chew, swallow and pay. No longer, though. Today you feel like a laboratory rat who has to struggle through a maze every time it wants a chunk of cheese.
"Good evening," the maitre d' said. "Table for four?"
"Yes, thank you."
"Smoking or non?"
"Nonsmoking."
"Would you prefer to dine indoors or outdoors this evening?"
"I guess indoors would be good."
"Very well, sir," he said. "Would you like to be seated in the main dining room, the enclosed patio or our lovely solarium?"
"Uh, let me see...uh..."
"I can give you a table with a lovely view in our lovely solarium."
"I think the solarium would be lovely," l said. We followed him there.
"Now, would you prefer a view overlooking the golf course, the sunset on the lake or the majestic mountains to the west?"
"Whatever you recommend," I said. Let him make a decision for a change, I thought.
He sat us by a window facing the golf course, the lake or the mountains. I couldn't tell which because it was dark outside.
Then a young man better dressed and better looking than any of us presented himself at our table. "Good evening, my name is Paul, and I'll be your waiter this evening. Would you like a few minutes before I take your order?"
"No," I said. "I'm just a meat-and-potatoes guy, so I'll have the filet mignon and a baked potato."
"Soup or salad?"
"Salad."
"We have a mixed-green salad, hearts of palm or a very fine endive salad with baby shrimp."
"Just a mixed-green salad, okay?"
"Whatever you say, sir. Dressing?"
I didn't want to make another decision. "Whatever you've got will be fine."
"We have creamy Italian, blue cheese, vinaigrette, Thousand Island, honey Dijon, ranch…"
"Just bring me one. Surprise me."
"Creamy Italian is our house specialty. Would that be all right, sir?"
"Yeah." I was curt. I was done with civility.
"And your baked potato..."
I knew what was coming. "I just want the baked potato dry, you understand? I don't want anything on it."
"No butter? No sour cream?"
"No."
"No chives?"
"No! Don't you understand English?" I shouted. "I don't want anything on it. Just bring me a baked potato and a steak."
"Would you prefer the six-, eight or 12-ounce steak, sir?"
"Whatever."
"Would you like that rare, medium rare, medium, medium well or well done? Or, if you prefer, we can butterfly it for you."
"Pauly Boy," I said, "you are really starting to get me steamed."
"Which brings up the vegetables, sir. Would you like steamed broccoli, creamed corn, sautéed zucchini, diced carrots—"
That did it. I threw my napkin to the floor, stood up, put my face right in his arrogant kisser and said, "How'd you like to settle this outside?"
"Fine with me, sir. Would you prefer the parking lot, the side alley or the street in front of the restaurant?"
"I prefer right here," I said, and sucker-punched him.
He ducked, then countered with a left hook right under my eye. It was the first time all night he hadn't offered me a selection. I collapsed semiconscious into my chair, as someone in authority rushed over and berated Pauly.
I felt my tie being loosened, my collar unbuttoned, hands slapping my face. When I regained my senses, I saw the very concerned maitre d' right in front of my nose. He apologized and offered to buy me a drink, call the paramedics—whatever I wanted.
"No, no," I said. "I'll be all right. Just bring me a glass of water."
"Yes, sir, right away," he said. "Would you prefer imported mineral water, sparkling water or club soda with a wedge of lime?"
Remember when eating out was a relaxing experience? Someone else cooked for you, served you and cleaned up after you. All you had to do was chew, swallow and pay. No longer, though. Today you feel like a laboratory rat who has to struggle through a maze every time it wants a chunk of cheese.
"Good evening," the maitre d' said. "Table for four?"
"Yes, thank you."
"Smoking or non?"
"Nonsmoking."
"Would you prefer to dine indoors or outdoors this evening?"
"I guess indoors would be good."
"Very well, sir," he said. "Would you like to be seated in the main dining room, the enclosed patio or our lovely solarium?"
"Uh, let me see...uh..."
"I can give you a table with a lovely view in our lovely solarium."
"I think the solarium would be lovely," l said. We followed him there.
"Now, would you prefer a view overlooking the golf course, the sunset on the lake or the majestic mountains to the west?"
"Whatever you recommend," I said. Let him make a decision for a change, I thought.
He sat us by a window facing the golf course, the lake or the mountains. I couldn't tell which because it was dark outside.
Then a young man better dressed and better looking than any of us presented himself at our table. "Good evening, my name is Paul, and I'll be your waiter this evening. Would you like a few minutes before I take your order?"
"No," I said. "I'm just a meat-and-potatoes guy, so I'll have the filet mignon and a baked potato."
"Soup or salad?"
"Salad."
"We have a mixed-green salad, hearts of palm or a very fine endive salad with baby shrimp."
"Just a mixed-green salad, okay?"
"Whatever you say, sir. Dressing?"
I didn't want to make another decision. "Whatever you've got will be fine."
"We have creamy Italian, blue cheese, vinaigrette, Thousand Island, honey Dijon, ranch…"
"Just bring me one. Surprise me."
"Creamy Italian is our house specialty. Would that be all right, sir?"
"Yeah." I was curt. I was done with civility.
"And your baked potato..."
I knew what was coming. "I just want the baked potato dry, you understand? I don't want anything on it."
"No butter? No sour cream?"
"No."
"No chives?"
"No! Don't you understand English?" I shouted. "I don't want anything on it. Just bring me a baked potato and a steak."
"Would you prefer the six-, eight or 12-ounce steak, sir?"
"Whatever."
"Would you like that rare, medium rare, medium, medium well or well done? Or, if you prefer, we can butterfly it for you."
"Pauly Boy," I said, "you are really starting to get me steamed."
"Which brings up the vegetables, sir. Would you like steamed broccoli, creamed corn, sautéed zucchini, diced carrots—"
That did it. I threw my napkin to the floor, stood up, put my face right in his arrogant kisser and said, "How'd you like to settle this outside?"
"Fine with me, sir. Would you prefer the parking lot, the side alley or the street in front of the restaurant?"
"I prefer right here," I said, and sucker-punched him.
He ducked, then countered with a left hook right under my eye. It was the first time all night he hadn't offered me a selection. I collapsed semiconscious into my chair, as someone in authority rushed over and berated Pauly.
I felt my tie being loosened, my collar unbuttoned, hands slapping my face. When I regained my senses, I saw the very concerned maitre d' right in front of my nose. He apologized and offered to buy me a drink, call the paramedics—whatever I wanted.
"No, no," I said. "I'll be all right. Just bring me a glass of water."
"Yes, sir, right away," he said. "Would you prefer imported mineral water, sparkling water or club soda with a wedge of lime?"
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
The Structure of Tamil Names
By Sivapuranam Thevaram
My name is Sivapuranam Thevaram, and my origins are in the northern parts of Sri Lanka. I usually identify myself as a Sri Lankan Tamil, strictly in that order. And that order is not negotiable. Equally significant, and not for negotiation, is the order of the two identifiers in my name: Sivapuranam is the one given to my father at his birth, Thevaram is mine. My brothers are Sivapuranam Thiruvasakam and Sivapuranam Thirumanthiram. Again, Thiruvasakam and Thirumanthiram are tokens my dad looked up in the phone book. The full name of my dad is Thirukkural Sivapuranam. So the structure, sliding across generations is: One Two, Two Three, Three Four and so on.
This structure doesn’t match the convention of my friend John Smith: Smith is his family name and John, the given name. His brothers are Mark Smith and Peter Smith, dad is Andy Smith and grandfather was Adam Smith (no, not the same chap). Their structure is like a tree: A great grandpa Smith, followed by a hierarchy of junior Smiths.
Nancy, our research group secretary isn’t phonetically gifted. “You guys got it all so long”, she complains.
Where I come from, Sivapuranam Thevaram is called Mr Thevaram for formal purposes, and should he acquire titles, he becomes Dr Thevaram, Professor Thevaram etc. Informally, people close to him say “Hey Thevaram”.
My friend John Smith, who is Dr Smith for formal purposes, is “Hey John”, informally. “Hey Smith” and “Dr John”, are wrong. Should he gain membership of the second chamber of British governance, he becomes Lord Smith, but should Her Majesty be minded to honor him, he will be Sir John.
In the UK, I maintain the habit from home. People formally address me as “Mr. Thevaram”, and informally also call me “Hey Thevaram”. It takes a bit of training, but in my ivory tower circles, people learn fast. Vincent, our technician, once said to me: “well, in the lab people may learn to say Thevaram, but if you were in a factory, they will give you a Christian name everyone can pronounce”. That explains why several Sri Lankans I know, working in petrol stations, have on their name badges “Mark”, “Anthony” etc. Once I have met three guys, working eight-hour shifts, all using the same “Jonathan” name badge. “Who cares, just part of the uniform”, they explained, in an amazingly detached view of life.
My brother Sivapuranam Thiruvasakam took a different approach. He has declared Thiruvasakam as his family name and a truncated version of my dad’s name as his first name. His work colleagues have learnt to call him Siva, informally, and Dr Thiruvasakam, in a formal setting. It gets odd when he is in the company of a mixture of Sri Lankans and Europeans at parties: Europeans calling him “Hey Seeeva” and the Sri Lankans calling him “Hey Thiruvasakam”.
I myself have abandoned the convention for the next generation, naming my kids One Thevaram, Two Thevaram and Three Thevaram, using Thevaram as family name and One, Two and Three as first names. In a few hundred years, you will find a whole family-tree of Thevarams, with me at the root.
Despite going into extensive searches, and sometimes numerical calculations, to find these names and sticking to their structures, we are reluctant to use them. We use a lot of uncle, aunty, annai, nangi, master and sir as substitutes for names — the supposedly polite way. My mom would never call my dad: “Hey Sivapuranam”, saying “Appa”– meaning father — instead. That has changed a bit in my generation. My wife addresses me as “injErungo Appa”, “Hey Thevaram” or “chaniyan” with roughly equal probability and in decreasing order of expressed affection.
Thinking about all this started from a conversation with a retired Jaffna High Court judge, whose name I forget, and the former principal of St John’s College, Anantharajan (see, just one name), at the Jaffna YMCA, in 1976/77. Having won the village chess tournament, I got to chat to these eminent gentlemen after the prize giving. The judge narrated a story of a woman witness, asked to identify her husband:
“Who is your husband?”
“It is him”
“What is his name?”
“It is him”;
“Just tell us what his name is”
“It is him, you know him”;
“For the last time, I will jail you for contempt of court if you don’t tell us his name”
“It is him, my daughter’s dad, you educated people — you already know him”.
It was sweet of Anantharajan to include this schoolboy in their conversation, and to let him laugh with them. If you will permit me a distraction just to complete the story, this man Anantharajan was shot about nine years after that conversation at the YMCA. It wasn’t clear to me how killing this wonderful school principal was going to help Tamils achieve greater political space in Sri Lanka. Is it to you?
So I asked!
I was visiting an aunt’s place in London when a coupe of chaps turned up to collect money for their war effort back home. She gave them 25 pounds and they were about to leave with the contribution, when I casually dropped my question:
“Are you taking this money to kill more of the likes of Anantharajan?”
Faces turned red. Tempers raised high.
“Are you calling us murderers?”
“Your words, not mine”
“You don’t know much do you, about his CIA connections?”
“What makes you think Anantharajan was an agent of the CIA?”
“You don’t know, I say, it is this type of people through whom the CIA operates”.
My aunt was as shocked at this logic as I was, but kept her cool and said something to ease the tension and make them leave. Later, I ask her to explain why she was funding them. “I gave the [bleep]s 25 pounds”, she said, “Otherwise they will come back and harass me, or even threaten me; no big deal 25 pounds for me, look at my grocery bill”. It was 120 pounds.
(Some will say why bring up this story so many years since it happened. Perhaps it is all water under the bridge. Or perhaps how we face up to this might be the determinant of the future we build for the next generation of Sri Lankans. I do not know, and I leave it as an exercise to you readers.)
Let’s get back to the name structure. Though Thevaram wasn’t phonetically difficult, Nancy, even after much practice, continued to complain it was too long. Vincent continued to wish he could call me Bertram instead.
Being the only Sri Lankan member of the group, I survived a couple of years with Thevaram double acting as my first and last names, claiming it to be the Sri Lankan way and an aspect of my cultural heritage I shall stubbornly stick to. But it wasn’t to last long.
On the first day of term, Nancy comes running into our lab. She is almost breathless and looks terrified. “Guess what”, she exclaims, “We have another one from your country”. She takes a deep breath. “Oh my God, his is even much longer!”
Polgahawela Aarachchilage Junius Solomon Rathmana Thanthiriya Bandarawela has joined our laboratory.
“Its OK, we can just call him Pol”, I comfort Nancy.
My name is Sivapuranam Thevaram, and my origins are in the northern parts of Sri Lanka. I usually identify myself as a Sri Lankan Tamil, strictly in that order. And that order is not negotiable. Equally significant, and not for negotiation, is the order of the two identifiers in my name: Sivapuranam is the one given to my father at his birth, Thevaram is mine. My brothers are Sivapuranam Thiruvasakam and Sivapuranam Thirumanthiram. Again, Thiruvasakam and Thirumanthiram are tokens my dad looked up in the phone book. The full name of my dad is Thirukkural Sivapuranam. So the structure, sliding across generations is: One Two, Two Three, Three Four and so on.
This structure doesn’t match the convention of my friend John Smith: Smith is his family name and John, the given name. His brothers are Mark Smith and Peter Smith, dad is Andy Smith and grandfather was Adam Smith (no, not the same chap). Their structure is like a tree: A great grandpa Smith, followed by a hierarchy of junior Smiths.
Nancy, our research group secretary isn’t phonetically gifted. “You guys got it all so long”, she complains.
Where I come from, Sivapuranam Thevaram is called Mr Thevaram for formal purposes, and should he acquire titles, he becomes Dr Thevaram, Professor Thevaram etc. Informally, people close to him say “Hey Thevaram”.
My friend John Smith, who is Dr Smith for formal purposes, is “Hey John”, informally. “Hey Smith” and “Dr John”, are wrong. Should he gain membership of the second chamber of British governance, he becomes Lord Smith, but should Her Majesty be minded to honor him, he will be Sir John.
In the UK, I maintain the habit from home. People formally address me as “Mr. Thevaram”, and informally also call me “Hey Thevaram”. It takes a bit of training, but in my ivory tower circles, people learn fast. Vincent, our technician, once said to me: “well, in the lab people may learn to say Thevaram, but if you were in a factory, they will give you a Christian name everyone can pronounce”. That explains why several Sri Lankans I know, working in petrol stations, have on their name badges “Mark”, “Anthony” etc. Once I have met three guys, working eight-hour shifts, all using the same “Jonathan” name badge. “Who cares, just part of the uniform”, they explained, in an amazingly detached view of life.
My brother Sivapuranam Thiruvasakam took a different approach. He has declared Thiruvasakam as his family name and a truncated version of my dad’s name as his first name. His work colleagues have learnt to call him Siva, informally, and Dr Thiruvasakam, in a formal setting. It gets odd when he is in the company of a mixture of Sri Lankans and Europeans at parties: Europeans calling him “Hey Seeeva” and the Sri Lankans calling him “Hey Thiruvasakam”.
I myself have abandoned the convention for the next generation, naming my kids One Thevaram, Two Thevaram and Three Thevaram, using Thevaram as family name and One, Two and Three as first names. In a few hundred years, you will find a whole family-tree of Thevarams, with me at the root.
