The Age of Kali (39 page)

It was just as well. The place was a hive of activity, buzzing with no fewer than two thousand heavily armed guerrillas. Some were attending political lectures, sitting in rapt attention as a senior Tiger harangued them with revolutionary rhetoric; others were busy with target practice or assault courses or weapons training; some were playing volleyball; others queued up for haircuts, the barbers’ chairs surreally removed from their proper place to sit between two peepul trees in the clearing.

As striking as the sheer scale of the place was the age of the
guerrillas. The overwhelming majority were in their early teens – just old enough to join the Boy Scouts in England. The same had been true of many of the Tigers I had seen in Jaffna, but then I had assumed that these were just the reserves, and that the real grown-up commandos were in the camps. Here for the first time it became clear that the Indians had been defeated by a guerrilla force whose average age cannot have been a year over eighteen.

The younger the Tiger, the more anxious he was to prove himself a full-blooded guerrilla. You did not have to talk to any of them for long before they began boasting about the operations they had been on; and they were not making it up. Did I remember the copse of palmyra trees just before I left the main road, asked two boys of about thirteen. That had been the site of a big ambush earlier in the year. They had let off two huge landmines and blown up six trucks in a convoy, then they had gunned down the survivors – killed nearly fifty Indians, they said. It was wonderful. I should have been there. Another, perhaps a year younger, began telling me of the booby-traps he had laid further in to the jungle. Small anti-personnel mines hidden in tree-stumps: took off a man’s legs, but rarely killed him. Good strategy, he said: wounded Indians used up more resources than dead ones. By the end the Indians were so scared they never dared leave the roads. Cowards! Chickens!

Castro had been firm that I was only to be allowed a glimpse of the camp, a taster. My last image before I was driven away was a party of ten boys carrying great lumps of raw, bloody meat in to the camp. The meat was skewered through by long wooden poles which the boys carried on their shoulders, one at each end. As I saw the meat, I suddenly thought of those pictures of the Tigers standing over the dead Indian bodies, triumphant over the bullet-mauled corpses. I shuddered. There was far too much blood here. I had seen enough.

Sitting now in Delhi six months later, thinking back on that journey, I remember one incident in particular.

It was a feast day in Jaffna, and I was late for church. I hurried through the deserted streets, past the gutted houses and the bombed-out shops, to the dusty square in front of the cathedral. It was a white-hot, sticky-hot tropical afternoon, and the plaster on the front of the cathedral had been pockmarked three inches deep by the bursts of shrapnel, grenades and fragmentation bombs. Pieces of broken stained glass lay scattered under the rose window, but the grotto of the Virgin beneath it was untouched; around her neck someone had hung a garland of orange marigolds, as if she were a Hindu goddess.

Inside, Mass was just beginning. The pews were packed, and segregated: men on the left, women on the right. The Bishop of Jaffna led a convoy of white-robed clergy up the central aisle, past the bleeding image of the Sacred Heart, and up to the altar. Everyone was singing, the schoolgirls in their white veils, the seminarians in their black serge cassocks, even the odd Tamil guerrilla, gun still strapped to his waist, and as they sung the ceiling fans whirred above the pews, round and around.

Just as the opening hymn was reaching its climax, through the singing I could suddenly hear a second sound, the noise of rotor blades, first distant, then throbbing loudly down, directly above the congregation. The sound echoed around the cathedral, and everyone looked up in instant, horrified recognition: although there was now a truce, it was just a few months since the bombardment, and everybody knew the sound of the gunships only too well. Slowly the hymn tailed off, until only two or three of the children
in the choir were still singing, encouraged by the frantic gestures of the choirmaster. Then even they fell quiet.

The helicopter passed on, and the Bishop began the Mass as if nothing had happened, but the tension in the cathedral remained. Jaffna was on edge; it had already been the site of two sieges, two battles, and everyone knew the third could not be far away. Everybody in the town – Christian and Hindu – was praying for peace.

In the event, of course, their prayers were not answered. The negotiations with the Sri Lankan government were a failure: the Tigers, delighted with their victory over the Indians, became arrogant and demanded too much. There were violent clashes. Then, on 13 June 1990, the Tigers went too far. They pounded Sri Lankan Army camps with mortars and seized 650 Singhalese policemen on duty in Tiger-held northern Sri Lanka. The policemen have never reappeared, and are feared dead. On 20 June, the Sri Lankan Army moved out of its barracks and headed north. Jaffna was under siege again; its third assault in three years.

The Tigers themselves were usually fanatics: severe, doctrinaire and rigorously disciplined, they were rarely good company. But the Jaffna townfolk were friendly people, tired of war, and were always ready to gossip.

So now I think of the people I met in the town. I wonder what has happened to those I met at the cathedral: the shy seminarians, the Bishop’s efficient secretary, the angry choirmaster. In the shady cloisters of the cathedral I had tea with the Bishop on Easter Saturday; he looked like Robert Morley, wore a dirty cassock and nursed a large paunch. When he talked about the last Indian attack on his cathedral town he blushed bright red: ‘The Indians stopped my car fifty yards from my palace and demanded to see my papers,’ he fumed. ‘Imagine! Me – the Bishop!’

