TAMILS FEAR THAT ‘TIGER KILLER’ WILL RETURN TO HIS PREY
Sri Lanka’s minority are worried about a renewed campaign of hate by new PM Mahinda Rajapaksa. Jack Moore reports from Colombo
On Galle Road, just a stone’s throw from the Indian Ocean, the smell of burning incense and sound of chanting drift on to the street from the Kathiresan Temple, a structure adorned with Hindu iconography and lotus flowers.
The holy site in the Colombo district of Bambalapitiya is devoted to Murugan, the Hindu god of war who grew up to destroy evil spirits.
But the members of the Tamil minority who predominate in this area of the Sri Lankan capital fear another old warlord who has returned to haunt them – Mahinda Rajapaksa.
Mr Rajapaksa is the nationalist who crushed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a separatist group that sought a federal state for Tamils, ending the civil war in 2009 in a brutal campaign aided by his brother, Gotabhaya, then defence minister.
The UN says the campaign left tens of thousands dead, wounded and missing.
The military under Mr Rajapaksa seized Tamil land in the north and east, which officers commandeered, building hotels, shops and businesses.
Ousted as president in 2015, Mr Rajapaksa, 72, is back as prime minister on the authority of his successor, President Maithripala Sirisena, in what many call an illegal and undemocratic changing of the guard.
Under pressure, the president will reconvene parliament on November 14 for a vote on his sacking of Ranil Wickremesinghe.
Until then, apprehension and suspicion permeate Sri Lanka’s Tamil communities. Anxiously awaiting the outcome of this crisis, Tamils are treading carefully and turning inwards.
Outside the temple entrance, Navaratnam, 62, a Tamil garland seller, stands next to his friend, a member of the Sinhalese ethnic group, Sri Lanka’s largest and the one from which Mr Rajapaksa comes.
“The situation is better,” Mr Navaratnam says when asked his opinion on the populist’s return. But when his friend walks off, he says what he really thinks.
“Since these people are back you can’t rule out suppression,” he says. “There is a likelihood but you never know how things will turn out.”
The new premier visited the temple the day before, bringing heavy security and making the stall owners leave while he was there. This was never the case with Mr Wickremesinghe, Mr Navaratnam says.
About a million Tamils have left Sri Lanka since the war began in 1983. The estimated 2.2 million remaining Tamils represent 13 per cent of the population, a significant drop in proportion to the Sinhalese.
Many who remain do not want to speak. The wounds of the 25year civil war and Mr Rajapaksa’s reign of terror are still raw.
A Bambalapitiya shop owner says the community is “worried and on alert”.
Mr Rajapaksa is regarded as thirsty for power and there is a “possibility of revenge” because he was beaten in the 2015 presidential race partly because of minority votes.
In the north, Tamils are using encrypted communications for fear of being monitored.
“Most of the people have switched to Telegram and Signal, two apps that are more secure than WhatsApp,” says Sutharshan Sukumaran, editor of the Tamil Guardian, a news website based in London.
Life improved for Tamils under Mr Wickremesinghe. They were allowed to protest and to commemorate those killed during the civil war. But now their concern is that those who have spoken out will become targets after the return of Mr Rajapaksa.
“A campaign of harassment, intimidation and killings of Tamil activists for political reasons remains the fear among Tamils,” says Mario Arulthas of People for Equality and Relief in Lanka, or Pearl, in Washington. The repercussions of such violence would be unthinkable.”
One man who knows better than most about what lies ahead is Mano Ganesan, 58, leader of the Tamil Progressive Alliance, a political union that represents 1.5 million Tamils living outside of the northern and eastern areas, and Minister of Integration, Reconciliation and Official Languages in Mr Wickremesinghe’s cabinet.
In 2006, during Mr Rajapaksa’s presidency, he set up a commission to investigate extrajudicial killings and disappearances. That year, the alliance co-founder, Nadarajah Raviraj, was assassinated.
Mr Ganesan was runner-up in the UN Freedom Defender award a year later, which he believes has protected him from a hit.
“Bringing justice, finding the people who have gone missing or not, finding the abductors, there has been small progress,” he tells The
National. “Under Rajapaksa’s new regime, all progress will be nullified.”
On Friday, as the power struggle in Colombo continued, a Sri Lankan court ordered the arrest of the country’s top military officer over the abduction and murder of 11 people during the civil war.
The judge censured top police investigators for failing to follow an order to arrest Adm Ravindra Wijegunaratne. It is unclear if he will be detained.
The military under Mr Rajapaksa is accused of war crimes, including firing indiscriminately into no-fire zones where thousands of civilians had massed, and shooting dead Tamil leaders who tried to surrender, on orders of the state.
He denied all allegations and refused to co-operate with a 2014 UN Human Rights
Council investigation. The Tamil Tigers were also accused of war crimes.
Sri Lankan police and military have continued to mistreat Tamil activists in the north and east since Mr Rajapaksa’s defeat in 2015, but could be emboldened by his return, Tamil activists and legislators say.
A surveillance network set up by Mr Rajapaksa to monitor and detain Tamils has been dormant since his departure; that could be revived. Tamils fear reinvigorated militarisation, even though there have been no Tamil violence since the war ended nine years ago.
Tamil activists and former fighters say detention and torture persists. Much of the land seized by the military in the war has not been returned to its owners, despite government pledges to do so. Now Mr Rajapaksa is back, that land is unlikely to leave military hands.
Sukumaran says if Mr Rajapaksa has his way, Sri Lanka could return to war, becoming like Myanmar where the military has killed thousands of Rohingya and displaced hundreds of thousands more.
The military is not controlled by the constitution and operates beyond the oversight of Sri Lanka’s parliament, he says.
“Failing to note militarisation in the north-east will lead to another situation like Myanmar where they thought they had restored democracy, but it ended in a Nobel Peace Prize winner being unable to stop a genocide,” Sukumaran says.
Mr Rajapaksa’s reputation for human rights offences has left advocacy groups and the international community stunned by Mr Sirisena’s welcome for him. Mr Sirisena was elected with a mandate to investigate atrocities against Tamils, but justice did not materialise.
“To date there’s been no investigation of these allegations,” said Thyagi Ruwanpathirana, South Asian researcher at Amnesty International. “The post-war period did not see any truth, reparation or justice initiatives that lived up to the expectations of the Tamil community.
“Given this experience, a re-emergence of the same rulers does not give cause for hope for the Tamil community.”
In a twist, the Tamils may hold the country’s future in their hands, that is if Mr Sirisena respects parliament and allows it to vote on the rightful premier.
The main Tamil party, the Tamil National Alliance, says it will use its 15 seats to vote against Mr Rajapaksa, who remains neck and neck with Mr Wickremesinghe, with both estimated to have 102 backers in the 225-seat parliament.
One Tamil MP, S Viyalendran, has for reasons unknown defected to Mr Rajapaksa’s camp, a move that confused a betrayed party who censured him for “being a part of this conspiracy”.
Regardless of that worrying move, the Tamil vote could yet swing the fortunes in favour of Mr Wickremesinghe.
Mr Rajapaksa is known for his love of gold jewellery, earning him the nickname “Lord of the Rings”. His charms, bracelets and talismans bring him good fortune and supernatural strength, he believes.
For now, they appear to have worked. A man Sri Lankans voted out three years ago has been spirited back to power by the country’s most senior figure.
That may be short-lived. Some of the Tamils who survived his decade-long rule feel their luck has run out again. But the power to restore democracy, and banish their demon, rests in their leaders’ hands.