Despite going into extensive searches, and sometimes numerical calculations, to find these names and sticking to their structures, we are reluctant to use them. We use a lot of uncle, aunty, annai, nangi, master and sir as substitutes for names — the supposedly polite way. My mom would never call my dad: “Hey Sivapuranam”, saying “Appa”– meaning father — instead. That has changed a bit in my generation. My wife addresses me as “injErungo Appa”, “Hey Thevaram” or “chaniyan” with roughly equal probability and in decreasing order of expressed affection.
Thinking about all this started from a conversation with a retired Jaffna High Court judge, whose name I forget, and the former principal of St John’s College, Anantharajan (see, just one name), at the Jaffna YMCA, in 1976/77. Having won the village chess tournament, I got to chat to these eminent gentlemen after the prize giving. The judge narrated a story of a woman witness, asked to identify her husband:
“Who is your husband?”
“It is him”
“What is his name?”
“It is him”;
“Just tell us what his name is”
“It is him, you know him”;
“For the last time, I will jail you for contempt of court if you don’t tell us his name”
“It is him, my daughter’s dad, you educated people — you already know him”.
It was sweet of Anantharajan to include this schoolboy in their conversation, and to let him laugh with them. If you will permit me a distraction just to complete the story, this man Anantharajan was shot about nine years after that conversation at the YMCA. It wasn’t clear to me how killing this wonderful school principal was going to help Tamils achieve greater political space in Sri Lanka. Is it to you?
So I asked!
I was visiting an aunt’s place in London when a coupe of chaps turned up to collect money for their war effort back home. She gave them 25 pounds and they were about to leave with the contribution, when I casually dropped my question:
“Are you taking this money to kill more of the likes of Anantharajan?”
Faces turned red. Tempers raised high.
“Are you calling us murderers?”
“Your words, not mine”
“You don’t know much do you, about his CIA connections?”
“What makes you think Anantharajan was an agent of the CIA?”
“You don’t know, I say, it is this type of people through whom the CIA operates”.
My aunt was as shocked at this logic as I was, but kept her cool and said something to ease the tension and make them leave. Later, I ask her to explain why she was funding them. “I gave the [bleep]s 25 pounds”, she said, “Otherwise they will come back and harass me, or even threaten me; no big deal 25 pounds for me, look at my grocery bill”. It was 120 pounds.
(Some will say why bring up this story so many years since it happened. Perhaps it is all water under the bridge. Or perhaps how we face up to this might be the determinant of the future we build for the next generation of Sri Lankans. I do not know, and I leave it as an exercise to you readers.)
Let’s get back to the name structure. Though Thevaram wasn’t phonetically difficult, Nancy, even after much practice, continued to complain it was too long. Vincent continued to wish he could call me Bertram instead.
Being the only Sri Lankan member of the group, I survived a couple of years with Thevaram double acting as my first and last names, claiming it to be the Sri Lankan way and an aspect of my cultural heritage I shall stubbornly stick to. But it wasn’t to last long.
On the first day of term, Nancy comes running into our lab. She is almost breathless and looks terrified. “Guess what”, she exclaims, “We have another one from your country”. She takes a deep breath. “Oh my God, his is even much longer!”
Polgahawela Aarachchilage Junius Solomon Rathmana Thanthiriya Bandarawela has joined our laboratory.
“Its OK, we can just call him Pol”, I comfort Nancy.
Refugees deny sexual abuse
P.K.Balachandran
First Published : 24 Dec 2009 05:49:33 PM IST
Last Updated : 24 Dec 2009 10:48:25 PM IST
VAVUNIYA: Tamil war refugees residing in camps in Vavuniya categorically denied that Sri Lankan troops guarding the camps had raped or indulged in any other form of sexual abuse as alleged by a former inmate in an interview to The Observer newspaper of London.
“It’s a mischivous rumour,” Rasendran from Ponneryn, who had been living in the Kadirgamar camp for months, told visiting journalists on Wednesday.
“The troops never did anything of that sort.They don’t even come into the camp,” said Nityanandan from Kilinochchi.
Sharma, the priest of the makeshift Shiva temple, and himself a refugee, said that there was no truth in the allegations.
“We face no problems with the army,” he said.
The UK national, who managed to leave the camp, told The Observer that she had seen soliders putting their arms on girls, and charged that soldiers gave females food only if they agreed to have sex with them.
EX-LTTE FEMALE CADRE HAVE NO PROBLEM
At a rehabilitation centre for young male and female LTTE cadre, the inmates said that the behaviour of troops was “exemplary”.
“They treat us with courtesy and understanding,” said Tharshini from Puthukudiyiruppu , who was being trained in tailoring.
“It was after seeing their behaviour that I revealed that I had been in the LTTE for a few months, a fact which I had concealed in the first instance out of fear of the consequences,” the 17 year old said.
“Till recently, the camps were so congested that a thing like rape or molestation could not have occured here. We were all here in the camp all the time, because till December 1, no one could go out of the camp,” pointed out the middle aged T.Sarawathy from Kilinochchi.
A Tamil employee of the postal department in the rehabilitation camp for LTTE cadre said that the kids (all between 12 and 18) felt pretty safe in the camp
“This is more like a hostel than a refugee camp or detention centre,” he said.
Asked if the London Observer story had any basis, the Competent Authority for the refugees in the Northern Province, Maj.Gen.Kamal Gunaratne, said that had only one term to describe such an allegation: “Bullshit!”
“There are far too many people in the camps for that kind of thing to happen. Besides, the army is a disciplined force,” he said.
He asked the visiting journalists to talk to the refugees and find out for themselves if these stories were true. True enough, officials allowed the scribes to go anywhere in the camps and talk to anyone without any armyman looking over.
CAMPS IMPROVE
Most of the inmates said that conditions had improved enormously since they arrived in April or May. The medical facilities are excellent with more than a hundred doctors on call
“Except for the shortage of toilets and cash, we are fine, and are being treated well,” said Loheshwaran, a herdsman from Pooneryn.
“Those who had relatives abroad got money through the banks in the camp, but those who did not have anyone, had to live only on the limited rations given by the government and the NGOs,” he said explaining the reasons for the cash shortage
From December 1, the inmates had been allowed to move out and work. Some of them did begin to earn to bring in some cash. But being basically farmers or fishermen ,the refugees could do little to earn money except as manual labourers.
This is why they are really looking forward to going back to their villages.
EAGER TO GET BACK TO VILLAGES
“I am part of the 1000 people leaving for Pooneryn today. I am happy to get back and start from livelihood which is animal husbandry. I am looking forward to selling milk in Jaffna across the lagoon,” Loheswaran said.
The LTTE cadre in the rahabilitation camp, are also looking forward to leaving the camp and joining their families.
“We have been told we’ll be let off in May,” said Suganthie from Trincomalee who got forcibly recruited to the LTTE when she was visiting a relative in Puthukudiyiruppu.
Suganthie, who was taking lessons in dress making and the use of computers, said she her ultimate aim was to become a computer engineer.
FORCIBLE RECRUITMENT ALIENATED PEOPLE
Most of the LTTE cadre looked very young, between 12 and 17. They were extremely small made for their age but were intelligent and spoke well. Almost all said that they were forcibly taken and given some military training, though only some had actually served on the front lines.
Asked what they thought of the LTTE and their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, the female cadre were categorical in their disapproval of the organisation. They did not feel sad when the organisation folded up.
But the reaction among the male cadre was mixed. They would not say that the movement had no base. But all of them said that it should not have gone in for forcible military service.
“Forcible recruitment became unbearable during the last year of the war. That is when the LTTE began to lose popular support,” said a refugee who had earlier beein a government servant.
ENS
First Published : 24 Dec 2009 05:49:33 PM IST
Last Updated : 24 Dec 2009 10:48:25 PM IST
VAVUNIYA: Tamil war refugees residing in camps in Vavuniya categorically denied that Sri Lankan troops guarding the camps had raped or indulged in any other form of sexual abuse as alleged by a former inmate in an interview to The Observer newspaper of London.
“It’s a mischivous rumour,” Rasendran from Ponneryn, who had been living in the Kadirgamar camp for months, told visiting journalists on Wednesday.
“The troops never did anything of that sort.They don’t even come into the camp,” said Nityanandan from Kilinochchi.
Sharma, the priest of the makeshift Shiva temple, and himself a refugee, said that there was no truth in the allegations.
“We face no problems with the army,” he said.
The UK national, who managed to leave the camp, told The Observer that she had seen soliders putting their arms on girls, and charged that soldiers gave females food only if they agreed to have sex with them.
EX-LTTE FEMALE CADRE HAVE NO PROBLEM
At a rehabilitation centre for young male and female LTTE cadre, the inmates said that the behaviour of troops was “exemplary”.
“They treat us with courtesy and understanding,” said Tharshini from Puthukudiyiruppu , who was being trained in tailoring.
“It was after seeing their behaviour that I revealed that I had been in the LTTE for a few months, a fact which I had concealed in the first instance out of fear of the consequences,” the 17 year old said.
“Till recently, the camps were so congested that a thing like rape or molestation could not have occured here. We were all here in the camp all the time, because till December 1, no one could go out of the camp,” pointed out the middle aged T.Sarawathy from Kilinochchi.
A Tamil employee of the postal department in the rehabilitation camp for LTTE cadre said that the kids (all between 12 and 18) felt pretty safe in the camp
“This is more like a hostel than a refugee camp or detention centre,” he said.
Asked if the London Observer story had any basis, the Competent Authority for the refugees in the Northern Province, Maj.Gen.Kamal Gunaratne, said that had only one term to describe such an allegation: “Bullshit!”
“There are far too many people in the camps for that kind of thing to happen. Besides, the army is a disciplined force,” he said.
He asked the visiting journalists to talk to the refugees and find out for themselves if these stories were true. True enough, officials allowed the scribes to go anywhere in the camps and talk to anyone without any armyman looking over.
CAMPS IMPROVE
Most of the inmates said that conditions had improved enormously since they arrived in April or May. The medical facilities are excellent with more than a hundred doctors on call
“Except for the shortage of toilets and cash, we are fine, and are being treated well,” said Loheshwaran, a herdsman from Pooneryn.
“Those who had relatives abroad got money through the banks in the camp, but those who did not have anyone, had to live only on the limited rations given by the government and the NGOs,” he said explaining the reasons for the cash shortage
From December 1, the inmates had been allowed to move out and work. Some of them did begin to earn to bring in some cash. But being basically farmers or fishermen ,the refugees could do little to earn money except as manual labourers.
This is why they are really looking forward to going back to their villages.
EAGER TO GET BACK TO VILLAGES
“I am part of the 1000 people leaving for Pooneryn today. I am happy to get back and start from livelihood which is animal husbandry. I am looking forward to selling milk in Jaffna across the lagoon,” Loheswaran said.
The LTTE cadre in the rahabilitation camp, are also looking forward to leaving the camp and joining their families.
“We have been told we’ll be let off in May,” said Suganthie from Trincomalee who got forcibly recruited to the LTTE when she was visiting a relative in Puthukudiyiruppu.
Suganthie, who was taking lessons in dress making and the use of computers, said she her ultimate aim was to become a computer engineer.
FORCIBLE RECRUITMENT ALIENATED PEOPLE
Most of the LTTE cadre looked very young, between 12 and 17. They were extremely small made for their age but were intelligent and spoke well. Almost all said that they were forcibly taken and given some military training, though only some had actually served on the front lines.
Asked what they thought of the LTTE and their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, the female cadre were categorical in their disapproval of the organisation. They did not feel sad when the organisation folded up.
But the reaction among the male cadre was mixed. They would not say that the movement had no base. But all of them said that it should not have gone in for forcible military service.
“Forcible recruitment became unbearable during the last year of the war. That is when the LTTE began to lose popular support,” said a refugee who had earlier beein a government servant.
ENS
Sri Lanka - A Post Conflict Perspective
By Lionel Beehner
What Does It Look Like To Win a War on Terror?
In Sri Lanka, it's fewer suicide bombers, a real estate boom, and hundreds of thousands of Tamils still packed into overcrowded camps.
TRINCOMALEE, Sri Lanka—As I almost dozed off admiring the verdant landscape—a lush tableau of thick jungle and terraced paddy fields that calls to mind Raiders of the Lost Ark—a soldier rapped his knuckles against the car window and ordered us to pull over. After a quick search, we were back on our way. Three or four military checkpoints later, we arrived at the port city of Trincomalee. Buddha statues and bell-shaped stupas gave way to gas stations displaying the visages of Vishnu and Jesus.
I traveled to this predominantly Tamil pocket of Sri Lanka out of curiosity: I wanted to see what victory in a war on terror looked like. After all, that is what the government claims to have accomplished in May. In fact, President Mahinda Rajapaksa is so confident of victory that he has already turned his attention to wiping out drugs, alcohol, and tobacco, just as he did the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
It was an elusive peace. Like other fronts in the war on terror—Iraq and Afghanistan come to mind—the war had been declared unwinnable. Numerous cease-fires and dialogue attempts failed. Even Mother Nature proved incapable of pacifying the island. The brief truce after the December 2004 tsunami never quite stuck. No, it took a major offensive that pinned down the LTTE's top leadership before finally wiping them out, an attack that reached a crescendo in May 2009 and also reportedly killed hundreds if not thousands of civilians in the process.
Sri Lanka may have been just one front against terrorism—a conflict driven more by ethnic nationalism than religious extremism—yet it represents a microcosm of the broader war on terror. A heavily armed transnational actor with a vast network of financial resources abroad, a willingness to attack civilian populations, Training camps to turn impressionable children into suicide bombers and a charismatic, elusive leader at the top.
There was no one cause of the war. After its independence in 1948, the Sinhalese majority resented that the British colonialists had given minority Tamils, most of them scattered across the north, preferential treatment and higher-paying jobs. That bred ethnic nationalism and discriminatory practices, which fed into Tamil desires for self-rule. It also fueled the Tamil Tigers' early 1980s campaign of terror against Sinhalese civilians and government outposts, with suicide bombings their signature trademark. All told, the 26-year war left more than 60,000 dead on both sides and many more displaced.
Back in Trinco, I saw no "Mission Accomplished" banners. The closest thing was a motivational slogan outside a Dutch fort that read: "When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going." Such a chirpy message might seem odd in a former war zone, but locals here are eager to put the war behind them and "get going," as it were.
Outside a downtown clock tower shaped like a lighthouse, men in colorful sarongs and sandals flashed toothy grins. A dog missing one eye limped past. Flies swarmed over a basket of fish. "Trinco is famous for its flies," said the fish seller, smiling.
A bombed out building in downtown Colombo is under reconstructionTrinco is also famous for its natural harbor, one of the world's largest. Where ships used to ferry in arms to the Tigers, wooden fishing vessels now bob along its tranquil waters. One of the island's best-kept secrets, a narrow stretch of golden sand called Nilaveli Beach, can be found just north of here. A few guesthouses are popping up along its virgin coastline. "With the war over, Tamils are coming back and going into real estate," A.S. Jayawardena, a former governor of Sri Lanka's central bank, told me.
But the Eastern Province, of which Trinco is the capital, has a long way to go before developers, much less tourists, flock here. It is a bumpy checkpoint-filled eight-hour journey from Colombo, the capital. Even today, parts of the Eastern and Northern Provinces are still no-go zones for the media, human rights groups, and other outside monitors. There are no mass graves or memorials near Trinco, at least none that I could see. (Many Tamils, I'm told, bury their dead in their gardens, while the graveyards of most of the "martyrs" are in the Northern Province.) Upward of 200,000 Tamils remain corralled in overcrowded camps—sorry, "welfare villages"—north of here, a situation that is bound to get worse as monsoon season approaches and the risk of flooding rises. While Tamils appreciate that they can now relax on buses and trains and need no longer worry about suicide bombers, parts of the island remain in perpetual military lockdown mode.