And what has happened to poor Anton Alfred, the civil servant appointed Jaffna GA (Government Agent) by the Sri Lankan authorities? He had no power in a town controlled by the Tigers, yet he was expected to keep the place working, to maintain the schools,
to run the buses. He was a small man – dwarfed by his huge Victorian desk – but he was very brave. If the truce broke, he knew the Tigers would come for him; they had shot his predecessor, and would have no compunction about doing the same to him.

‘It is not a very enviable position to hold,’ he said, ‘but someone has got to do this service. One must try to go on …’

And what has happened to Comrade Dilani, the prettiest guerrilla in Jaffna? Recently I read that several of the Freedom Birds had fled to India, but I doubt if Dilani was among them.

The reports from Jaffna have become ever more grim. For three months there has been neither water nor electricity in the town, and nothing works: not the telephones, not the banks, not the post offices, not even the market. There is no petrol, and food is selling for ten times its normal price. The Sri Lankan forces who are besieging the town let nothing through; even candles and matches are stopped.

But the most terrible aspect of the siege is the bombing and the strafing. The strafing, from Bell-412 helicopter gunships, is relatively state-of-the-art, with sudden swoops disrupting funeral processions, emptying streets, picking off old men at crossroads. But as the Sri Lankan Air Force has no modern bombers, the bombing is a lot less high-tech. It is, in fact, about as crude and as random as the stones flung by a medieval mangonel. The government is killing its own people with Chinese Y-12 transport planes. The slow, lumbering aircraft carry home-made three-hundred-kilogram bombs, packed in to wooden barrels. These are rolled manually out of the cargo hatch – simple, but effective nonetheless: countless homes, the Tirunveli market, the central railway station and the Jaffna Memorial Hospital have all been blown to pieces in this way in the past month. One Indian correspondent reported seeing a woman scavenging in the street: it was only on closer inspection that he realised she was collecting pieces of her husband’s flesh for cremation; he had been passing on a bicycle when a bomb went off nearby.

One week Jaffna was subjected to what its inhabitants called
‘shit-bomb attacks’ – barrels of excrement rolled out of aircraft. They caused little physical damage, but made Jaffna smell like a sewer, and the city’s already frightened inhabitants suspected they were being subjected to some sort of crude experiment in biological warfare.

Actual civilian casualties in Jaffna are of course hard to estimate in mid-siege, but according to the Tigers they stand at about four thousand, a terrible toll in a town of only sixty thousand inhabitants. As a retired government official told one correspondent: ‘It is a living hell – that is, for those of us who are alive.’

Meanwhile, in the centre of Jaffna, like Russian dolls stacked one within another, there was a siege within the siege.

One of the finest colonial relics in Sri Lanka was the magnificent sixteenth-century Dutch fort. Its walls had long been elegantly crumbling, but they were hastily rebuilt when the Easter truce dissolved in to the June war. Like a scene from the Indian Mutiny, the defunct fort suddenly became a last place of refuge for the Singhalese trapped in Jaffna – traders, government officials, policemen and a small detachment of two hundred government troops.

The houses around the fort were quickly levelled by the Sri Lankan Air Force to provide the defenders with a clear killing-field around the walls. Undaunted, the Tigers dug a network of trenches to encircle the fort, and proceeded to pound it with mortar and heavy-artillery fire. They followed this up with a series of desperate assaults, on one occasion coming at the walls protected by the only armour they possessed: bulldozers and dumper trucks. In another attempt a fifteen-year-old boy was sent to climb the walls with explosives strapped to his body, so as to blow them at their weakest
point – but at the last minute he was spotted and shot by the defenders. The explosives went off, and the blast could be heard twelve miles away, but the old Dutch walls held.

It was only after ninety-six days, with food and water running short, that the fort was finally relieved. After a preliminary bombardment, the Sri Lankan government sent a thousand crack troops across the Jaffna lagoon on dinghies. Six were sunk and an old Italian Siamarchetti fighter shot down, but the troops managed to land and fight their way through to the southern gate of the fort. The garrison was evacuated, but attempts to fan out and capture more of Jaffna failed. On 26 September the government troops abandoned the fort under cover of darkness. The Tigers raised the flag of an independent Tamil Eelam from the battlements two days later.

Jaffna remains under siege. Though the government forces will probably succeed in taking the town, as the Indians did before them, it is unlikely that they will succeed in crushing the Tigers. Like a rerun of an old movie, the Tigers will escape to their secret camps deep in the jungle, and there they will bide their time until the moment comes to counter-attack. For as long as the Singhalese continue to discriminate against Tamils, there will always be new Tiger recruits to fill the shoes of those who are killed. The Tigers are ruthless, certainly, but they survive because they are perceived by the Tamil population to be fighting genuine injustice.

In the meantime, the random bombing of Jaffna goes on, and civilian casualties continue to mount. The government claims it merely wishes to ‘rid the Tigers of their lair’, but rightly or wrongly, the people of Jaffna detect more sinister motives. As one of Comrade Dilani’s Freedom Birds told me on my last visit: ‘We must continue to fight, for if we do not, the Singhalese will not rest until they have ejected the Tamils from this island once and for all.’

Postscript

Seven years later, the civil war is still limping on. Jaffna fell in 1993, and at the time of writing the Tigers have indeed been driven back in to the jungles. The government now controls all the towns of the Jaffna Peninsula, but it is unable to keep the roads open or to prevent the Tigers emerging from the shadows to regain effective control of the peninsula every evening after dark.