It appears that the Sri Lankan government had somehow forgotten about the existence of the mobile phone.
That was the blunder it made in 2009, when it launched the final onslaught deep into the territory of Tamil insurgents to end a 26-year-old civil war. It kept the news media and human rights organizations out of the war zone, and from the evidence that has emerged, it did not plan to leave many witnesses.
But over the last three years, video clips and photographs shot on mobile phones of the final months of the civil war have surfaced and what they show are executions of men, women and children whose limbs are bound, and the shelling of civilians by the Sri Lankan army.
The Sri Lankan government maintains that these images are ‘‘lies.’’ My latest Letter From India column is set against this background.
It is not as if the insurgents, the Tamil Tigers, were meek underdogs. Headed by Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tigers were one of the most ruthless and dangerous terrorist organizations in the world, who lured or forced impoverished Tamils, including children â€" among them an unknown number of girls â€" into taking up arms. In the end they used their own people as human shields against the advancing Sri Lankan army.
The complicity of the Sri Lankan state and of the Tigers in the brutality of the civil war is well documented.
But there is a group that has gotten away â€" the Tamil expatriate middle class that had settled in affluent nations, and financed and supported the Tigers in the name of nationalism. As it so often happens, when the end of the revolution came, they were fine and it was the poor with no means of escaping their geography w! ho had become the body count.
As Niromi de Soyza, who joined the Tigers as an idealistic 17-year-old, hints in one of her chilling accounts of her experience as a female militant, from the late 1980s, the Tamil population of Sri Lanka, especially the poor, were tired of the war and disenchanted with the Tigers. But they had to content themselves with their repressive ‘‘liberators.’’
It is easy to fund nationalism when you are far away in the comfort of Britain or the United States, when you have no stake in the war, when you are not going to be used as a human shield and your daughter’s safety is not threatened. It is easy to sponsor the ‘‘liberators’’ who share your love for your language and your dream for it to have a permanent home, when your child is not going to battle with a cyanide capsule strung around her neck to ensure an ‘‘honorable’’ death if captured.
When the Tamil insurgency began, it was a middle-class movement, as such nationalistic movements oftn are at their inception. But in the 1980s, as the war intensified, the Tamil middle class migrated in huge numbers to India and to the West. Those who did not have the opportunity to escape were the ones who eventually became the bodies that gave gravitas to a middle-class movement.
Among the many heartbreaking photographs of the civil war, there is one that shows three early adolescent girls, just children, in the fatigues of the Tigers. They are looking straight into the camera with bright juvenile eyes. Where are they now What happened to them Did they grow up into happy young women in the glow of a family Hope they made it to the United States or Britain or Australia or India. Probably not.