"That is where the LTTE lived," my soft-spoken driver, Sarath De Alwis, said, pointing to a thick patch of jungle in the distance. Sarath is a Christian Tamil—his cell phone display reads, "God Bless All"—who listens to nothing but American country music. The green brush along the road was cleared for several hundred feet to prevent Tamil Tigers from ambushing government convoys. There are bored-looking teenage soldiers clutching AK-47s every few hundred yards. Sarath tells me the Sri Lankan military never much cared for Westerners, because they suspected the outsiders were funneling aid to the LTTE.
We stopped for lunch at a "Chinese" restaurant, a converted garage with faded pink walls and a peculiar odor. It took little prodding to get the restaurant's owner, a local Tamil, to launch into a tirade against the Tiger leadership.
"In the beginning, we had a lot of faith," he said, pulling up a seat. "They would come and shout slogans in the street. The soldiers were so small, their rifle butts were touching the ground." The owner blamed the LTTE for ruining his restaurant business. He opened three places with his brothers. Now he runs just one but barely stays afloat. Violence scared off customers. Like any respectable mafia, the LTTE skimmed 10 percent of his profits for protection. "It was a big business," he said. "If there's peace, there's no money to be made."
Then there were the victims. In India's Chennai Airport, I met Grace, an ethnic Tamil who sought asylum in the United States in the mid-1980s after hunkering under a tree and watching Sinhalese soldiers burn down her house. Another Tamil who fled to Canada told me that both his parents lost their limbs after a landmine exploded. Most people here just want their jobs back, their livelihoods back, their lost loved ones back. The Sinhalese majority may find it difficult to win back Tamil hearts and minds. The war is over, but the root causes—ethnic discrimination, economic and political marginalization—remain (not to mention that a rich and vocal Tamil diaspora, embittered by the government's handling of the war, still lobbies from abroad for Tamil rights; Britain-born Tamil singer M.I.A. is perhaps its most well-known member).
Yet Colombo has balked at outside pressure from the European Union, United Nations, and U.S. State Department to release its internally displaced Tamils or launch an inquiry into alleged war crimes. It claims the war-torn areas are still danger zones pocked with landmines and that the military needs to first weed out former Tigers in the camps. When the authorities recently released a few thousand Tamils, the gesture came off as insincere, a PR move to blunt outside criticism that it was not moving fast enough to rehabilitate the displaced.
Sri Lanka may be a victim of its own success. That is to say, outside the north, despite military checkpoints and hagiographic billboards showing the president ("I am no king but guardian of the people!"), life appears deceptively normal. Beaches along the southern coast fill up each day with surfers and fishermen on stilts. Buses stuffed with Europeans flock to the hill country to gawk at tea planters and leaning Buddha statues. You can now buy Cialis in Sri Lanka's main airport. A recent front-page headline in Sri Lanka's Daily Mirror read, "Lindsay Back With Sam." Perhaps the biggest headache for most Sinhalese was a recent petrol strike. Such are the banalities of peace.
The European Union has threatened to suspend an important trade concession unless the government investigates its conduct of the war and resettles more displaced Tamils. That would hit Sri Lanka's garment industry, which employs roughly 270,000 workers, especially hard, since Europe buys more than half of the apparel made on the island. The Sri Lankan government complains that the allegations of human rights violations and war crimes are based on second-hand sources and come from British newspapers with an ax to grind (because their journalists were booted out of the country). They also say such criticism smacks of neocolonialism and hypocrisy, given the amount of civilian carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Still, five years after the tsunami and five months after the war came to an end, Sri Lanka looks poised to put this ugly chapter behind it. As Preshan Dissanayake, a hotelier who owns properties down south, told me: "Come back in two or three years. It will be a totally different country."
What Does It Look Like To Win a War on Terror?
In Sri Lanka, it's fewer suicide bombers, a real estate boom, and hundreds of thousands of Tamils still packed into overcrowded camps.
TRINCOMALEE, Sri Lanka—As I almost dozed off admiring the verdant landscape—a lush tableau of thick jungle and terraced paddy fields that calls to mind Raiders of the Lost Ark—a soldier rapped his knuckles against the car window and ordered us to pull over. After a quick search, we were back on our way. Three or four military checkpoints later, we arrived at the port city of Trincomalee. Buddha statues and bell-shaped stupas gave way to gas stations displaying the visages of Vishnu and Jesus.
I traveled to this predominantly Tamil pocket of Sri Lanka out of curiosity: I wanted to see what victory in a war on terror looked like. After all, that is what the government claims to have accomplished in May. In fact, President Mahinda Rajapaksa is so confident of victory that he has already turned his attention to wiping out drugs, alcohol, and tobacco, just as he did the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
It was an elusive peace. Like other fronts in the war on terror—Iraq and Afghanistan come to mind—the war had been declared unwinnable. Numerous cease-fires and dialogue attempts failed. Even Mother Nature proved incapable of pacifying the island. The brief truce after the December 2004 tsunami never quite stuck. No, it took a major offensive that pinned down the LTTE's top leadership before finally wiping them out, an attack that reached a crescendo in May 2009 and also reportedly killed hundreds if not thousands of civilians in the process.
Sri Lanka may have been just one front against terrorism—a conflict driven more by ethnic nationalism than religious extremism—yet it represents a microcosm of the broader war on terror. A heavily armed transnational actor with a vast network of financial resources abroad, a willingness to attack civilian populations, Training camps to turn impressionable children into suicide bombers and a charismatic, elusive leader at the top.
There was no one cause of the war. After its independence in 1948, the Sinhalese majority resented that the British colonialists had given minority Tamils, most of them scattered across the north, preferential treatment and higher-paying jobs. That bred ethnic nationalism and discriminatory practices, which fed into Tamil desires for self-rule. It also fueled the Tamil Tigers' early 1980s campaign of terror against Sinhalese civilians and government outposts, with suicide bombings their signature trademark. All told, the 26-year war left more than 60,000 dead on both sides and many more displaced.
Back in Trinco, I saw no "Mission Accomplished" banners. The closest thing was a motivational slogan outside a Dutch fort that read: "When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going." Such a chirpy message might seem odd in a former war zone, but locals here are eager to put the war behind them and "get going," as it were.
Outside a downtown clock tower shaped like a lighthouse, men in colorful sarongs and sandals flashed toothy grins. A dog missing one eye limped past. Flies swarmed over a basket of fish. "Trinco is famous for its flies," said the fish seller, smiling.
A bombed out building in downtown Colombo is under reconstructionTrinco is also famous for its natural harbor, one of the world's largest. Where ships used to ferry in arms to the Tigers, wooden fishing vessels now bob along its tranquil waters. One of the island's best-kept secrets, a narrow stretch of golden sand called Nilaveli Beach, can be found just north of here. A few guesthouses are popping up along its virgin coastline. "With the war over, Tamils are coming back and going into real estate," A.S. Jayawardena, a former governor of Sri Lanka's central bank, told me.
But the Eastern Province, of which Trinco is the capital, has a long way to go before developers, much less tourists, flock here. It is a bumpy checkpoint-filled eight-hour journey from Colombo, the capital. Even today, parts of the Eastern and Northern Provinces are still no-go zones for the media, human rights groups, and other outside monitors. There are no mass graves or memorials near Trinco, at least none that I could see. (Many Tamils, I'm told, bury their dead in their gardens, while the graveyards of most of the "martyrs" are in the Northern Province.) Upward of 200,000 Tamils remain corralled in overcrowded camps—sorry, "welfare villages"—north of here, a situation that is bound to get worse as monsoon season approaches and the risk of flooding rises. While Tamils appreciate that they can now relax on buses and trains and need no longer worry about suicide bombers, parts of the island remain in perpetual military lockdown mode.
"That is where the LTTE lived," my soft-spoken driver, Sarath De Alwis, said, pointing to a thick patch of jungle in the distance. Sarath is a Christian Tamil—his cell phone display reads, "God Bless All"—who listens to nothing but American country music. The green brush along the road was cleared for several hundred feet to prevent Tamil Tigers from ambushing government convoys. There are bored-looking teenage soldiers clutching AK-47s every few hundred yards. Sarath tells me the Sri Lankan military never much cared for Westerners, because they suspected the outsiders were funneling aid to the LTTE.
We stopped for lunch at a "Chinese" restaurant, a converted garage with faded pink walls and a peculiar odor. It took little prodding to get the restaurant's owner, a local Tamil, to launch into a tirade against the Tiger leadership.
"In the beginning, we had a lot of faith," he said, pulling up a seat. "They would come and shout slogans in the street. The soldiers were so small, their rifle butts were touching the ground." The owner blamed the LTTE for ruining his restaurant business. He opened three places with his brothers. Now he runs just one but barely stays afloat. Violence scared off customers. Like any respectable mafia, the LTTE skimmed 10 percent of his profits for protection. "It was a big business," he said. "If there's peace, there's no money to be made."
Then there were the victims. In India's Chennai Airport, I met Grace, an ethnic Tamil who sought asylum in the United States in the mid-1980s after hunkering under a tree and watching Sinhalese soldiers burn down her house. Another Tamil who fled to Canada told me that both his parents lost their limbs after a landmine exploded. Most people here just want their jobs back, their livelihoods back, their lost loved ones back. The Sinhalese majority may find it difficult to win back Tamil hearts and minds. The war is over, but the root causes—ethnic discrimination, economic and political marginalization—remain (not to mention that a rich and vocal Tamil diaspora, embittered by the government's handling of the war, still lobbies from abroad for Tamil rights; Britain-born Tamil singer M.I.A. is perhaps its most well-known member).
Yet Colombo has balked at outside pressure from the European Union, United Nations, and U.S. State Department to release its internally displaced Tamils or launch an inquiry into alleged war crimes. It claims the war-torn areas are still danger zones pocked with landmines and that the military needs to first weed out former Tigers in the camps. When the authorities recently released a few thousand Tamils, the gesture came off as insincere, a PR move to blunt outside criticism that it was not moving fast enough to rehabilitate the displaced.
Sri Lanka may be a victim of its own success. That is to say, outside the north, despite military checkpoints and hagiographic billboards showing the president ("I am no king but guardian of the people!"), life appears deceptively normal. Beaches along the southern coast fill up each day with surfers and fishermen on stilts. Buses stuffed with Europeans flock to the hill country to gawk at tea planters and leaning Buddha statues. You can now buy Cialis in Sri Lanka's main airport. A recent front-page headline in Sri Lanka's Daily Mirror read, "Lindsay Back With Sam." Perhaps the biggest headache for most Sinhalese was a recent petrol strike. Such are the banalities of peace.
The European Union has threatened to suspend an important trade concession unless the government investigates its conduct of the war and resettles more displaced Tamils. That would hit Sri Lanka's garment industry, which employs roughly 270,000 workers, especially hard, since Europe buys more than half of the apparel made on the island. The Sri Lankan government complains that the allegations of human rights violations and war crimes are based on second-hand sources and come from British newspapers with an ax to grind (because their journalists were booted out of the country). They also say such criticism smacks of neocolonialism and hypocrisy, given the amount of civilian carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Still, five years after the tsunami and five months after the war came to an end, Sri Lanka looks poised to put this ugly chapter behind it. As Preshan Dissanayake, a hotelier who owns properties down south, told me: "Come back in two or three years. It will be a totally different country."
A peace dividend Sri Lanka cannot squander
By David Pilling
Published: November 25 2009 20:44 Last updated: November 25 2009 20:44
M. Chandrapala may not be your typical Sinhalese Sri Lankan. Dressed in an ankle-length lungi and standing outside his modest home in Trincomalee, on the east coast of this beautiful but tragic island, he tells me that Tamil citizens must be given political rights if the fragile peace reached this year is to hold. A former justice of the peace turned organic farmer, Mr Chandrapala is also an advocate of mixed schooling, which he says is essential to foster understanding between Sinhalese and Tamil communities cleaved by language, culture and religion. “Children should quarrel in school and learn how to get on,” he says. “If we don’t solve these problems, the war will come again.”
In May, the Sri Lankan army under General Sarath Fonseca ended 26 years of brutal civil conflict with the military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The war had cost more than 70,000 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. It had also spawned one of the most ruthless secessionist groups in the world, prepared to terrorise its own people as well as the Buddhist majority. The finality of the government’s victory was underlined when grisly footage of the moustachioed corpse of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tigers’ founder, was paraded on television. Even Tamils with little sympathy for the bloodthirsty organisation that had fought in their name could not help feeling that an era had passed.
That victory came at the cost of huge civilian casualties and human rights abuses. Nevertheless, it has kindled optimism about the island’s prospects. Everywhere, there are signs of a cautious return to normality. Ubiquitous military checkpoints are being dismantled. The government soon intends to open the A9 north-south highway to civilian traffic, a symbol of reunification to rival the fall of the Berlin Wall. HSBC even plans by January to open a branch in Jaffna, the northern peninsula that became synonymous with violent conflict.
Investors are (over)excitedly talking about Sri Lanka as the next Singapore. While that is far-fetched, the island does have economic potential. The tourist industry, for one, could reap a big peace dividend. Beyond its other mainstays of tea and textiles, Sri Lanka has deep reserves of human capital. Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire founder of hedge fund Galleon, who was last month arrested in New York on suspicion of insider trading, may not be the ideal poster-boy for Sri Lanka. Yet he is an extreme example of the success Sri Lanka’s talented diaspora has achieved in finance, industry and the professions. After a quarter century of senseless bloodshed, which frightened off tourists and investors alike, Sri Lanka boasts a nominal gross domestic product of some $2,000 per head, about twice that of India. Think what it could achieve if it had sustainable peace.
That is the ten-thousand lakh question. Can Sri Lanka build lasting stability on the back of what has been a purely military triumph? The danger is that the government of Mahinda Rajapaksa – whose brothers adorn the cabinet like Christmas tree ornaments – will take power for granted after its crushing victory and embrace a crude Sinhalese chauvinism. That would risk stirring renewed conflict from the smouldering embers of peace.
To prevent that, at least three things need to happen. First, the 140,000 people still in camps need to be swiftly and justly resettled. Here, Mr Rajapaksa’s government is moving in the right direction. It has promised to allow complete freedom of movement by December 1 and says it will give non-governmental organisations, hitherto held in suspicion because of their supposed sympathy for the Tamil cause, greater access to displaced people. The authorities must also move quickly to rebuild destroyed infrastructure so that victims of the war are not left to rot without homes, schools and utilities.
Second, Sri Lanka needs a political settlement. Jehan Perera, director of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka, says the government is allergic to the term federalism. But whatever it is called – the preferred nomenclature is devolution – Tamils must feel that they have a political say. The seeming finality of the government’s victory must not become an excuse to crush Tamil hopes of greater political and civil participation.
The third task is the most difficult of all. As Mr Chandrapala says, the degree to which communities are segregated in an island of only 20m people is shocking. In four schools I visited this month – two Sinhalese, one Tamil and one Muslim – there was not a single child enrolled from an outside community. The government should draw up plans for an integrated, multilingual education system as a priority.
