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Rasheeda Bhagat

Sri Lanka Voices from a War Zone By Nirupama Subramanian Publisher: Viking, Penguin Price: Rs 350

Journalists covering a conflict or war zone, particularly for a substantial spell of time, face a dilemma. Amidst the blood and gore, death and destruction, as they constantly battle to catch the deadline, chasing the latest in terms of the death count, the number of injured, the perpetrators of a bomb blast or a grenade attack, the breakthrough in nabbing the culprits, etc, in peddling the facts and figures their reportage tends to lose the human touch. As though the tragedy unfolding before them is not about human beings... real people with their dreams and aspirations... and can be captured in cold statistics. And by answering those essential questions you are trained to answer as a reporter... why, when, who, what...

It is in this context Nirupama Subramanian's Sri Lanka: Voices from a War Zone assumes significance. Having reported from Sri Lanka from 1995 to 2002, for India Today, The Indian Express and The Hindu, capturing "a period that coincided with the end of one peace process and the beginning of another", she admits that during those years she did not go "anywhere close to the actual fighting. Perhaps it was the government censorship of war coverage in Sri Lanka, perhaps it was my diffidence about breaking those rules." To compensate for what she then thought was "a huge gap" in her reporting, she travelled incessantly to the south and northeast areas to which journalists had access.

During her travel she met "ordinary people" who were extraordinarily affected by a conflict that was not of their making but which nevertheless shattered their lives. Though the author has skilfully interwoven the history and geography of Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict into the narrative and the peace accords that were signed only to be broken, at the end of the day the voices and images that haunt you are those of the father of Vasumathy, the young woman who had gone to the Central bank to collect a cheque on the day a suicide bomber attacked it, the mothers of child soldiers, the women who refused to accept that their husbands were dead until the Sri Lankan army could produce their bodies, children who escaped from the LTTE's training camps and, above all, that of Jagan, the Sri Lankan Tamil who could capture so clearly and eloquently for Nirupama the dilemma of the Sri Lankan Tamils.

Forced out of his home in Jaffna, owing to the bloody offensive between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan army in 1995, he returned in 1996 to a Jaffna under army control. But unable to adjust to life under the "new masters", in 1998 he shifted to Colombo in search of opportunities and was planning to return to Jaffna when the author met him. But for his disrupted life, he blamed only himself. "This is the calibre of the Tamil people... that we have allowed our national struggle to be appropriated... by a fascist organisation that terrorises its people."

And yet he didn't want the Tigers to be militarily defeated, because that day would "also be the end for Tamil nationalism."

So what option did the Tamils have?

"The Tigers have to be handled by us, the Tamils. We have allowed a tyrant to come up from among us. Now we have to throw him out." But this couldn't be done as long as the Sinhalese looked at the Tamils as their enemies. "We carry a double burden now. We have to fight Sinhalese racism and the tyranny of the Tiger, both together," says Jagan. That in essence captures the plight of the Sri Lankan Tamils.

Whether a conscious attempt or not, the author manages to walk the middle ground on how the bloody years of conflict have shattered the lives of both the Tamils and the Sinhalese and gives a brief sketch of why the "Tigers hate the (island's 8 per cent) Muslims". She explains that the Sri Lankan conflict is between people claiming separate national identities on the basis of language and even though the Sinhalese are mainly Buddhists and the Tigers mainly Hindu, with both having a Christian component, it is not a religious conflict. So where do the Muslims come into this picture? Though mainly Tamil speakers, "the Muslims do not view themselves as Tamil. They consider themselves a separate ethnic group identified by their religion."

It is interesting to learn from the author that at first many eminent Muslims identified with the Tamil cause till the Tigers turned on the Muslims, "accusing them of being informers of the Indian army and the Sri Lankan security forces and started killing them"!

A commendable feature of the book is that Nirupama is neither overawed by the Tigers nor bashes them unnecessarily. A very readable chapter in the book, particularly for journalists, is the press conference held by the LTTE chief V. Prabhakaran in April 2002. After fighting the temptation to reply "The Hilton" to an American journalist who asks her about the "best hotel in Vanni" ("an underdeveloped wilderness even before the war"), Nirupama says: "Preparing for the event was like preparing to scale Everest and my home office had begun to resemble a base camp. Apart from computer, camera, tape recorder, notebooks, pens, I would carry food and water to last four days, bedding, torches, batteries, candles, mosquito coils and a first-aid kit."

At the end of a mind-boggling security drill, one that would have put any post-9/11 airport checks to shame ("women cadres looked inside my nostrils, under my tongue, in gaps between my teeth, behind and inside my ears") and during which one journalist had the insoles of his shoes ripped open, the journos were crowded into a long hall. They had all been virtually the prisoners of the LTTE for over 24 hours. Finally, when Prabhakaran appeared at the conference — his first in over a decade — the man who had "masterminded terrorist attacks and suicide bombings, who killed off all his rivals, and was described as a military genius who commanded the undying fealty of his cadres, in his outdated chic, looked like a small-town businessman from India," says the author.

For Nirupama, the most important takeaway from the press conference was that Prabhakaran is "a prisoner for life, a Tiger locked in a cage of his making. In order to embrace normal life and democratic politics, Prabhakaran had to leave the cage first. He could never do that."

And yet this one man had shattered countless Sri Lankan lives. Such as that of Dayani, whose husband Vajira was declared missing in action by the Sri Lankan army. Convinced he would return some day, she had vowed to eat only vegetarian food and hardly went out to meet friends, saying: "When Vajira comes back we will visit all our friends together." Or Tamil refugees like Rajalingam Mahendran, constantly suspected of being LTTE informers, and made to go through unfathomable misery to get a daily pass just to move around. Or Vasumathy's father Somasundaram, who willingly agrees to talk about the death of his daughter in the suicide bombing, saying, "If we don't tell our stories, who will." She was to leave for Sydney three days later, and had gone to the bank to collect her money — "thirty-two thousand rupees; was it worth it," he asks.

It is the Afterword of the book, on the author's return to Sri Lanka in July 2003, when she found the 18-month-old ceasefire between the government and the Tigers holding, that leaves the reader with a sense of hope for this tiny and traumatised nation. This time Colombo was without roadblocks and checkpoints. Nirupama could now travel to Jaffna on a commercial flight, and see hundreds of Sri Lankan Tamils who had returned from overseas to check out their homes and meet relatives or friends. "The place was full of Tamil teenagers wearing cosmopolitan clothes and hairstyles, with pierced bodies and accents from England, Europe and North America." With Sinhalese too visiting Jaffna after long years, new hotels and guesthouses had come up and were packed.

A simple, yet invaluable part of the book is a good map of Sri Lanka and a timeline of events right from 1948 when Ceylon gained full independence from the British. A very readable book that breathes life into important events in the nation's troubled recent history, with flesh and blood figures telling their story simply... and as it is.

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