by Rohini Mohan
Among these men, Sarva spoke in Tamil freely, even to excess. An ageing prisoner from his cell once asked why Sarva ‘jabbered away like someone had turned on a tap inside him’. The places the prisoners came from, their schools, their wives’ villages, their favourite foods—anything would suffice for Sarva to find a connection. During the very first week in his cell, he swapped notes with twenty-nine-year-old Rooban about their idyllic childhoods. The stealing of mangoes in summer, the anger on losing one’s precious marbles or wickets to a bully, the devouring of stories in Tamil literature textbooks even before classes began. Rooban used to work in a rice mill. He had a handsome face and lustrous hair, but it was his timidity that was his most pronounced physical characteristic.
When Sarva was brought to the cell, Rooban saw him wincing while sitting on the floor. ‘I can’t sit down either,’ he said. ‘Is it only your lower back or your feet, too?’
‘Feet also,’ Sarva replied.
Rooban said he was from Valaignarmadam, in Mullaitivu in the north. ‘Where are you from?’
‘Nuwara Eliya,’ Sarva had said first, but then added, ‘My mother’s side is from the north.’
Like Sarva, Rooban had been pulled off a street, but in Vavuniya, a city in the north that was under government control. He was detained in a cow shed for about six months along with three strangers he had not heard of since. When his bladder had ruptured from a severe kicking, he was moved to a hospital in Colombo and then to the TID basement. He was cagey about the details of what happened to him there except for mentioning once that he was suspended from the ceiling by his ankles for half a day with a bucket of petrol evaporating slowly beneath his head. His interrogators had asked him to sing the national anthem in Sinhala, and he had only known the Tamil version learnt in school. It was a state-approved Tamil translation of the Sri Lankan anthem that government schools all over the north taught, but in a dark room with the anti-terrorism police, nothing was innocuous.
In prison, Sarva saw Rooban struggle to comprehend Sinhala instructions and get into tight spots with officials who didn’t speak Tamil. He wasn’t ‘one of those separatists’ who didn’t want to learn Sinhala, Rooban said. In his part of the country, he had never needed more than Tamil. Sarva told him not to bother learning Sinhala. After all, Sarva spoke Sinhala, and he was accused of espionage.
During a morning assembly in their ward a few months later, when the national anthem was being sung, Rooban and Sarva broke into the Tamil rendition, hoping to get caught so that they could retort that the Tamil anthem wasn’t outlawed. No one noticed, however, until, in desperation, they switched to the dirty version passed on for generations by older boys to high school kids. This variant moved a few words around, turning patriotic descriptions of Mother Sri Lanka into a tribute from hormonal teenagers to a curvaceous woman. When the part about ‘thou, laden with luscious fruit’ set off the giggles among a whole section of inmates, the friends were finally punished with sweeping duty for a week. A week later, they did it again.
They spread silly rumours about prisoners: that the gruff cellmate had a mellifluous voice, the vegetarian had taken to meat, the cricketer Muthiah Muralitharan was soon to visit. When the day prison officials gave in to the G Cell’s demand for a Pillaiyar statue for prayer, Rooban and Sarva suggested smuggling mobile phones in through the statue’s pot belly. They got a parent to seal a phone on the inside of the papier mâché idol and deliver it covered in garlands during visiting hours. Another prisoner bribed a guard so he wouldn’t run a metal detector over the idol, but Sarva and Rooban always took credit for the idea. They behaved as if they were in school, rebelling against suffocating rules and routines in small, entertaining ways. Sarva told Rooban that with him around, he sometimes forgot that he was in prison for the worst crime in the country.
If there was a brutal reminder of where they were, it was the ritual they underwent every fortnight. Neither Sarva nor Rooban were told why they were taken to a basement every fifteen days in batches of sixty, a metal chain looping through the cuffs on their wrists and ankles. It was a long human snake, the distance between the prisoners shortening towards the end. Barely five inches separated the last of the chained men, and as they walked down three flights of stairs to a dark basement, they shuffled and bumped into each other. Once, a prisoner tripped and about fifty-five of them tumbled with him. As if the broken ribs, chipped teeth and injuries were not enough, the guards immediately swung batons at them, accusing them of deliberately delaying the procedure by creating a ruckus. Rooban, who found himself underneath two other prisoners, fractured his forearm.