Until a few weeks ago, the prospect of such reconciliatory moves was low indeed. Mr Rajapaksa was preparing to ride his triumph to six more years in office. That certainty has now faded with the likelihood that Gen Fonseca, credited with masterminding victory over the Tigers, will run as an opposition candidate. If there is a contest, neither contender will be able to rely entirely on the Sinhalese nationalist vote. That is a development wholly to be welcomed.
david.pilling@ft.com
Published: November 25 2009 20:44 Last updated: November 25 2009 20:44
M. Chandrapala may not be your typical Sinhalese Sri Lankan. Dressed in an ankle-length lungi and standing outside his modest home in Trincomalee, on the east coast of this beautiful but tragic island, he tells me that Tamil citizens must be given political rights if the fragile peace reached this year is to hold. A former justice of the peace turned organic farmer, Mr Chandrapala is also an advocate of mixed schooling, which he says is essential to foster understanding between Sinhalese and Tamil communities cleaved by language, culture and religion. “Children should quarrel in school and learn how to get on,” he says. “If we don’t solve these problems, the war will come again.”
In May, the Sri Lankan army under General Sarath Fonseca ended 26 years of brutal civil conflict with the military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The war had cost more than 70,000 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. It had also spawned one of the most ruthless secessionist groups in the world, prepared to terrorise its own people as well as the Buddhist majority. The finality of the government’s victory was underlined when grisly footage of the moustachioed corpse of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tigers’ founder, was paraded on television. Even Tamils with little sympathy for the bloodthirsty organisation that had fought in their name could not help feeling that an era had passed.
That victory came at the cost of huge civilian casualties and human rights abuses. Nevertheless, it has kindled optimism about the island’s prospects. Everywhere, there are signs of a cautious return to normality. Ubiquitous military checkpoints are being dismantled. The government soon intends to open the A9 north-south highway to civilian traffic, a symbol of reunification to rival the fall of the Berlin Wall. HSBC even plans by January to open a branch in Jaffna, the northern peninsula that became synonymous with violent conflict.
Investors are (over)excitedly talking about Sri Lanka as the next Singapore. While that is far-fetched, the island does have economic potential. The tourist industry, for one, could reap a big peace dividend. Beyond its other mainstays of tea and textiles, Sri Lanka has deep reserves of human capital. Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire founder of hedge fund Galleon, who was last month arrested in New York on suspicion of insider trading, may not be the ideal poster-boy for Sri Lanka. Yet he is an extreme example of the success Sri Lanka’s talented diaspora has achieved in finance, industry and the professions. After a quarter century of senseless bloodshed, which frightened off tourists and investors alike, Sri Lanka boasts a nominal gross domestic product of some $2,000 per head, about twice that of India. Think what it could achieve if it had sustainable peace.
That is the ten-thousand lakh question. Can Sri Lanka build lasting stability on the back of what has been a purely military triumph? The danger is that the government of Mahinda Rajapaksa – whose brothers adorn the cabinet like Christmas tree ornaments – will take power for granted after its crushing victory and embrace a crude Sinhalese chauvinism. That would risk stirring renewed conflict from the smouldering embers of peace.
To prevent that, at least three things need to happen. First, the 140,000 people still in camps need to be swiftly and justly resettled. Here, Mr Rajapaksa’s government is moving in the right direction. It has promised to allow complete freedom of movement by December 1 and says it will give non-governmental organisations, hitherto held in suspicion because of their supposed sympathy for the Tamil cause, greater access to displaced people. The authorities must also move quickly to rebuild destroyed infrastructure so that victims of the war are not left to rot without homes, schools and utilities.
Second, Sri Lanka needs a political settlement. Jehan Perera, director of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka, says the government is allergic to the term federalism. But whatever it is called – the preferred nomenclature is devolution – Tamils must feel that they have a political say. The seeming finality of the government’s victory must not become an excuse to crush Tamil hopes of greater political and civil participation.
The third task is the most difficult of all. As Mr Chandrapala says, the degree to which communities are segregated in an island of only 20m people is shocking. In four schools I visited this month – two Sinhalese, one Tamil and one Muslim – there was not a single child enrolled from an outside community. The government should draw up plans for an integrated, multilingual education system as a priority.
Until a few weeks ago, the prospect of such reconciliatory moves was low indeed. Mr Rajapaksa was preparing to ride his triumph to six more years in office. That certainty has now faded with the likelihood that Gen Fonseca, credited with masterminding victory over the Tigers, will run as an opposition candidate. If there is a contest, neither contender will be able to rely entirely on the Sinhalese nationalist vote. That is a development wholly to be welcomed.
david.pilling@ft.com
War's end lures tourists back to Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka's bitter 25-year civil war has come to an end, and tourists can safely return to this island off India to enjoy its beauty, history, diversity and friendly people
By FRED BRUEMMER, Freelance
Photograph
A man uses his mobile phone to take a photo of a wild elephant that broke onto a farmer's propert, near Arugam Bay, 220 km (137 miles) east of Colombo.
"Serendip," is how Arab traders called Sri Lanka ages ago, the "Island of Gems." From this our word "serendipity" is derived, the gift of finding unexpected but beautiful things. This often happened to us on Sri Lanka, for it was once aptly named "The Island of the Blessed," the earthly paradise given to Adam and Eve after they were turfed out of Eden because of that unfortunate affair with the apple.
"Paradise" seems ironic when talking about a country reft by a bitter 25-year civil war, now finally over, that consumed much of the island's wealth and crippled its once flourishing tourism industry.
But the war, in its final days when we were there, really didn't touch us. We simply followed local advice and avoided the danger zones of the northeast. That left us about 90 per cent of this beautiful and diverse island, known until 1972 as Ceylon, "the pearl near the southern tip of India."
As a result, our first and lasting impression during a two-month trip to this magic island was its friendly population. We usually stayed in nice but modest (and modestly priced) guesthouses in villages and near towns. When we walked through a village in the velvety warmth of a tropical evening, nearly everyone greeted us with a friendly "hello." The kids practiced their school English: "How are you?" they would ask. "Where you from?" "From Canada." "Oh." they would laugh. "Very good. VERY BIG!" They would wave and smile. "Bye-bye," they would call. "Be happy!"
Sri Lanka, smaller than New Brunswick, is crammed with history and beauty. Where else on earth can you find a place like the 2,243-metre-high Adam's Peak: that, say ancient tales, is where Adam arrived (together with Eve); Buddha stood on its summit and left his footprint, Sri Pada, as he ascended to heaven; Mohammed stopped briefly; and, before him, the peak was visited by St. Thomas, one of Christ's disciples, by the Lord Shiva and, some say, by King Solomon. It is sacred to Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and Muslims, and during the annual pilgrimage season, from the "poja" (the full-moon day) in December to the poja of May, tens of thousands of pilgrims of many faiths help each other as they ascend (usually at night) the 5,200 steep steps and pray together at sunrise atop the magic mountain.
We start our trip in Colombo, the busy, sprawling commercial capital of Sri Lanka, a fascinating amalgam of East and West, of modern department stores and teeming oriental bazaars where you can buy anything from the gorgeous gems that made Sri Lanka famous (the world's largest rubies and sapphires came from this island, including the 400-carat sapphire in the British crown) to Ayurvedic, or traditional, medicines that reputedly restore health and rejuvenate the body. Language is never a problem. Apart from Sinhala and Tamil, English is the lingua franca of the country.
From Colombo, we travel in the teak-panelled "observation car" of a charming, bouncy train high into the country's central mountain region that was once the Kingdom of Kandy with cities of stunning splendour and some of the world's first hospitals. Deposed by British troops in 1815, the king of Kandy was Sri Lanka's last royal ruler.
Being home to so many different religions, Sri Lanka has a plethora of holy days and holidays, more holidays, they happily claim, than any other country in the world. The greatest festival, the Esala Perahera, with probably the most sumptuous procession in all of Asia, is held annually during the time of the full moon in July/August in Kandy.
Thousands of drummers, torch-bearers and the flamboyantly dressed Kandyan dancers escort a great procession of more than 50 gorgeously caparisoned elephants through Kandy. The largest, most venerated elephant carries, beneath a jewel-studded baldachin, a golden replica of the sacred tooth snatched from Lord Buddha as his body was being cremated in 483 B.C. and smuggled to Sri Lanka 794 years later.
Most Sri Lankans love their elephants. Long ago, they worshipped them: elephant statues and effigies ornament many temples and memorials to Buddha. About 4,000 wild elephants still live in Sri Lanka, about half of them in the country's superb national parks, the rest in the extensive jungle regions of the island.
To protect villages and fields from marauding elephants, farmers encircle the villages with deep ditches. Occasionally baby elephants slip in, get mired and are abandoned by their herd. These hapless mud-smeared waifs are brought to one of Sri Lanka's two elephant orphanages.
One orphanage is at Pinnewala, an hour's drive from Kandy. Every morning at 10, the elephants young and old (83 during our visit) march from their spacious sanctuary down a village street to the river for their morning bath. Restaurants and cafés line the shore. You can have lunch or enjoy a cold beer and watch as the elephants spray themselves or are being scrubbed by their mahouts. (For a little tip, you, too, can wash an elephant!)
At noon, the elephants return to their enclosure for a hearty lunch: 100 kilograms of grass and leaves for every adult, washed down with a hundred litres of water.
The Pinnewala animals have nearly everything that elephants desire: lots of food and water, daily baths, good company, and sex every three years. But they lack freedom. That's perhaps why we preferred a second, less well-known orphanage, the Elephant Transit Home near the great Uda Walawe National Park. Only baby elephants are kept there (36 at the time of our visit). Once they're weaned at the age of 3 or 4, they are released and join the 450 wild elephants in the national park.
There are several feedings (each elephant calf gets 40 litres of milk a day). You can watch it from a nearby platform. It is funny and charming: a baby elephant filling station. They rush up on urgent little pillar legs, shrieking shrilly in anticipation, and as milk is poured into them through a funnel their eyes roll up in ecstasy.
In Kandy, we hire a car and driver. Wise tourists in Sri Lanka travel with car and driver from guesthouse to guesthouse or hotel - it's the nicest way to go.
Ours is a friendly young man, Prabat, driver, guide, problem-solver and, finally, friend. He shows us the extensive ruins of what were once among the most beautiful cities on earth, the ancient royal capitals of Sri Lanka: Anuradhapura (founded in 380 B.C.) and its successor, Polonnaruwa; the 1,500-year-old mountain fortress of Sigiriya (the Lion Rock) built as a refuge by a parricide king atop a sheer-faced, 200-metre-high granite crag; and the ancient, brilliantly painted and superbly preserved cave-temples of Dambulla, all four UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
In a niche half-way up Sigiriya Rock, we admire the frescoes of voluptuous wasp-waisted, big-bosomed women (goddesses, say some experts; concubines say others), ancient but marvelously vivid, and see, nearby, traces of graffiti incised by ardent admirers 1,500 years ago. For example, "Women like you make my body tremble with desire."
After days immersed in history, we travel south into another of Sri Lanka's many disparate regions: the highlands where the island's famous tea is grown, and its "tea capital," Nuwara Eliya. Here are the great tea plantations founded by the British. It was at this pleasant hill station that colonial civil servants played golf, watched horse races, went for walks in the lovely Victoria Park, and dined on roast beef at their exclusive clubs. They have gone, but their spirit lingers, including the cool climate and frequent drizzle.
That's just what tea loves, and the highland hills are covered with tea bushes, neatly trimmed and sculpted. Tamil women, many in colourful saris, dot the emerald-green hills, each one plucking 16 kilograms of newly sprouted tea leaves a day. We roam the verdant hills all day and dine at night in the lovingly preserved ambience of a colonial era dining room, served by white-gloved waiters.
We end our trip on Sri Lanka's southern coast, the fun-in-the-sun playground of the island, with postcard-pretty palm-girt crescents of sand washed by the warmish waters of the Indian Ocean. It's fairly close to every chilled Canadian's dream vision of "tropical beaches." The southeast coast has surfer-sea. "The waves are great!" a group of happy young Australians tells us.
We opt for the more sedate waters of Unawatuna, protected by a distant reef, ideal for long leisurely swims in a gentle sea. At night, we dine by candlelight on a terrace near the sea, and we are charmed by this island that charmed so many.
By FRED BRUEMMER, Freelance
Photograph
A man uses his mobile phone to take a photo of a wild elephant that broke onto a farmer's propert, near Arugam Bay, 220 km (137 miles) east of Colombo.
"Serendip," is how Arab traders called Sri Lanka ages ago, the "Island of Gems." From this our word "serendipity" is derived, the gift of finding unexpected but beautiful things. This often happened to us on Sri Lanka, for it was once aptly named "The Island of the Blessed," the earthly paradise given to Adam and Eve after they were turfed out of Eden because of that unfortunate affair with the apple.
"Paradise" seems ironic when talking about a country reft by a bitter 25-year civil war, now finally over, that consumed much of the island's wealth and crippled its once flourishing tourism industry.
But the war, in its final days when we were there, really didn't touch us. We simply followed local advice and avoided the danger zones of the northeast. That left us about 90 per cent of this beautiful and diverse island, known until 1972 as Ceylon, "the pearl near the southern tip of India."
As a result, our first and lasting impression during a two-month trip to this magic island was its friendly population. We usually stayed in nice but modest (and modestly priced) guesthouses in villages and near towns. When we walked through a village in the velvety warmth of a tropical evening, nearly everyone greeted us with a friendly "hello." The kids practiced their school English: "How are you?" they would ask. "Where you from?" "From Canada." "Oh." they would laugh. "Very good. VERY BIG!" They would wave and smile. "Bye-bye," they would call. "Be happy!"
Sri Lanka, smaller than New Brunswick, is crammed with history and beauty. Where else on earth can you find a place like the 2,243-metre-high Adam's Peak: that, say ancient tales, is where Adam arrived (together with Eve); Buddha stood on its summit and left his footprint, Sri Pada, as he ascended to heaven; Mohammed stopped briefly; and, before him, the peak was visited by St. Thomas, one of Christ's disciples, by the Lord Shiva and, some say, by King Solomon. It is sacred to Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and Muslims, and during the annual pilgrimage season, from the "poja" (the full-moon day) in December to the poja of May, tens of thousands of pilgrims of many faiths help each other as they ascend (usually at night) the 5,200 steep steps and pray together at sunrise atop the magic mountain.
We start our trip in Colombo, the busy, sprawling commercial capital of Sri Lanka, a fascinating amalgam of East and West, of modern department stores and teeming oriental bazaars where you can buy anything from the gorgeous gems that made Sri Lanka famous (the world's largest rubies and sapphires came from this island, including the 400-carat sapphire in the British crown) to Ayurvedic, or traditional, medicines that reputedly restore health and rejuvenate the body. Language is never a problem. Apart from Sinhala and Tamil, English is the lingua franca of the country.
From Colombo, we travel in the teak-panelled "observation car" of a charming, bouncy train high into the country's central mountain region that was once the Kingdom of Kandy with cities of stunning splendour and some of the world's first hospitals. Deposed by British troops in 1815, the king of Kandy was Sri Lanka's last royal ruler.
Being home to so many different religions, Sri Lanka has a plethora of holy days and holidays, more holidays, they happily claim, than any other country in the world. The greatest festival, the Esala Perahera, with probably the most sumptuous procession in all of Asia, is held annually during the time of the full moon in July/August in Kandy.
Thousands of drummers, torch-bearers and the flamboyantly dressed Kandyan dancers escort a great procession of more than 50 gorgeously caparisoned elephants through Kandy. The largest, most venerated elephant carries, beneath a jewel-studded baldachin, a golden replica of the sacred tooth snatched from Lord Buddha as his body was being cremated in 483 B.C. and smuggled to Sri Lanka 794 years later.
Most Sri Lankans love their elephants. Long ago, they worshipped them: elephant statues and effigies ornament many temples and memorials to Buddha. About 4,000 wild elephants still live in Sri Lanka, about half of them in the country's superb national parks, the rest in the extensive jungle regions of the island.
