THIS DIVIDED Shortlisted for THE

SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE for

Non-fiction 2015

ISLAND Stories from the Sri Lankan War

SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN ‘A masterpiece, a Book of the Year, even possibly the decade’

MANI SHANKAR AIYAR, India Today

Praise for thIS DIVIDED ISLAND ‘This is narrative journalism at its most literary, diligently researched reportage presented with poetry and flair. subramanian has an eye for an image, an ear for an anecdote and an affection for the absurd. His descriptions of the bullet-ridden flatlands of Jaffna are on point, as are his chilling interviews with war widows and ex-terrorists’—shehan Karunatilaka, author of Chinaman, Mint Lounge ‘Like Philip Gourevitch’s account of the genocide in rwanda, We Wish to Inform You that tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, this is a superbly reported book. But its closest literary compatriot is Anil’s Ghost, Michael ondaatje’s poetic yet utterly disturbing novel that was a response to the bloodbath that followed a violent Marxist uprising in the early 1970s in sri Lanka and the then ongoing war with the Tamil Tigers’—rahul Jacob, Business Standard ‘With the humility of a truly gifted writer, samanth subramanian sets out, not to find firm answers to the reasons behind sri Lanka’s civil war, but rather to be changed and opened up by his journey through this warravaged land. His journey becomes ours. The things he discovers, the people he meets, haunt us long after we have closed the pages of this sensitive, poignant book’—shyam selvadurai ‘With this splendid book, samanth subramanian has performed a task that is very difficult at this moment for anyone who knows what is going on in sri Lanka; he has written a book about the ethnic war without losing his temper’—tehelka ‘subramanian walks the tightrope between taking sides brilliantly. The book is taut with this dichotomous tension, building it up much as it would have built up on the island in the deeply disturbed decades that led up to the bloody denouement that finally had us poring over grainy news photographs of a Prabhakaran with half his skull blown off’—the hindu ‘subramanian seeks to illuminate the war and its aftermath through a series of interviews that reflect the range of experiences that the war engendered. His interlocutors include several ex-Tigers, in sri Lanka and abroad; Tamils who bravely opposed the LTTe; two Buddhist monks, one socialist and one militant nationalist; and a number of journalists. To integrate these interviews into a broader historical narrative as seamlessly as subramanian has done is a rare achievement’—Keshava Guha, scroll.in

‘Brutal majoritarians and ruthless insurgents have long monopolized our sense of sri Lanka. samanth subramanian’s sensitive account makes us aware of a missing human dimension. exploring a war-ravaged landscape, he is bracingly alert to the role of ambiguity as well as ideology in human affairs. in this Divided Island, one of our finest young writers of nonfiction reveals the complicated lives lived in their shadow’—Pankaj Mishra ‘this Divided Island is a welcome read, very different from any other book written on this terrible chapter of human struggle. slow-cooked over a number of years, meticulously constructed and with a passion and sympathy for sri Lanka and her people, this Tamil–indian writer illuminates the central dilemma established midway through the book, and around which all hinges: What did it take for an ordinary, peaceable Tamil to commit to violence?’—Gordon Weiss, former UN spokesperson in sri Lanka

PeNGUiN BooKs

THis DiviDeD isLaND samanth subramanian is a New Delhi-based journalist. He has written for the New Yorker, New York times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, Caravan, Mint, New Republic and Foreign Policy. His first book, Following Fish: travels around the Indian Coast, won the 2010 shakti Bhatt first Book Prize in india and was shortlisted for the 2013 andré simon award in the United Kingdom. this Divided Island was shortlisted for the samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction 2015 and won the raymond Crossword Book award for Non-fiction 2014.

PENGUIN BOOKS USA Canada UK Ireland Australia New Zealand India South Africa China Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com Published by Penguin Random House India Pvt. Ltd 4th Floor, Capital Tower 1, MG Road, Gurugram 122 002, Haryana, India

First published in Hamish Hamilton by Penguin Books India 2014 Published in Penguin Books 2015 Copyright © Samanth Subramanian 2014 All rights reserved 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by him which have been verified to the extent possible, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same. ISBN 9780143425472 For sale in the Indian Subcontinent only Typeset in Sabon Roman by Ram Das Lal, New Delhi Printed at Repro India Limited

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. www.penguin.co.in

For Sanjaya, who, like his namesake in the Mahabharata, opened up the world to his unseeing friend

I wish I could persuade you to regard death as casually as we do over here. In the heat of it you expect it, you are expecting it, you are not surprised by anything anymore . . . —Jorie Graham, ‘Spoken from the Hedgerows’