In this basement, a man of authority sat on an old wooden chair at a metal table covered with files. In the sick white glow of a humming fluorescent light, he scanned the files and called out names or numbers. As the prisoner called came forward, the seated figure glanced up almost imperceptibly and stamped a sheet of paper. Next!
The process took a whole day, as several chains of prisoners were brought in and took turns going to the front. Through it all, the chains stayed on their wrists. No toilet breaks were allowed, all meals for the day were cancelled, no talking was tolerated. It was a soul-deadening exercise, exhausting and disorienting. Every time, Sarva imagined that the stamp was on his neck, like red-hot metal branding cattle. The prisoners called this paathalam, the hell underground.
Only after months did Sarva and Rooban realise that the paathalam was the prison’s court and the stamp a fortnightly extension of their detention. The anti-terrorism law they were arrested under allowed the Investigation Department to keep them in remand prison or in a police station for three months without being charged, even before they had a shred of evidence against them. Once the three months were up, the police asked for more time to gather evidence for a charge sheet, and they kept doing so every two weeks. These extensions, under the PTA, could allow for endless detention and more harassment of the prisoner. Charges were filed in very few cases; eventually detainees would have spent anywhere from six months to several years wasting away in jail, still unclear as to what they were being accused of.
Sarva understood some of this only after Amma hired a lawyer in January 2009. The advocate on record, Mr Vel, visited only once, and Sarva was too intimidated to ask the various whys, whats, and hows he was bursting with. He knew he was being accused of terrorism, of having worked for the LTTE as a spy. But he didn’t get why he was moved from prison to prison, what he was waiting for, what remand meant, why the lawyer said he could do nothing until the police actually filed charges, ‘which could be anytime or never’. It was only after Mr Vel’s junior lawyer, a young, cherubic woman called Sumati, started to visit Sarva that his situation became slightly clearer.
Sumati’s arrival always caused a tizzy among Sarva’s cellmates. ‘What! You get babes visiting you, you lucky fellow,’ one of them whistled. For kicks, Sarva let them believe the pretty, chipper woman was his girlfriend. She always draped her saris professionally and carried lots of files; Rooban asked if she was a teacher and congratulated Sarva on scoring a girlfriend with a government job. When Sumati came, she usually asked for a private conversation in the visitors’ room, a privilege lawyers were sometimes allowed. There, she patiently dissected for Sarva the legal web he was caught in.
Sarva was arrested under the 1979 Prevention of Terrorism Act, or PTA, originally passed as a temporary law to fight communist insurgents, mostly rural Sinhalese youth. It was made permanent in 1982, by which time the state was under attack not only from regrouped insurgents in the south but also Tamil militants in the north. By the early nineties, the leftist insurgency was quelled, with about 7,000 members detained under the PTA and emergency laws. After that, the law was used to arrest Tiger sympathisers, largely Tamils, but also some Sinhalese and Muslims.
Sumati said that Sarva was luckier than most because he was arrested directly under the PTA. The more common practice was to arrest people under the Emergency Regulations, which had been in place lon
ger than the PTA, and nearly continuously from 1971. In these decades the police had perfected the systematic abuse of detainees. They would be detained without charge for up to two years under emergency law, and then have the PTA slapped on them, extending the detention by another eighteen months. This explained why Rooban, who was detained in mid-2006, was still in prison when Sarva got there in 2008. The double stranglehold of the Emergency Regulations and the PTA could keep a person in custody for up to fifteen years based on mere suspicion, without being charged. No evidence was necessary.
Sumati warned Sarva not to sign any statements the police showed him. The PTA was Sri Lanka’s only law under which confessions made to the police during custody were admissible as evidence in court. Sumati said three of the four PTA detainees she had represented had succumbed to threats and admitted to crimes they did not commit. She asked him to recall whatever got him through the TID torture. ‘Confession is suicide,’ she said.