To protect villages and fields from marauding elephants, farmers encircle the villages with deep ditches. Occasionally baby elephants slip in, get mired and are abandoned by their herd. These hapless mud-smeared waifs are brought to one of Sri Lanka's two elephant orphanages.
One orphanage is at Pinnewala, an hour's drive from Kandy. Every morning at 10, the elephants young and old (83 during our visit) march from their spacious sanctuary down a village street to the river for their morning bath. Restaurants and cafés line the shore. You can have lunch or enjoy a cold beer and watch as the elephants spray themselves or are being scrubbed by their mahouts. (For a little tip, you, too, can wash an elephant!)
At noon, the elephants return to their enclosure for a hearty lunch: 100 kilograms of grass and leaves for every adult, washed down with a hundred litres of water.
The Pinnewala animals have nearly everything that elephants desire: lots of food and water, daily baths, good company, and sex every three years. But they lack freedom. That's perhaps why we preferred a second, less well-known orphanage, the Elephant Transit Home near the great Uda Walawe National Park. Only baby elephants are kept there (36 at the time of our visit). Once they're weaned at the age of 3 or 4, they are released and join the 450 wild elephants in the national park.
There are several feedings (each elephant calf gets 40 litres of milk a day). You can watch it from a nearby platform. It is funny and charming: a baby elephant filling station. They rush up on urgent little pillar legs, shrieking shrilly in anticipation, and as milk is poured into them through a funnel their eyes roll up in ecstasy.
In Kandy, we hire a car and driver. Wise tourists in Sri Lanka travel with car and driver from guesthouse to guesthouse or hotel - it's the nicest way to go.
Ours is a friendly young man, Prabat, driver, guide, problem-solver and, finally, friend. He shows us the extensive ruins of what were once among the most beautiful cities on earth, the ancient royal capitals of Sri Lanka: Anuradhapura (founded in 380 B.C.) and its successor, Polonnaruwa; the 1,500-year-old mountain fortress of Sigiriya (the Lion Rock) built as a refuge by a parricide king atop a sheer-faced, 200-metre-high granite crag; and the ancient, brilliantly painted and superbly preserved cave-temples of Dambulla, all four UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
In a niche half-way up Sigiriya Rock, we admire the frescoes of voluptuous wasp-waisted, big-bosomed women (goddesses, say some experts; concubines say others), ancient but marvelously vivid, and see, nearby, traces of graffiti incised by ardent admirers 1,500 years ago. For example, "Women like you make my body tremble with desire."
After days immersed in history, we travel south into another of Sri Lanka's many disparate regions: the highlands where the island's famous tea is grown, and its "tea capital," Nuwara Eliya. Here are the great tea plantations founded by the British. It was at this pleasant hill station that colonial civil servants played golf, watched horse races, went for walks in the lovely Victoria Park, and dined on roast beef at their exclusive clubs. They have gone, but their spirit lingers, including the cool climate and frequent drizzle.
That's just what tea loves, and the highland hills are covered with tea bushes, neatly trimmed and sculpted. Tamil women, many in colourful saris, dot the emerald-green hills, each one plucking 16 kilograms of newly sprouted tea leaves a day. We roam the verdant hills all day and dine at night in the lovingly preserved ambience of a colonial era dining room, served by white-gloved waiters.
We end our trip on Sri Lanka's southern coast, the fun-in-the-sun playground of the island, with postcard-pretty palm-girt crescents of sand washed by the warmish waters of the Indian Ocean. It's fairly close to every chilled Canadian's dream vision of "tropical beaches." The southeast coast has surfer-sea. "The waves are great!" a group of happy young Australians tells us.
We opt for the more sedate waters of Unawatuna, protected by a distant reef, ideal for long leisurely swims in a gentle sea. At night, we dine by candlelight on a terrace near the sea, and we are charmed by this island that charmed so many.
Buddha’s Savage Peace
By Robert D. Kaplan
I had always wanted to go to Kandy, for no other reason than that I was in love with the name: so airy, fanciful, and obviously suggestive of sweet things. I first found Kandy on a map of what was then called Ceylon, decades ago as a young man. Little did I know that it would one day have urgent revelations for me, more dark and poignant than sweet.
My journey began at Colombo’s crumbling train station, with its white facade like a cake about to melt. The first-class ticket cost a little more than $3 for the three-hour journey from Sri Lanka’s steamy Indian Ocean capital, through deep forest, to an altitude of 1,650 feet. The rusted railway car rattled and groaned its way uphill. Soon banana leaves were slapping against the train as we entered a relentless tangle of greenery.
The forest thickened with the crazy chaos of dark hardwood foliage. Vines choked every tree. The torrential rain of the southwest monsoon invigorated the pageant, shrieking and beating against the leaves as sheets of mist moved across the jungle. Then came swollen brown rivers, with water buffalo half sunk in mud near the pottery-red banks. Here and there the forest would break to reveal a shiny, rectilinear carpet of paddy fields, only to close in again, denser than before. I saw scrap-iron hutments and tiled rooftops the color of autumn leaves, and smoky blue hillsides creased by waterfalls and half-eaten by gray monsoon clouds. Other breaks in the forest revealed the occasional bell-shaped Buddhist dagoba, or stupa, with its soaring-to-heaven whiteness against the otherwise fungal-green tableau. As we drew near to Kandy, we passed through several narrow tunnels. In the pitch black, the creak of the train reverberated against the rock walls.
Kandy in early evening was a study in rust and mildew, with a crawling-uphill line of food stalls and other storefronts, so tattered and musty they seemed about to disintegrate. Yet that was only a first impression. Later ones would reveal how I had misjudged the scene. The storefronts—eateries, jewelers, mini-supermarkets, five-and-dime shops—were merely in need of new windows and paint jobs; they were in fact doing a brisk business. The streets were clean, the overhead fans worked in every shop I entered, and few beggars were visible. The middle class was evidently thriving, as demonstrated by the number of lavish, assembly-line weddings at my hotel during these auspicious days at the beginning of the monsoon.
A motorized rickshaw brought me to the Hotel Suisse, a seedy, dark-wooded British-colonial pile built in the mid-19th century. It had a well-stocked bar with boxy sofas and a billiard room, and was half empty: a cliché, in other words. My room cost $50. It lay off a portico overlooking a garden and Kandy Lake, which at dusk was tinted a mystical gray and dotted with lizards that crawled out onto the rocks. A thing of rare beauty, the lake was created by the last king of Kandy, Sri Wickrama Rajasinha, at great cost. After a stretch in Colombo’s punishing heat, I sat on the portico, yes, with a gin-and-tonic, and enjoyed the energizing coolness of a higher altitude, watching and listening to the rain on the lake.
Kandy defines quaintness, to such an extent that you begin to see the town in the black-and-white of a photo negative. But Kandy is also gaudy and magical. Within this forest town are Sri Lanka’s principal Buddhist shrines, swimming in gold and Technicolor. Across the lake from the Hotel Suisse is the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, or Sri Dalada Maligawa, a shrine complex that was built in the 17th and 18th centuries by Kandy’s Sinhalese Buddhist kings and holds a tooth of the Buddha—Prince Siddhartha Gautama—said to have been taken from his funeral pyre in 543 B.C.
The Temple of the Tooth is a site of mass pilgrimage, where the tourist instinctively knows to dress modestly, remove shoes, stay quiet, and lurk in the background. Within the mottled stone walls of the complex is an immense layout of gardens lined with striped Buddhist flags: the blue stripe signifying loving-kindness, the yellow the middle path away from extremes, red the blessings of practice, orange the Buddha’s teachings, and white the purity of the dharma, or universal truth, leading to liberation. Hundreds of Sinhalese sit in a two-story room in meditative positions, softly chanting and offering up mountains of pink lotuses, purple waterlilies, and white jasmines in front of the gilded casket that holds the tooth. Babies are everywhere, remarkably silent, held tightly against the chests of women in long cotton wraparounds. Leaf monkeys watch the whole scene from the massive, fanlike roofs.
From this and the other temples and monasteries around Kandy radiates the overwhelming and studied richness of the two chief colors of Buddhism: a rich, maroon-like red and a dazzling gold, painted on stone statues and sumptuously draping the giant sitting Buddha in each temple. The murals in these temples are faded and blackened with age. Only in the Eastern Orthodox churches in the Balkans have I come across a clutter of magnificence to match what I have seen in the Buddhist sanctuaries of Sri Lanka. Even as you experience this whole sensual feast, your bare feet press against cold and wet stone, since the rains are constant during the southwest monsoon.
Here, you are alone with your thoughts. Sri Lanka is in general a less panicky, less frantic, less intrusive version of India. Only rarely are you hassled. And Kandy, up in the hills, away from the crowded coastal highway, is a concentrated version of the country’s charms.
Alas, when you fall in love with a place, you encounter its history, which is often tragic. In fact, Kandy has remained seedily quaint, its monuments and ambience unravaged by mass tourism, only because Sri Lanka has experienced more than a quarter century of civil war between ethnic Sinhalese Buddhists and Hindu Tamils. And the origins and conduct of that savage conflict have drawn, in many ways, from the same emotional wellsprings as the tradition of worship at Kandy’s tranquil Buddhist shrines.
Buddhism holds an exalted place in the half-informed Western mind. Whereas Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism are each associated, in addition to their thought, with a rich material culture and a defended territory, Buddhism, despite its great monuments and architectural tradition throughout the Far East, is somehow considered purer, more abstract, and almost dematerialized: the most peaceful, austere, and uncorrupted of faiths, even as it appeals to the deeply aesthetic among us. Hollywood stars seeking to find themselves—famously Richard Gere—become Buddhists, not, say, orthodox Jews.
Yet Buddhism, as Kandy demonstrates, is deeply materialistic and demands worship of solid objects, in a secure and sacred landscape that has required the protection of a military. There have been Buddhist military kingdoms—notably Kandy’s—just as there have been Christian and Islamic kingdoms of the sword. Buddhism can be, under the right circumstances, a blood-and-soil faith.
Kandy may be the Buddhist world’s best example of this. From the late 16th to the early 19th centuries, the kingdom of Kandy sturdily held out against European invaders: the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British in their turn. “Like many other armies in peasant and tribal societies,” writes Channa Wickremesekera in Kandy at War: Indigenous Military Resistance to European Expansion in Sri Lanka 1594 to 1818 (2004), “the Kandyan army fought in loosely organized and highly mobile units depending on a flimsy logistical base,” making optimum use of its rugged, jungly terrain. It was very much like a 21st-century guerrilla insurgency, in other words—inspired, in this case, by the need to defend faith and homeland against heathen Europeans. The dense forest through which I had passed on my train ride constituted the graveyard of European attempts to reach Kandy, with many a Portuguese, Hollander, and Briton dying or giving up, exhausted and demoralized, afflicted by disease amid the cruel jungle so well described by Leonard Woolf in his 1913 novel, The Village in the Jungle:
For the rule of the jungle is first fear, and then hunger and thirst. There is fear everywhere: in the silence and in the shrill calls and the wild cries, in the stir of the leaves and the grating of branches, in the gloom, in the startled, slinking, peering beasts.
Eventually, the improved muskets and light artillery developed in Europe proved too much for the Kandyans. The British, explains Wickremesekera, unlike the Portuguese and Dutch, had the added advantages of “mastery over the neighboring Indian subcontinent and an army of over 100,000 soldiers when they clashed with Kandy.” They toppled King Wickrama of Kandy in 1815. He may have dug the lake, but he had been a tyrant and torturer. At least that was how the British rationalized their actions.
Thus the redoubtable kingdom of Kandy, for centuries such a rebuke to European attempts at conquest in Asia, became a trope in the warrior imagination of the Buddhist Sinhalese. To be sure, the quest to recover Kandy’s lost honor and glory played a role in the bloody and morally unclean victory that the Buddhist Sinhalese won over an ethnic Tamil insurgency in May, after 26 years of fighting. More broadly, the history of Kandy—a cultural and artistic repository of 2,300 years of Buddhist worship that the Europeans rarely left in peace—has imbued Sinhalese with the sense of being repeatedly under siege.
Regional demography hasn’t helped. Indeed, the majority-Buddhist Sinhalese, who constitute three-quarters of Sri Lanka’s population of 20 million, have lived in fear of being overwhelmed by the Hindu Tamils, who, although they are only 18 percent of the population, can theoretically call upon their 60 million ethnic and religious compatriots living just across the Palk Strait in southeastern India. The history of Tamil invasions against the only homeland that the Buddhist Sinhalese possess is not just the stuff of ancient history, but a living reality underpinned by latter-day Tamil terrorism. Writes the Sri Lankan scholar K. M. de Silva:
Sri Lanka’s location off the coast of South India, and especially its close proximity to [the Indian state of] Tamilnadu, separated by a shallow and narrow stretch of sea serves to accentuate this sense of a minority status among the Sinhalese. Their own sense of ethnic distinctiveness is identified through religion—Theravada Buddhism—and language—Sinhala. They take pride in the fact that Buddhism thrives in Sri Lanka while it has practically disappeared in its original home, India. Their language, Sinhala, has its roots in classical Indian languages, but it is now a distinctly Sri Lankan language, and one that is not spoken anywhere else.
The Sinhalese, argues de Silva, see their historical destiny in preserving Theravada Buddhism from a Hindu revivalist assault, with southern India the source of these invasions. As they see it, they are a lonely people, with few ethnic compatriots anywhere, who have been pushed to their final sanctuary, the southern two-thirds of Sri Lanka, by the demographic immensity of majority-Hindu India. The history of the repeated European attacks on their sacred city, Kandy, the last independent bastion of the Sinhalese in that southern two-thirds of the island, has only accentuated the sense of loneliness.
The Sinhalese must, therefore, fight for every kilometer of their ethnic homeland, Bradman Weerakoon, an adviser to former Sri Lankan presidents and prime ministers, told me. As a result, like the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, the Jews in Israel, and the Shiites in Iran, the Sinhalese are a demographic majority with a dangerous minority complex of persecution.
The Hindu Tamils, for their part, have been labeled a minority with a majority complex, owing to the triumph of Hinduism over Buddhism in southern India in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., and the subsequent invasions from India’s south against the rich and thriving Buddhist city-state of Anuradhapura in north-central Sri Lanka. These invasions resulted in the creation, by the 14th century, of a Tamil kingdom that, in turn, helped lay the groundwork for Tamil majorities in the north and east of the island.
Sri Lanka’s post-independence experience, including its civil war between Sinhalese and Tamils, has borne out the worst fears of both communities. The Sinhalese have had to deal with a guerrilla insurgency every bit as vicious and suicidal as the better-known ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Tamils, for their part, have had to deal with coercion, discrimination, and the utter failure of Sinhalese government institutions to protect their communal rights. There is nothing crueler than a majority that feels itself a minority.
In 1976, a certain Velupillai Prabhakaran founded the Tamil New Tigers, who would later become known to journalists around the world as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE: “Tamil Tigers” for short. Prabhakaran would develop into one of the world’s most hunted terrorists, as well as one of its most feared and capable guerrilla leaders. The young Prabhakaran had killed animals with a slingshot and air gun, and practiced building homemade bombs. He stuck pins under his nails to build up his tolerance for pain, and killed insects with needles to prepare himself to torture the enemy.