CONTENTS

Timeline Introduction

xiii xv

The Terror

1

The North

91

The Faith

179

Endgames

233

Acknowledgements

319

N

INDIA JAFFNA

e

w

s

mullivaikal na ndikadal l agoon MULLAITIVU

KILINOCHCHI

MANNAr VAVUNIYA TRINcomalee

ANURADHAPURA

BATTICALOA

KANDY

COLOMBO

BADDEGAMA GALLE not to scale X

TIMELINE

1948: Ceylon gains independence from Great Britain. 1956: The Sinhala Only Act is passed, making Sinhalese the language of governance and failing to recognize Tamil as an official language. 1958: Anti-Tamil riots break out. An estimated 300 Tamils across the island are killed. 1971: The government implements the standardization policy, setting higher benchmarks for Tamil students to enter universities. 1972: Ceylon is renamed Sri Lanka, and Buddhism is given ‘the foremost place’ among the country’s religions. 1975: Velupillai Prabhakaran, twenty-one years old, assassinates the mayor of Jaffna, Alfred Duraiappah. 1976: Prabhakaran creates the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a successor to his earlier group, the Tamil New Tigers. 1977: Following the general elections, a fresh wave of antiTamil riots breaks out. Around 300 Tamils are slaughtered. 1983: A Tiger ambush of an army convoy in Jaffna triggers the worst anti-Tamil riots yet. Although numbers are unclear, up to 3,000 Tamils may have been killed. The ambush is often considered the beginning of the civil war. 1987–90: Indian Peace Keeping Forces swarm across the north and the east, trying without success to eliminate the Tigers. When they retreat, the Tigers hold Jaffna.

xiii

xiv

TIMELINE

1991: In retribution for sending in peacekeeping forces, the Tigers assassinate the former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. 1993: The Tigers are held responsible for the assassination of the Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa. 1995: After a brief truce, the Tigers lose control of Jaffna. 2002: Norway brokers a ceasefire between the Tigers and the government. 2004: The Tigers, having pulled out of peace talks the previous year, go on the offensive to regain the east, signalling a return to hostilities. That December, a tsunami kills 30,000 Sri Lankans. 2005: Mahinda Rajapaksa becomes president of Sri Lanka. 2006: The beginning of the fourth—and last—phase of the civil war. 2007: The government announces that it has cleared eastern Sri Lanka of Tigers. January 2009: The army captures Kilinochchi, which has served for a decade as the Tigers’ capital. February 2009: Concern mounts over the welfare of civilians trapped in the battle zone. May 2009: The government announces a victory over the Tigers, even as it shrugs off accusations of bombing civilians. Prabhakaran is killed on the final day of fighting. 2010: Rajapaksa wins re-election to the presidency. 2011: The United Nations releases a report accusing the Sri Lankan army of war crimes. The report estimates that 40,000 may have died in the final months of the civil war.

INTRODUCTION

war is a time of unfathomable flux. The terrains of the soul and of the body, of the family, of the community and of geopolitics itself all undergo extensive renovation. It can seem, sometimes, that even the very land rearranges itself. And, of course, in the fraction of a second that it takes for a bullet to find flesh, life can turn into death. There is no more drastic or permanent transformation than that. But peacetime can witness swift, profound change as well. In 2013, when I was writing the first draft of this book, Sri Lanka was a tense, wary place. Its twenty-six-year-long civil war had ended in 2009, in a final paroxysm of bloodletting. Mahinda Rajapaksa, the president of the country at the time, had supervised a brutal assault upon a mass of Tamil civilians huddled on the north-eastern shore of the island, hoping to flush out the leaders and guerrilla cadre of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The United Nations estimated that 40,000 people died in this bombardment, but the Sri Lankan government didn’t appear to care. It had ended the insurgency, hunted down its quarry, won the war. Not long afterwards, Rajapaksa won a re-election, and his family’s hold over the country grew tighter still. The government permitted no serious discussion of war crimes, and it throttled its opposition: politicians, activists, journalists. Right-wing nationalism grew muscular and fevered.

A TIME OF

xv

Winner of the Raymond Crossword Book Award for Non-fiction 2014 ‘[A] searingly angry and deeply moving portrayal of the agonies of this conflict . . . [A] major work . . . a fine literary monument against the government’s attempt at imposed forgetfulness’ AMIT CHAUDHURI, Guardian ‘[B]racingly alert to the role of ambiguity as well as ideology in human affairs . . . One of our finest young writers of non-fiction reveals the complicated lives lived in their shadow’ PANKAJ MISHRA ‘Slow-cooked over a number of years, meticulously constructed and with a passion and sympathy for Sri Lanka and her people’ GORDON WEISS, former UN spokesperson in Sri Lanka, Open In the summer of 2009, the leader of the Tamil Tigers was killed, bringing to a bloody end the stubborn and complicated civil war in Sri Lanka. For nearly thirty years, this war had stretched its fingers: into the bustle of Colombo, through Buddhist monasteries scattered across the island, up the soft hills of central Sri Lanka, down the curves of the eastern coast near Batticaloa and Trincomalee, and over the stark, hot north. Samanth Subramanian gives us an extraordinary account of this great modern conflict and the lives it changed. Taking us to the ghosts of summers past, he draws out the story of Sri Lanka today—an exhausted, disturbed society, still caught in the embers. This Divided Island is a harrowing and humane investigation by one of India’s finest narrative journalists.

Non-fiction

Cover illustration by Sourav Chatterjee Cover design by Ahlawat Gunjan

MRP `399 (incl. of all taxes)

www.penguin.co.in For sale in the Indian Subcontinent only