Sarva knew he was fortunate just to have a legal representative. Amma had pulled many strings to find these lawyers, and was digging through John’s retirement fund to pay them. Most prisoners could not afford this. Rooban did not have a lawyer either, but Sumati advised him free of charge on occasion. Despite the desperate situation, with a better understanding of his situation, Sarva began to nurse a little hope. With a privilege such as an advocate, perhaps the odds, however tiny, could turn in his favour.
This optimism was only bolstered when J. S. Tissainayagam was brought to Sarva’s ward. A reputable English-language journalist, Tissa, as he was known, was booked under the PTA for allegedly inciting communal hatred through his articles and aiding terrorism by collecting funds for his magazine. The other prisoners were heartened to have Tissa in their midst, eating the same bland food, walking the same grey corridors, and bearing the brunt of the same unfair law. Those who chatted with him raved about his simplicity and good humour. A celebrity who was just like them.
Sarva had not come across Tissa’s articles but had read reports on him since his detention. He knew Tissa was arrested three months before he was. When Tissa was brought to the same cell, Sarva mentioned to Rooban, for the first time, his appetite for news reportage. He had begun to imagine that his destiny was interlinked with Tissa’s.
In truth, however, their trajectories couldn’t have been more different. Although he was imprisoned with the rest, Tissa was a VIP, watched closely both by the guards within and his fraternity outside. Every political prisoner yearned for the kind of raucous support the journalist had. The liberal elites of Sri Lanka demanded his release, condemned the government for targeting the free press, and questioned the practice of labelling any dissenter a terrorist. ‘Release Tissa’ posters, with his gaunt, bespectacled face printed in stark red and black, challenged postwar state authoritarianism. The campaign, spearheaded by Sri Lankan activists and scaled up by the Tamil diaspora, had begun to have global impact. President Barack Obama had mentioned Tissa on the 2009 World Press Freedom Day as ‘an emblematic example’ of the persecution of journalists. The battle to free Sarva, on the other hand, was fought only by his mother.
10.
February 2009
ALTHOUGH ONLY A handful in the Vanni had any reliable information about what was happening around them, it was not difficult for Mugil and the others, in the yawning time between the shelling and their meals, to stitch together a coherent story from conversations. All the recent talk was about the hospital bombings; fact and conjecture began to dissolve into each other.
In Mugil’s experience, the army had never before targeted hospitals in the Vanni. But all that had changed now. The Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu general hospitals were hit in December. Long-range missiles came dangerously close to several makeshift clinics and a shower of flying metal hit the patients. A month earlier, twelve people had died and sixty-eight were injured in the bombardment of the Vallipuram and Udayarkattu hospitals. In some of these cases, the Sri Lankan government claimed that the army had credible intelligence that Tiger cadres were hiding in the clinics. At other times, they talked about collateral damage—civilians simply happened to be in the way.
The February attacks on the PTK hospital, however, fitted neither explanation. As the war intensified, millions of Tamils were displaced from across the north and east, and the hospital premises became a safe haven for the gravely injured and their families. It was one of the few areas in which the government permitted Red Cross workers to treat civilians. It was also common knowledge that there was a highly visible Red Cross sign on the hospital’s terrace, marking it as a medical facility to be avoided by bombers flying overhead.
In the first three days of February, the army shelled the PTK general hospital repeatedly. Since the centre of the building was bombed and not the annex or side wings, it was unlikely to have been hit in error. Over seventy-two hours, six separate air attacks rained shells over the women’s ward, paediatric ward, staff quarters, operation theatres and about 500 civilians seeking treatment. As the medical staff and Red Cross workers tried to evacuate some 200 patients and fifty severely injured children from the war zone, the shelling moved to a private medical facility in the town, the Ponnambalam Memorial Hospital. Sixty people died in and around it.