Prabhakaran turned the Tamil Tigers into a quasi-cult terrorist group that venerated him as a demigod. To comprehend the Tamil Tigers, wrote the late American scholar Michael Radu, “imagine Jim Jones’ Temple cult of Guyana in possession of a ‘navy’ and ‘air force,’ as well as (at its height) some 20,000 fanatical and armed zombie followers.” Indeed, Prabhakaran’s Tamil Tigers constituted the world’s first guerrilla insurgency with its own air force (Czech-made Zlin Z143s) and navy (explosive-packed fishing trawlers and a small submarine force). He imposed a blood tax on the population under his control in the north and east, requiring each family to provide a son to the Tigers. One wing of the organization—the Black Tigers—was dedicated to murder and assassination. Until the early 1990s, the Tigers held a record for suicide bombings, a tactic that they had largely pioneered. The Tigers used many tens of thousands of civilians as human shields and children as porters during combat. The very history of the Hindu Tamil Tigers shows that perverse violence, the embedding of warriors amid large numbers of civilians, and the rampant use of suicide bombing are not crimes specific to Muslims.
To defeat such a group, the Buddhist Sinhalese relied on a powerful sense of communal religious identity. This identity has been embodied, in particular, by the current Sri Lankan government of Mahinda Rajapaksa and two of his brothers: the defense secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa; and the president’s most trusted adviser, Basil Rajapaksa. Together, the three brothers have marked a decisive break from previous Sri Lankan governments. Whereas the governments of the Senanayake and Bandaranaike family dynasties hailed from the relatively moderate Colombo-centric elite, the Rajapaksas are more representative of the somewhat xenophobic, semi-literate, and collectivist rural part of the Sinhalese Buddhist population. The Rajapaksas, with the full backing of the Buddhist clergy, have reconstituted something out of the Sinhalese past: an ethnically rooted dynasty, like the Buddhist kingdoms of Kandy of old, dedicated to ethno-national survival, unaccountable to the cabinet and parliament.
Mahinda Rajapaksa was elected in 2005 to win the war outright, and he succeeded in the most brutal fashion: by abducting or killing journalists and lawyers to silence the media, even as he conducted a counterinsurgency campaign that had no moral qualms about the deaths of the thousands of Tamil civilians that the Tamil Tigers were using as human shields. Of the 70,000 people killed in the war since 1983, 10 percent, mainly civilians, were killed in the last few months of fighting in 2009.
I was in Sri Lanka on May 18, 2009, the day the war was declared over, and the body of Prabhakaran, killed in last-ditch fighting, was displayed on television, as government forces mopped up the final few hundred yards of Tamil Tiger territory. The next morning, May 19, I drove through the southern coastal heartland of the Buddhist Sinhalese. Everywhere there were parades and flag-bedecked, horn-honking rickshaw convoys, with young men, many of them unemployed, shouting and setting off masses of firecrackers. An effigy of Prabhakaran’s body was dragged and burned. I sensed a scary and wanton boredom in these young men, as if the same crowds, under different circumstances, could be setting fire to Tamil homes, as had been done in earlier decades. I noticed that the closer I got to the ethnically mixed population center of Colombo, the fewer such demonstrations I saw.
President Rajapaksa came to Kandy a few days later, on May 23, to receive the blessings of the chief Buddhist monks at the Temple of the Tooth for winning the war. He expressed no apologies or remorse for the victims of the war, and he promised the monks, “Our motherland will never be divided [again].” He told them that there were only two types of Sri Lankans, those who love the motherland and those who don’t. Because he conceives of the motherland as primarily Buddhist, his words carried too little magnanimity.
The monks had acquiesced in this descent into communal intolerance. They have long enjoyed the uses of political power and hark back to a past when they were the rousing nationalist force behind Ceylonese kings. Now they could close a long historical chapter that began at the Temple of the Tooth in March 1815, when the Kandyan Convention was signed, ceding all of Ceylon to the British after the defeat of the last Kandyan king, Wickrama. British rule in Ceylon, lasting until independence in 1948, was followed by decades of communal unrest culminating in the civil war. At last, these monks could look forward to a Buddhist-run state that would have full sovereignty over the island.
But even if the artistic grandeur of Kandy has helped form the emotional source of Buddhist nationalism, which has proved itself as bloody as other religious nationalisms, Kandy’s religious monuments also offer a much deeper lesson: the affinity—rather than the hostility—between Buddhism and Hinduism. Buddhism arrived in Sri Lanka from India as part of the missionary activity of the great Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century B.C. And later eras of Indian history would witness an amalgamation of Buddhist teachings into Hinduism. A few miles from Kandy, deep in the forest amid glistening fields of tea, I saw statues of the Buddha and of Hindu gods under the same roofs, together in their dusky magnificence: in dark stone vestibules at the 14th-century temples of Gadaladeniya, Lankatilake, and Embekke. At the temple of Embekke, I lifted aside a veiling Hindu tapestry to behold the Buddha. At Lankatilake, I saw the Buddha surrounded on all four sides by devales (shrines) devoted to the deities Upulvan, Saman, Vibhisana, and Skanda—of mixed Hindu, Buddhist, and Persian origin. At the Buddhist shrine of Gadaladeniya, I saw stone carvings based on the style of the Hindu empire of Vijayanagar in Andhra Pradesh, in southern India. Each of these temples “reflects the fusion of Buddhism and Hinduism,” writes SinhaRaja Tammita-Delgoda in Eloquence in Stone: The Lithic Saga of Sri Lanka (2008).
In fact, Wickrama, the Buddhist king who was deposed by the British, became the last in a dynasty, the Nayakkars, that was South Indian and Hindu in origin; even as its members patronized Theravada Buddhism, they sought Hindu brides for their male Buddhist heirs. The British, by ending this dynasty and thus breaking the link between Buddhism and Hinduism, helped set the stage for the polarization of politics in the postcolonial era. The truth was that Theravada Buddhism, so concentrated on ethics and the release from worldly existence, was too austere for the Kandyan peasantry, who were drawn to the color and magic of the Hindu pantheon. Kandy and its forests are a monument not only to Buddhism, but to Hinduism as well. The historical and aesthetic legacy of Sri Lanka that long predates modern statehood is, in the final analysis, deeply syncretic. Only when Sri Lanka’s political leadership recognizes that legacy will communal peace be at hand—and with it the arrival of globalization and chain hotels, and the end of Kandy’s quaintness.
(Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, in Washington, D.C.)
I had always wanted to go to Kandy, for no other reason than that I was in love with the name: so airy, fanciful, and obviously suggestive of sweet things. I first found Kandy on a map of what was then called Ceylon, decades ago as a young man. Little did I know that it would one day have urgent revelations for me, more dark and poignant than sweet.
My journey began at Colombo’s crumbling train station, with its white facade like a cake about to melt. The first-class ticket cost a little more than $3 for the three-hour journey from Sri Lanka’s steamy Indian Ocean capital, through deep forest, to an altitude of 1,650 feet. The rusted railway car rattled and groaned its way uphill. Soon banana leaves were slapping against the train as we entered a relentless tangle of greenery.
The forest thickened with the crazy chaos of dark hardwood foliage. Vines choked every tree. The torrential rain of the southwest monsoon invigorated the pageant, shrieking and beating against the leaves as sheets of mist moved across the jungle. Then came swollen brown rivers, with water buffalo half sunk in mud near the pottery-red banks. Here and there the forest would break to reveal a shiny, rectilinear carpet of paddy fields, only to close in again, denser than before. I saw scrap-iron hutments and tiled rooftops the color of autumn leaves, and smoky blue hillsides creased by waterfalls and half-eaten by gray monsoon clouds. Other breaks in the forest revealed the occasional bell-shaped Buddhist dagoba, or stupa, with its soaring-to-heaven whiteness against the otherwise fungal-green tableau. As we drew near to Kandy, we passed through several narrow tunnels. In the pitch black, the creak of the train reverberated against the rock walls.
Kandy in early evening was a study in rust and mildew, with a crawling-uphill line of food stalls and other storefronts, so tattered and musty they seemed about to disintegrate. Yet that was only a first impression. Later ones would reveal how I had misjudged the scene. The storefronts—eateries, jewelers, mini-supermarkets, five-and-dime shops—were merely in need of new windows and paint jobs; they were in fact doing a brisk business. The streets were clean, the overhead fans worked in every shop I entered, and few beggars were visible. The middle class was evidently thriving, as demonstrated by the number of lavish, assembly-line weddings at my hotel during these auspicious days at the beginning of the monsoon.
A motorized rickshaw brought me to the Hotel Suisse, a seedy, dark-wooded British-colonial pile built in the mid-19th century. It had a well-stocked bar with boxy sofas and a billiard room, and was half empty: a cliché, in other words. My room cost $50. It lay off a portico overlooking a garden and Kandy Lake, which at dusk was tinted a mystical gray and dotted with lizards that crawled out onto the rocks. A thing of rare beauty, the lake was created by the last king of Kandy, Sri Wickrama Rajasinha, at great cost. After a stretch in Colombo’s punishing heat, I sat on the portico, yes, with a gin-and-tonic, and enjoyed the energizing coolness of a higher altitude, watching and listening to the rain on the lake.
Kandy defines quaintness, to such an extent that you begin to see the town in the black-and-white of a photo negative. But Kandy is also gaudy and magical. Within this forest town are Sri Lanka’s principal Buddhist shrines, swimming in gold and Technicolor. Across the lake from the Hotel Suisse is the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, or Sri Dalada Maligawa, a shrine complex that was built in the 17th and 18th centuries by Kandy’s Sinhalese Buddhist kings and holds a tooth of the Buddha—Prince Siddhartha Gautama—said to have been taken from his funeral pyre in 543 B.C.
The Temple of the Tooth is a site of mass pilgrimage, where the tourist instinctively knows to dress modestly, remove shoes, stay quiet, and lurk in the background. Within the mottled stone walls of the complex is an immense layout of gardens lined with striped Buddhist flags: the blue stripe signifying loving-kindness, the yellow the middle path away from extremes, red the blessings of practice, orange the Buddha’s teachings, and white the purity of the dharma, or universal truth, leading to liberation. Hundreds of Sinhalese sit in a two-story room in meditative positions, softly chanting and offering up mountains of pink lotuses, purple waterlilies, and white jasmines in front of the gilded casket that holds the tooth. Babies are everywhere, remarkably silent, held tightly against the chests of women in long cotton wraparounds. Leaf monkeys watch the whole scene from the massive, fanlike roofs.
From this and the other temples and monasteries around Kandy radiates the overwhelming and studied richness of the two chief colors of Buddhism: a rich, maroon-like red and a dazzling gold, painted on stone statues and sumptuously draping the giant sitting Buddha in each temple. The murals in these temples are faded and blackened with age. Only in the Eastern Orthodox churches in the Balkans have I come across a clutter of magnificence to match what I have seen in the Buddhist sanctuaries of Sri Lanka. Even as you experience this whole sensual feast, your bare feet press against cold and wet stone, since the rains are constant during the southwest monsoon.
Here, you are alone with your thoughts. Sri Lanka is in general a less panicky, less frantic, less intrusive version of India. Only rarely are you hassled. And Kandy, up in the hills, away from the crowded coastal highway, is a concentrated version of the country’s charms.
Alas, when you fall in love with a place, you encounter its history, which is often tragic. In fact, Kandy has remained seedily quaint, its monuments and ambience unravaged by mass tourism, only because Sri Lanka has experienced more than a quarter century of civil war between ethnic Sinhalese Buddhists and Hindu Tamils. And the origins and conduct of that savage conflict have drawn, in many ways, from the same emotional wellsprings as the tradition of worship at Kandy’s tranquil Buddhist shrines.
Buddhism holds an exalted place in the half-informed Western mind. Whereas Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism are each associated, in addition to their thought, with a rich material culture and a defended territory, Buddhism, despite its great monuments and architectural tradition throughout the Far East, is somehow considered purer, more abstract, and almost dematerialized: the most peaceful, austere, and uncorrupted of faiths, even as it appeals to the deeply aesthetic among us. Hollywood stars seeking to find themselves—famously Richard Gere—become Buddhists, not, say, orthodox Jews.
Yet Buddhism, as Kandy demonstrates, is deeply materialistic and demands worship of solid objects, in a secure and sacred landscape that has required the protection of a military. There have been Buddhist military kingdoms—notably Kandy’s—just as there have been Christian and Islamic kingdoms of the sword. Buddhism can be, under the right circumstances, a blood-and-soil faith.
Kandy may be the Buddhist world’s best example of this. From the late 16th to the early 19th centuries, the kingdom of Kandy sturdily held out against European invaders: the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British in their turn. “Like many other armies in peasant and tribal societies,” writes Channa Wickremesekera in Kandy at War: Indigenous Military Resistance to European Expansion in Sri Lanka 1594 to 1818 (2004), “the Kandyan army fought in loosely organized and highly mobile units depending on a flimsy logistical base,” making optimum use of its rugged, jungly terrain. It was very much like a 21st-century guerrilla insurgency, in other words—inspired, in this case, by the need to defend faith and homeland against heathen Europeans. The dense forest through which I had passed on my train ride constituted the graveyard of European attempts to reach Kandy, with many a Portuguese, Hollander, and Briton dying or giving up, exhausted and demoralized, afflicted by disease amid the cruel jungle so well described by Leonard Woolf in his 1913 novel, The Village in the Jungle:
For the rule of the jungle is first fear, and then hunger and thirst. There is fear everywhere: in the silence and in the shrill calls and the wild cries, in the stir of the leaves and the grating of branches, in the gloom, in the startled, slinking, peering beasts.
Eventually, the improved muskets and light artillery developed in Europe proved too much for the Kandyans. The British, explains Wickremesekera, unlike the Portuguese and Dutch, had the added advantages of “mastery over the neighboring Indian subcontinent and an army of over 100,000 soldiers when they clashed with Kandy.” They toppled King Wickrama of Kandy in 1815. He may have dug the lake, but he had been a tyrant and torturer. At least that was how the British rationalized their actions.
Thus the redoubtable kingdom of Kandy, for centuries such a rebuke to European attempts at conquest in Asia, became a trope in the warrior imagination of the Buddhist Sinhalese. To be sure, the quest to recover Kandy’s lost honor and glory played a role in the bloody and morally unclean victory that the Buddhist Sinhalese won over an ethnic Tamil insurgency in May, after 26 years of fighting. More broadly, the history of Kandy—a cultural and artistic repository of 2,300 years of Buddhist worship that the Europeans rarely left in peace—has imbued Sinhalese with the sense of being repeatedly under siege.
Regional demography hasn’t helped. Indeed, the majority-Buddhist Sinhalese, who constitute three-quarters of Sri Lanka’s population of 20 million, have lived in fear of being overwhelmed by the Hindu Tamils, who, although they are only 18 percent of the population, can theoretically call upon their 60 million ethnic and religious compatriots living just across the Palk Strait in southeastern India. The history of Tamil invasions against the only homeland that the Buddhist Sinhalese possess is not just the stuff of ancient history, but a living reality underpinned by latter-day Tamil terrorism. Writes the Sri Lankan scholar K. M. de Silva:
Sri Lanka’s location off the coast of South India, and especially its close proximity to [the Indian state of] Tamilnadu, separated by a shallow and narrow stretch of sea serves to accentuate this sense of a minority status among the Sinhalese. Their own sense of ethnic distinctiveness is identified through religion—Theravada Buddhism—and language—Sinhala. They take pride in the fact that Buddhism thrives in Sri Lanka while it has practically disappeared in its original home, India. Their language, Sinhala, has its roots in classical Indian languages, but it is now a distinctly Sri Lankan language, and one that is not spoken anywhere else.
The Sinhalese, argues de Silva, see their historical destiny in preserving Theravada Buddhism from a Hindu revivalist assault, with southern India the source of these invasions. As they see it, they are a lonely people, with few ethnic compatriots anywhere, who have been pushed to their final sanctuary, the southern two-thirds of Sri Lanka, by the demographic immensity of majority-Hindu India. The history of the repeated European attacks on their sacred city, Kandy, the last independent bastion of the Sinhalese in that southern two-thirds of the island, has only accentuated the sense of loneliness.
