Jude Ratnam’s film breaks silence on ‘madness’ of civil war in Sri Lanka
CANNES, France: Jude Ratnam is worried how his film might go down with his fellow Sri Lankan Tamils. And he has a point.
Demons in Paradise tells of the bloodbath that drove some Tamils to take up arms in the three decade-long insurgency.
But the documentary also shatters a taboo by insisting that some of most horrific violence the minority endured was at the hands of their supposed defenders, the Tamil Tigers.
Tamil Tigers leader Velupillai Prabhakaran was shot dead in 2009 in the final stages of the war.
And the “hard truth” comes from the mouths of former Tamil fighters themselves.
“By making this film I know that I will have to face harsh, perhaps even hateful criticism from both communities,” Ratnam said.
“The Sinhalese will claim that I am betraying my country by stirring up the past that is best forgotten. The Tamils will insist that I betrayed our cause by revealing the atrocities committed by the Tamil Tigers.”
As many as 20,000 civilians died as the Tigers — led by Prabhakaran, whose supporters venerated him — imposed their will through a bloody reign of terror in the Tamil- dominated north.
Ratnam believes another 10,000 disappeared after being tortured or taken to camps.
“If you don’t recognise that madness and just keep saying we were the victims, you are not facing the truth,” he added.
In the film, witnesses talk of the almost daily public executions of “spies” and “traitors” in the Tigers’ stronghold of Jaffna. Opponents were also “necklaced” with burning car tyres.
In one scene Ratnam brings together rival former fighters to talk for the first time around a campfire about what they saw and did.
If the film has a hero, it is his uncle, a former fighter who grew disillusioned with the struggle and risked his life to smuggle civilians out of Jaffna.
He returned from Canada with Ratnam to the family’s ancestral village near Kandy to reunite with Sinhalese neighbours who hid him during earlier antiTamil violence in 1977.
“He’s a great man,” Ratnam said. “When I was 16 and I saw my people dying I wanted to fight. But he was the first to return and say, ‘ This wrong, it’s messed up. What is going on is madness’.” — AFP