Every day since the hospitals were hit, Mugil had thought about the pregnant girl and her grandmother. They would have been in the women and children’s ward. Mugil hoped they escaped with a few bruises. She imagined them walking away in safety, a healthy baby cradled in her mother’s arms. She imagined she would run into them suddenly, around a corner, two recognisable faces among the thousands. She imagined they would not blame her for leaving them to die at the hospital.
A week after the attacks, the government held a press conference in Colombo to deny that hospitals had been targeted. To a room full of journalists, Ministry of Defence officials displayed satellite images of the PTK hospital. In the photos, the building was intact. ‘There has been no attack on the hospital,’ said one official. Questions about whether the picture was taken before the date of attack were not answered. Around the same time, Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, the military spokesperson, stated, ‘We don’t fire shells on that area. There is no requirement for us to fire into there.’ Then, contradicting the press conference claim that the hospital was untouched, he said the hospitals had indeed been hit, but by the Tigers. ‘It must be LTTE shells, as they are desperately firing.’
Few among the Tamil locals and international aid workers in PTK had any doubt who was firing on the hospital. It was clear that the shells came from the southern end, where the 57th Sri Lankan army was stationed.
Every statement from the government contradicted some earlier pronouncement. The Ponnambalam hospital, which was known to treat both civilians and cadres, was said to have been hit because it housed militants. Indeed, of the sixty who died when it was shelled, fourteen were Tamil Tigers. If Brigadier Nanayakkara’s argument held, why would the Tigers bomb themselves? Moreover, in PTK hospital, there was no proof that Tigers outnumbered civilians to such an extent that the air force had no option but to attack.
Even in the worst of times, the Tamils had not expected the Sri Lankan army to shell the sick and dying. But as the bombings continued, and the Red Cross workers left the hospital with the severely injured, disbelief was a luxury no one could afford.
Mugil’s father began to believe that the army’s intentions went beyond defeating the Tigers, or winning back territory. ‘I get it now,’ Father said, a new conviction gripping him. ‘What do you do when you can’t deal with locusts? You burn the field. That’s what they’re doing—eradicating as many Tamils as possible.’
The PTK bunkers were rife with arguments about the hospital shelling, the rising number of injuries, the food shortages and displaced and separated families. But the hardest developments to digest were conscription and the loss of confidence in the Tiger leaders. Pottu Amman, people said, had all but lost PTK. Since January, Tamil villagers had been appall
ed at the Tigers’ casual neglect of people’s safety in the battle zone. They did not inform villages about sieges and set off landmines on approach roads. Cadres camped among the civilians in bunkers, exposing people to both LTTE fire and retaliations from the military.
Because of the Tigers’ callousness, many began to look for ways to shield themselves from the onslaught. Over the radio and over loudspeakers, the Sri Lankan military was promising shelter to civilians in the Thevipuram no-fire zone. ‘If you stay in your villages, we cannot guarantee your safety,’ they announced. ‘Go to the no-fire zone. Move with your families there. There is food, water, and security there.’ Panic-stricken thousands rose from the bunkers and filled the roads that led away from PTK.
Above Mugil’s bunker, feet ran helter-skelter. People were packing to leave. ‘I didn’t think I would be alive to see this happen in the Vanni,’ Father said. ‘Putting our heads willingly into the lion’s mouth … Has it come to this?’
Leaving, however, was not proving easy. Just as the Tigers had done in the nineties with the Jaffna exodus and often in the Vanni thereafter, they were ordering the civilians to stay or move with them during battle. Mother reported seeing a young man loudly berate the LTTE for turning against their own. They had lit tall fires around exits from PTK, he screamed, preventing people leaving for the no-fire zone.
One evening, when Divyan came to see them, he described seeing charred bodies all around PTK, contorted in the last moments of failed escape. Taking her aside, he admitted to Mugil that disenchantment had crept into the forces. ‘This time is different,’ he said. ‘Since Kilinochchi fell, some cadres are not sure what they’re fighting for. They still fight like machines, but in the breaks they talk about surrender.’ That thousands of civilians were making it to the no-fire zone, defying the LTTE rules and trusting the enemy, was to him a sign of both their desperation and defeat.