The Sinhalese must, therefore, fight for every kilometer of their ethnic homeland, Bradman Weerakoon, an adviser to former Sri Lankan presidents and prime ministers, told me. As a result, like the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, the Jews in Israel, and the Shiites in Iran, the Sinhalese are a demographic majority with a dangerous minority complex of persecution.
The Hindu Tamils, for their part, have been labeled a minority with a majority complex, owing to the triumph of Hinduism over Buddhism in southern India in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., and the subsequent invasions from India’s south against the rich and thriving Buddhist city-state of Anuradhapura in north-central Sri Lanka. These invasions resulted in the creation, by the 14th century, of a Tamil kingdom that, in turn, helped lay the groundwork for Tamil majorities in the north and east of the island.
Sri Lanka’s post-independence experience, including its civil war between Sinhalese and Tamils, has borne out the worst fears of both communities. The Sinhalese have had to deal with a guerrilla insurgency every bit as vicious and suicidal as the better-known ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Tamils, for their part, have had to deal with coercion, discrimination, and the utter failure of Sinhalese government institutions to protect their communal rights. There is nothing crueler than a majority that feels itself a minority.
In 1976, a certain Velupillai Prabhakaran founded the Tamil New Tigers, who would later become known to journalists around the world as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE: “Tamil Tigers” for short. Prabhakaran would develop into one of the world’s most hunted terrorists, as well as one of its most feared and capable guerrilla leaders. The young Prabhakaran had killed animals with a slingshot and air gun, and practiced building homemade bombs. He stuck pins under his nails to build up his tolerance for pain, and killed insects with needles to prepare himself to torture the enemy.
Prabhakaran turned the Tamil Tigers into a quasi-cult terrorist group that venerated him as a demigod. To comprehend the Tamil Tigers, wrote the late American scholar Michael Radu, “imagine Jim Jones’ Temple cult of Guyana in possession of a ‘navy’ and ‘air force,’ as well as (at its height) some 20,000 fanatical and armed zombie followers.” Indeed, Prabhakaran’s Tamil Tigers constituted the world’s first guerrilla insurgency with its own air force (Czech-made Zlin Z143s) and navy (explosive-packed fishing trawlers and a small submarine force). He imposed a blood tax on the population under his control in the north and east, requiring each family to provide a son to the Tigers. One wing of the organization—the Black Tigers—was dedicated to murder and assassination. Until the early 1990s, the Tigers held a record for suicide bombings, a tactic that they had largely pioneered. The Tigers used many tens of thousands of civilians as human shields and children as porters during combat. The very history of the Hindu Tamil Tigers shows that perverse violence, the embedding of warriors amid large numbers of civilians, and the rampant use of suicide bombing are not crimes specific to Muslims.
To defeat such a group, the Buddhist Sinhalese relied on a powerful sense of communal religious identity. This identity has been embodied, in particular, by the current Sri Lankan government of Mahinda Rajapaksa and two of his brothers: the defense secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa; and the president’s most trusted adviser, Basil Rajapaksa. Together, the three brothers have marked a decisive break from previous Sri Lankan governments. Whereas the governments of the Senanayake and Bandaranaike family dynasties hailed from the relatively moderate Colombo-centric elite, the Rajapaksas are more representative of the somewhat xenophobic, semi-literate, and collectivist rural part of the Sinhalese Buddhist population. The Rajapaksas, with the full backing of the Buddhist clergy, have reconstituted something out of the Sinhalese past: an ethnically rooted dynasty, like the Buddhist kingdoms of Kandy of old, dedicated to ethno-national survival, unaccountable to the cabinet and parliament.
Mahinda Rajapaksa was elected in 2005 to win the war outright, and he succeeded in the most brutal fashion: by abducting or killing journalists and lawyers to silence the media, even as he conducted a counterinsurgency campaign that had no moral qualms about the deaths of the thousands of Tamil civilians that the Tamil Tigers were using as human shields. Of the 70,000 people killed in the war since 1983, 10 percent, mainly civilians, were killed in the last few months of fighting in 2009.
I was in Sri Lanka on May 18, 2009, the day the war was declared over, and the body of Prabhakaran, killed in last-ditch fighting, was displayed on television, as government forces mopped up the final few hundred yards of Tamil Tiger territory. The next morning, May 19, I drove through the southern coastal heartland of the Buddhist Sinhalese. Everywhere there were parades and flag-bedecked, horn-honking rickshaw convoys, with young men, many of them unemployed, shouting and setting off masses of firecrackers. An effigy of Prabhakaran’s body was dragged and burned. I sensed a scary and wanton boredom in these young men, as if the same crowds, under different circumstances, could be setting fire to Tamil homes, as had been done in earlier decades. I noticed that the closer I got to the ethnically mixed population center of Colombo, the fewer such demonstrations I saw.
President Rajapaksa came to Kandy a few days later, on May 23, to receive the blessings of the chief Buddhist monks at the Temple of the Tooth for winning the war. He expressed no apologies or remorse for the victims of the war, and he promised the monks, “Our motherland will never be divided [again].” He told them that there were only two types of Sri Lankans, those who love the motherland and those who don’t. Because he conceives of the motherland as primarily Buddhist, his words carried too little magnanimity.
The monks had acquiesced in this descent into communal intolerance. They have long enjoyed the uses of political power and hark back to a past when they were the rousing nationalist force behind Ceylonese kings. Now they could close a long historical chapter that began at the Temple of the Tooth in March 1815, when the Kandyan Convention was signed, ceding all of Ceylon to the British after the defeat of the last Kandyan king, Wickrama. British rule in Ceylon, lasting until independence in 1948, was followed by decades of communal unrest culminating in the civil war. At last, these monks could look forward to a Buddhist-run state that would have full sovereignty over the island.
But even if the artistic grandeur of Kandy has helped form the emotional source of Buddhist nationalism, which has proved itself as bloody as other religious nationalisms, Kandy’s religious monuments also offer a much deeper lesson: the affinity—rather than the hostility—between Buddhism and Hinduism. Buddhism arrived in Sri Lanka from India as part of the missionary activity of the great Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century B.C. And later eras of Indian history would witness an amalgamation of Buddhist teachings into Hinduism. A few miles from Kandy, deep in the forest amid glistening fields of tea, I saw statues of the Buddha and of Hindu gods under the same roofs, together in their dusky magnificence: in dark stone vestibules at the 14th-century temples of Gadaladeniya, Lankatilake, and Embekke. At the temple of Embekke, I lifted aside a veiling Hindu tapestry to behold the Buddha. At Lankatilake, I saw the Buddha surrounded on all four sides by devales (shrines) devoted to the deities Upulvan, Saman, Vibhisana, and Skanda—of mixed Hindu, Buddhist, and Persian origin. At the Buddhist shrine of Gadaladeniya, I saw stone carvings based on the style of the Hindu empire of Vijayanagar in Andhra Pradesh, in southern India. Each of these temples “reflects the fusion of Buddhism and Hinduism,” writes SinhaRaja Tammita-Delgoda in Eloquence in Stone: The Lithic Saga of Sri Lanka (2008).
In fact, Wickrama, the Buddhist king who was deposed by the British, became the last in a dynasty, the Nayakkars, that was South Indian and Hindu in origin; even as its members patronized Theravada Buddhism, they sought Hindu brides for their male Buddhist heirs. The British, by ending this dynasty and thus breaking the link between Buddhism and Hinduism, helped set the stage for the polarization of politics in the postcolonial era. The truth was that Theravada Buddhism, so concentrated on ethics and the release from worldly existence, was too austere for the Kandyan peasantry, who were drawn to the color and magic of the Hindu pantheon. Kandy and its forests are a monument not only to Buddhism, but to Hinduism as well. The historical and aesthetic legacy of Sri Lanka that long predates modern statehood is, in the final analysis, deeply syncretic. Only when Sri Lanka’s political leadership recognizes that legacy will communal peace be at hand—and with it the arrival of globalization and chain hotels, and the end of Kandy’s quaintness.
(Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, in Washington, D.C.)
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
If you don’t mind me asking, what is your race?
by Mahesan Niranjan
At my local hospital (in the UK) this morning, a nurse asked: “If you don’t mind my asking, what is your race?” Not the sort of everyday question, so I was taken aback. “Different races have different risks, you see”, she quickly explained. “Oh, I am Sri Lankan”, I replied. But is that a race? Aren’t we Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim etc. for this race purpose?
From a DNA point of view, Sri Lankan is probably my race. A random subset of Sri Lankans will have the same statistical variation in their genomes, as a group of a particular ethnicity in Sri Lanka. Our genomes are quite a soup: Of indigenous islanders, invading thugs, fishermen in transit and travelling businessmen who retired to stay. My own ancestors were probably thugs, given I can neither catch fish nor do business. (The similarity in medical risk the nurse was concerned with probably has more to do with common lifestyles of immigrants than with genetics.)
Medicine aside, I wondered when I was first asked for my race / nationality and I replied: “Sri Lankan”. It is always a good exercise to flashback at your earliest memory of something. Sharpens your mind and delays the onset of Alzheimer’s.
“When did you first become aware of your penis?” a lecturer at Peradeniya once asked us, a group of undergraduates. University rules do not usually allow such a question. But the lecturer was a philosopher. Also, I had just cracked that silly joke about God being a civil engineer from the Public Works Department: Who else would run a toxic wastepipe right in the middle of a recreation area? “I always knew I had it – and functionally perfect too, thank you very much”, was my aggressive reply to the philosopher. We engaged in a lengthy debate about what he meant by “become aware”. In those lovely surroundings of Peradeniya, with its peaceful looking mountains, winding river and beautiful trees, my philosopher friends could stretch your mind as much as the complex calculus of electromagnetic wave propagation could — albeit in an entirely useless way.
Talking of Peradeniya, I once asked my late father what his flashback of university memories were. A rather crooked character who was my dad’s class mate, upon graduating with considerable struggle, had applied for an inspector position in the police. Bosses there requested the then Vice Chancellor at Peradeniya, Sir Ivor Jennings, for a reference on this chap. “It is my firm belief, considering the interests of society”, Sir Ivor is rumored to have written, “this gentleman is best kept inside the forces than let loose on the outside”. So it seems the foundations were laid long ago, by a celebrated educationist (and sudda – patriots, your chance), for the shameful drama our country enacted at the beaches of Bambalapitiya a few weeks back.
Getting back to my flashback, my first ever declaration of being Sri Lankan nearly landed me in trouble. I was 15 then, and had gone to the Post Office at Bandarawela to get an identity card to sit my GCSE O/L.
I need to clarify the context for you. In the early seventies, Sirimavo had won the elections, the first of the JVP uprisings had been brutally put down and we had declared ourselves a Republic. (Just a Republic then, the “Democratic Socialist” part was added when we decided to be neither – power ever more centralized; gulf between rich and poor ever wider.) No more citizens of Her Majesty, not even a ceremonial Governor, Supreme Court is our own and Supreme. That was all very exciting in my teen-age days.
In recognition of the Republic, I had declared myself a Sri Lankan Tamil, strictly in that order: Sri Lankan first, Tamil second.
After careful analysis, I had even developed my very own teen-ager model of the Banda-Chelva pact: Hire some thugs to beat up Tamils, Banda gets votes in the South, Chelva gets votes in the North. “What do these teen-agers know about real politics”, you reject. Or do you?
At the post office, I filled the form in. Where it asked for nationality, I wrote Sri Lankan. Correct answer, you will readily agree.
The Post Master, however, had a different take. “You should write Ceylon Tamil”, he suggested. He was a very nice man I recall, clean shaven, dressed in full white and spoke good English. A well trained civil servant.
“But I am Sri Lankan”, I protested.
“Ceylon Tamil, you write”, he said firmly.
There was a stand-off. I wasn’t prepared to give up my nationalism. He wasn’t going to deviate from his civil service training. The sleepy post office in that beautiful up-country town has never experienced such tension. But it lasted just for a few seconds though.
I quickly realized I wasn’t going to win this and backed down. Sitting my exam was more important than making a petty nationalistic stand, no?
So I filled the form all over again, this time writing “Ceylon Tamil” against nationality. But I made it a point to record my protest by signing it in Tamil script. It was my way of saying “I belong here”.
The habit that started then has stayed with me ever since. Thirty five years on, I still sign my name using Tamil script. Every time I sign, I remember the nice Postman Perera and his innocent attempt at disallowing me membership of my country.
The signature has distorted significantly over the years, and I have invented a kind of flowing-hand writing for Tamil, but still recognizable Tamil characters.
In the mid eighties, before the chip ‘n pin type credit cards were invented, we used cheques a lot. I would go into random petrol stations in London, and often find a South Asian looking young guy working there. Illegal, asylum-seeking Ceylon Tamil guy who ran away from Sri Lanka – fearful of the war or for economic betterment, who knows? The guy would look at my signature on the cheque, compare it to that on the back of the guarantee card and, recognizing the Tamil font, would greet me with a smile and seek to confirm our common race: “Siri Langaavaa?”
At my local hospital (in the UK) this morning, a nurse asked: “If you don’t mind my asking, what is your race?” Not the sort of everyday question, so I was taken aback. “Different races have different risks, you see”, she quickly explained. “Oh, I am Sri Lankan”, I replied. But is that a race? Aren’t we Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim etc. for this race purpose?
From a DNA point of view, Sri Lankan is probably my race. A random subset of Sri Lankans will have the same statistical variation in their genomes, as a group of a particular ethnicity in Sri Lanka. Our genomes are quite a soup: Of indigenous islanders, invading thugs, fishermen in transit and travelling businessmen who retired to stay. My own ancestors were probably thugs, given I can neither catch fish nor do business. (The similarity in medical risk the nurse was concerned with probably has more to do with common lifestyles of immigrants than with genetics.)
Medicine aside, I wondered when I was first asked for my race / nationality and I replied: “Sri Lankan”. It is always a good exercise to flashback at your earliest memory of something. Sharpens your mind and delays the onset of Alzheimer’s.
“When did you first become aware of your penis?” a lecturer at Peradeniya once asked us, a group of undergraduates. University rules do not usually allow such a question. But the lecturer was a philosopher. Also, I had just cracked that silly joke about God being a civil engineer from the Public Works Department: Who else would run a toxic wastepipe right in the middle of a recreation area? “I always knew I had it – and functionally perfect too, thank you very much”, was my aggressive reply to the philosopher. We engaged in a lengthy debate about what he meant by “become aware”. In those lovely surroundings of Peradeniya, with its peaceful looking mountains, winding river and beautiful trees, my philosopher friends could stretch your mind as much as the complex calculus of electromagnetic wave propagation could — albeit in an entirely useless way.
Talking of Peradeniya, I once asked my late father what his flashback of university memories were. A rather crooked character who was my dad’s class mate, upon graduating with considerable struggle, had applied for an inspector position in the police. Bosses there requested the then Vice Chancellor at Peradeniya, Sir Ivor Jennings, for a reference on this chap. “It is my firm belief, considering the interests of society”, Sir Ivor is rumored to have written, “this gentleman is best kept inside the forces than let loose on the outside”. So it seems the foundations were laid long ago, by a celebrated educationist (and sudda – patriots, your chance), for the shameful drama our country enacted at the beaches of Bambalapitiya a few weeks back.
Getting back to my flashback, my first ever declaration of being Sri Lankan nearly landed me in trouble. I was 15 then, and had gone to the Post Office at Bandarawela to get an identity card to sit my GCSE O/L.
I need to clarify the context for you. In the early seventies, Sirimavo had won the elections, the first of the JVP uprisings had been brutally put down and we had declared ourselves a Republic. (Just a Republic then, the “Democratic Socialist” part was added when we decided to be neither – power ever more centralized; gulf between rich and poor ever wider.) No more citizens of Her Majesty, not even a ceremonial Governor, Supreme Court is our own and Supreme. That was all very exciting in my teen-age days.
In recognition of the Republic, I had declared myself a Sri Lankan Tamil, strictly in that order: Sri Lankan first, Tamil second.
After careful analysis, I had even developed my very own teen-ager model of the Banda-Chelva pact: Hire some thugs to beat up Tamils, Banda gets votes in the South, Chelva gets votes in the North. “What do these teen-agers know about real politics”, you reject. Or do you?
At the post office, I filled the form in. Where it asked for nationality, I wrote Sri Lankan. Correct answer, you will readily agree.
The Post Master, however, had a different take. “You should write Ceylon Tamil”, he suggested. He was a very nice man I recall, clean shaven, dressed in full white and spoke good English. A well trained civil servant.
“But I am Sri Lankan”, I protested.
“Ceylon Tamil, you write”, he said firmly.
There was a stand-off. I wasn’t prepared to give up my nationalism. He wasn’t going to deviate from his civil service training. The sleepy post office in that beautiful up-country town has never experienced such tension. But it lasted just for a few seconds though.
I quickly realized I wasn’t going to win this and backed down. Sitting my exam was more important than making a petty nationalistic stand, no?
So I filled the form all over again, this time writing “Ceylon Tamil” against nationality. But I made it a point to record my protest by signing it in Tamil script. It was my way of saying “I belong here”.
The habit that started then has stayed with me ever since. Thirty five years on, I still sign my name using Tamil script. Every time I sign, I remember the nice Postman Perera and his innocent attempt at disallowing me membership of my country.
The signature has distorted significantly over the years, and I have invented a kind of flowing-hand writing for Tamil, but still recognizable Tamil characters.
In the mid eighties, before the chip ‘n pin type credit cards were invented, we used cheques a lot. I would go into random petrol stations in London, and often find a South Asian looking young guy working there. Illegal, asylum-seeking Ceylon Tamil guy who ran away from Sri Lanka – fearful of the war or for economic betterment, who knows? The guy would look at my signature on the cheque, compare it to that on the back of the guarantee card and, recognizing the Tamil font, would greet me with a smile and seek to confirm our common race: “Siri Langaavaa?”
Denial and rage in Sri Lanka
by Roma Tearne
As the restaurant cleared, a Singhalese woman approached me. Her fury was palpable. She had read a piece I had written on Sri Lanka and was outraged by it. Why was I writing only about Sinhalese hatred and not about Tamil terrorism? How dare I take the side of those murderous Tamils who milked the media for all it was worth? Before I could speak, she began a tirade on the misrepresentation of the Sri Lankan government by the British press. The British, she told me, were taken in by Tamil propaganda. The government merely wanted peace.
Having, as it were, a foot in both camps, my mother was Sinhalese, my father Tamil, I have frequently come up against the grievances of both groups. To a westerner, the difference is negligible. The west knows of Prabhakaran's cruel recruitment of child soldiers and his suicide bombers. It knows of the stubborn refusal of the government to allow international help to civilians in the war zone. The west has little patience for what appears a hopelessly confused scenario.
Lest we forget the shameful fact, Sri Lanka was the first country that managed to turn suicide into a weapon of war. What developed in that distant coral-rimmed island was a microcosm of what goes on around the globe today. Other wars have been modelled on this same tactic; nowhere is safe from its frightening, nihilist impact. By neglecting what was going on in Sri Lanka, the global community simultaneously turned a blind eye to the causes that lie behind suicide terror in other places. Thus it spread, silent as a deadly virus, ignored until it was too late. While Sri Lanka, first let down by the British who ruled it so wantonly (denying the Buddhist majority their religion, while favouring the Tamils), was let down once again. Like Israel and Palestine, like parts of Africa, like India and Pakistan, both sides in the conflict suffered a deep sense of injustice.
Meanwhile, as early as the 1960s, those who could began leaving the country. Desperately hounded Tamils were ready to go anywhere that might offer them peace, while richer, less desperate Sinhalese, looked for the quiet life away from political controversy.
Now, at last, the west is listening. Unicef and Amnesty are sending out clear messages, but these are being ignored by the Sri Lankan government. Damilvany Gnanakumar's eye witness story, told to Gethin Chamberlain in the Guardian today is a further shocking indictment.
The Singhalese are mainly Buddhist; once a gentle people, charged with the preservation of life. That they have failed so completely is a measure of how far the collective hysteria of war has led them astray. Without a doubt, the Sri Lankan Tamils have suffered terribly. Led by a man who took his people to the brink of annihilation, persecuted by a barbaric government, they have suffered twice over.
Today, denial and rage walk hand in hand, both at home and abroad, in the Sri Lankan community. These emotions need desperately to be addressed. Expatriates should throw off their complacency. What is happening in our homeland is our collective responsibility. We should demand that the government clear our name of this terrible stain and allow the international community into the country.
The shelling might have stopped, but the persecution continues. The only way towards peace is the release of those suffering in the appalling internment camps. Not years from now, but immediately. For the time has come to help our lost and beautiful island find some new blueprint for unity. It is a matter of both urgency and national pride.
As the restaurant cleared, a Singhalese woman approached me. Her fury was palpable. She had read a piece I had written on Sri Lanka and was outraged by it. Why was I writing only about Sinhalese hatred and not about Tamil terrorism? How dare I take the side of those murderous Tamils who milked the media for all it was worth? Before I could speak, she began a tirade on the misrepresentation of the Sri Lankan government by the British press. The British, she told me, were taken in by Tamil propaganda. The government merely wanted peace.
Having, as it were, a foot in both camps, my mother was Sinhalese, my father Tamil, I have frequently come up against the grievances of both groups. To a westerner, the difference is negligible. The west knows of Prabhakaran's cruel recruitment of child soldiers and his suicide bombers. It knows of the stubborn refusal of the government to allow international help to civilians in the war zone. The west has little patience for what appears a hopelessly confused scenario.
Lest we forget the shameful fact, Sri Lanka was the first country that managed to turn suicide into a weapon of war. What developed in that distant coral-rimmed island was a microcosm of what goes on around the globe today. Other wars have been modelled on this same tactic; nowhere is safe from its frightening, nihilist impact. By neglecting what was going on in Sri Lanka, the global community simultaneously turned a blind eye to the causes that lie behind suicide terror in other places. Thus it spread, silent as a deadly virus, ignored until it was too late. While Sri Lanka, first let down by the British who ruled it so wantonly (denying the Buddhist majority their religion, while favouring the Tamils), was let down once again. Like Israel and Palestine, like parts of Africa, like India and Pakistan, both sides in the conflict suffered a deep sense of injustice.
Meanwhile, as early as the 1960s, those who could began leaving the country. Desperately hounded Tamils were ready to go anywhere that might offer them peace, while richer, less desperate Sinhalese, looked for the quiet life away from political controversy.
Now, at last, the west is listening. Unicef and Amnesty are sending out clear messages, but these are being ignored by the Sri Lankan government. Damilvany Gnanakumar's eye witness story, told to Gethin Chamberlain in the Guardian today is a further shocking indictment.
The Singhalese are mainly Buddhist; once a gentle people, charged with the preservation of life. That they have failed so completely is a measure of how far the collective hysteria of war has led them astray. Without a doubt, the Sri Lankan Tamils have suffered terribly. Led by a man who took his people to the brink of annihilation, persecuted by a barbaric government, they have suffered twice over.
Today, denial and rage walk hand in hand, both at home and abroad, in the Sri Lankan community. These emotions need desperately to be addressed. Expatriates should throw off their complacency. What is happening in our homeland is our collective responsibility. We should demand that the government clear our name of this terrible stain and allow the international community into the country.
The shelling might have stopped, but the persecution continues. The only way towards peace is the release of those suffering in the appalling internment camps. Not years from now, but immediately. For the time has come to help our lost and beautiful island find some new blueprint for unity. It is a matter of both urgency and national pride.
Colonel Ram Found Up a Tree after Jailbreak: Sinhaloids Followed Stench Trail, Leading To Re-Arrest
[TamilNet, Saturday, 26 December 2009, 03:30 GMT]
Colonel Ram was recently re-arrested by the Sinhaloids after he broke out of jail, where he had been singing and eating well, and attempted the Eelamic version of The Great Escape.
Colonel Ram managed to escape from jail after knocking a prison guard unconscious with his extra-strong thalathel smell. He ran away to a nearby village where he hoped to sprout wings and fly off to safety far away from the Demonic Sinhaloid Yakkas who were making him sing.
However, he was drawn to a house by a very inviting aroma and stuck his hand inside a jar of biscuits because, you know, really smart people who escape from jail waste time munching on cookies. When the lady of the house, who was obviously a Sinhaloid racist, screamed her head off, our heroic Colonel Ram made a tactical withdrawal™ and did the marathon up a coconut tree in a bid to escape the Sinhaloids who were after him. Unfortunately for him, the Sinhaloids easily picked up the stench trail that was wafting in the air behind him and re-arrested the fugitive.
This is the same Colonel Ram who was reputed to have been hiding in the eastern jungles after Thalaivar was sent to Eelam in the sky. Jolly old KP anna even said that he was in contact with Colonel Ram, who had 2000 armed donkey cadres ready to launch Eelam War 5 on his command. As you can see, things have totally gone according to plan: KP was RENDITION GENOCIDED™ and brought to Sri Lanka while Colonel Ram had actually surrendered to the Sinhaloids ages ago and was chatting to KP anna while in their custody, thus giving KP anna the impression that the totally bad-ass Colonel Ram was ready for action while the Sinhaloids quietly traced his location. Both Ram and KP are currently eating well in Colombo and singing like rock stars on Eelam Idol.
Colonel Ram was recently re-arrested by the Sinhaloids after he broke out of jail, where he had been singing and eating well, and attempted the Eelamic version of The Great Escape.
Colonel Ram managed to escape from jail after knocking a prison guard unconscious with his extra-strong thalathel smell. He ran away to a nearby village where he hoped to sprout wings and fly off to safety far away from the Demonic Sinhaloid Yakkas who were making him sing.
However, he was drawn to a house by a very inviting aroma and stuck his hand inside a jar of biscuits because, you know, really smart people who escape from jail waste time munching on cookies. When the lady of the house, who was obviously a Sinhaloid racist, screamed her head off, our heroic Colonel Ram made a tactical withdrawal™ and did the marathon up a coconut tree in a bid to escape the Sinhaloids who were after him. Unfortunately for him, the Sinhaloids easily picked up the stench trail that was wafting in the air behind him and re-arrested the fugitive.
This is the same Colonel Ram who was reputed to have been hiding in the eastern jungles after Thalaivar was sent to Eelam in the sky. Jolly old KP anna even said that he was in contact with Colonel Ram, who had 2000 armed donkey cadres ready to launch Eelam War 5 on his command. As you can see, things have totally gone according to plan: KP was RENDITION GENOCIDED™ and brought to Sri Lanka while Colonel Ram had actually surrendered to the Sinhaloids ages ago and was chatting to KP anna while in their custody, thus giving KP anna the impression that the totally bad-ass Colonel Ram was ready for action while the Sinhaloids quietly traced his location. Both Ram and KP are currently eating well in Colombo and singing like rock stars on Eelam Idol.
S Lanka hosts wacky tuk-tuk race
By Charles Havliand
BBC News, Colombo
Two dozen brightly-coloured auto-rickshaws have just completed a nine-day charity rally around the hills and valleys of Sri Lanka.
The Great Sri Lankan Tuk-Tuk Challenge was organised partly to boost tourism after decades of war.
Not all the vehicles appeared entirely reliable, with a number of mechanical problems reported by contestants.
Nonetheless, it was an exuberant finish for racers from countries ranging from New Zealand to Switzerland.
Auto-rickshaws, crammed with contestants, chugged wearily into Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo.
Few had ever before driven one of these vehicles.
Arun Rajagopalan, from Bangalore in India, nearly came off a cliff at the start.
"We swung right, hit a very sharp turn at about 45km per hour, which is pretty fast on an uphill swing." And the tuk-tuk went over.
And we were actually on the side of the road. "It's just a villager who saw us and yelled for help. We picked up our tuk-tuk, we beat it up in shape, fixed the plugs and we rode again."
It was his first visit to Sri Lanka and he described it as "a wonderful place to be in", and felt it time for tourism to take off on the island.
'Funky transport'
One of the organisers, Julian Carnall, was from the UK and one from distant Colombia, Juan Paredes.
They call these three-wheelers "one of the funkiest modes of transport invented by man".
But Mr Paredes admitted the vehicles were not all roadworthy.
"Some had some engine problems. Most of them have cable problems, you know, gear reverse clutch and so on. But overall because we had a team of mechanics it was still OK," he said.
The charities helped include the Sri Lankan Red Cross and a group helping an indigenous forest community here, the Veddas.
The government has promoted the tuk-tuk challenge as a plank in its strategy to revive tourism, with the war over.
Bernard Goonetilleke, chairman of the Sri Lanka Tourism Promotions Bureau, said the event "showcases an important facet of everyday Sri Lankan living, the tuk-tuk, while discovering so many diverse destinations within the country".
There is not yet a complete sense of normality here, though.
The trishaws were held up for a long time as all the roads around the finishing point were closed off to let a VIP convoy pass - still an everyday occurrence here.
BBC News, Colombo
Two dozen brightly-coloured auto-rickshaws have just completed a nine-day charity rally around the hills and valleys of Sri Lanka.
The Great Sri Lankan Tuk-Tuk Challenge was organised partly to boost tourism after decades of war.
Not all the vehicles appeared entirely reliable, with a number of mechanical problems reported by contestants.
Nonetheless, it was an exuberant finish for racers from countries ranging from New Zealand to Switzerland.
Auto-rickshaws, crammed with contestants, chugged wearily into Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo.
Few had ever before driven one of these vehicles.
Arun Rajagopalan, from Bangalore in India, nearly came off a cliff at the start.
"We swung right, hit a very sharp turn at about 45km per hour, which is pretty fast on an uphill swing." And the tuk-tuk went over.
And we were actually on the side of the road. "It's just a villager who saw us and yelled for help. We picked up our tuk-tuk, we beat it up in shape, fixed the plugs and we rode again."
It was his first visit to Sri Lanka and he described it as "a wonderful place to be in", and felt it time for tourism to take off on the island.
'Funky transport'
One of the organisers, Julian Carnall, was from the UK and one from distant Colombia, Juan Paredes.
They call these three-wheelers "one of the funkiest modes of transport invented by man".
But Mr Paredes admitted the vehicles were not all roadworthy.
"Some had some engine problems. Most of them have cable problems, you know, gear reverse clutch and so on. But overall because we had a team of mechanics it was still OK," he said.
The charities helped include the Sri Lankan Red Cross and a group helping an indigenous forest community here, the Veddas.
The government has promoted the tuk-tuk challenge as a plank in its strategy to revive tourism, with the war over.
Bernard Goonetilleke, chairman of the Sri Lanka Tourism Promotions Bureau, said the event "showcases an important facet of everyday Sri Lankan living, the tuk-tuk, while discovering so many diverse destinations within the country".
There is not yet a complete sense of normality here, though.
The trishaws were held up for a long time as all the roads around the finishing point were closed off to let a VIP convoy pass - still an everyday occurrence here.
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