Death of the Tiger - Ilankai Tamil Sangam

A female soldier of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam walks through an L.T.T.E. cemetery in Kilinochchi, in September, 2007.

organization that had controlled much ofnorthern and eastern Sri Lanka for nearlya decade, it was a devastating reversal.Their remaining fighters, a force of aboutfifteen thousand, retreated into the junglenear the coastal town of Mullaittivu, takingalong more than three hundred thousandTamil civilians who were trappedwith them. With international concernmounting over the safety ofthe civilians, the Sri LankanArmy designated a series of“no-fire zones” and told civiliansto assemble there. It thenshelled those zones repeatedly,while issuing denialsthat it was doing so and forbiddingjournalists access tothe area. Hundreds of peoplewere killed every day. By mid-April, the Tamil rebels andthe civilians were trapped on a bloodystretch of beach about a mile long.Hemmed in by the sea, a lagoon, and ahundred thousand government soldiers,they were all but helpless, as the Armykept up a barrage of fire from gunboats,aircraft, and field artillery.On April 21st, the Army broke throughthe Tigers’ defenses, creating a chaoticcorridor that, over several days, allowednearly two hundred thousand famishedand wounded civilians to flee into itscustody. The Army had ordered mostrelief workers and all international observersto leave the area, but it nonethelessbilled its offensive as a “humanitarianoperation” to rescue hostages fromthe Tigers. (The Tigers did in fact preventsome civilians from fleeing, andshot hundreds of them as they tried toescape.) The Tigers’ defenders, meanwhile,claimed that the Army was committinggenocide. Secretary of StateHillary Clinton admonished Sri Lanka’sgovernment, saying that “the entireworld is very disappointed” by the “untoldsuffering” that was being caused byits efforts to end the war. There werelater reports, which the government denied,that as many as forty thousand civilianswere killed during the Army’sfinal offensive, and that their bodies wereburned or buried in secret mass graves.The foreign secretaries of France andGreat Britain flew to Sri Lanka, wherethey pleaded with the government tocall a ceasefire in order to rescue the civilianswho were still trapped. Suspiciousthat the diplomats also wanted tosave the Tiger leaders, the governmentignored them. Tens of thousands of civiliansremained in the kill zone, whichcontinued to shrink until it was no biggerthan four football fields.A survivor of the final stand at Mullaittivu,a young pastor, described thescene to me. He and four other pastorsand a group of sixty orphansin their care had been duginto shallow bunkers on thebeach. “It was the first thingwe did whenever we reacheda new position—diggingand making bags with cutupwomen’s saris,” he said.“Only afterward would wego and look for food orwater.” The Tamil fighterswere in bunkers all aroundthem. “Most of them were Black Tigers,”he said, referring to the Tamil suicidesquad. “Prabhakaran was amongus, too, but none of us saw him.” He describeda charnel ground, with artilleryshells landing at random. “All we couldsee was dead people, people crying forfood and for water, and burning vehicleseverywhere.”On May 16th, Army troops took thelast coastal positions, and, as they pursuedthe remaining Tigers, the Armycommander, General Sarath Fonseka,declared victory. The next day, a Tigerspokesman posted a statement on theorganization’s Web site: “This battle hasreached its bitter end. . . . We have decidedto silence our guns. Our only regretsare for the lives lost and that wecould not hold out for longer.”In the bunker, the pastor’s grouptalked by cell phone with a brigadiergeneral in the Sri Lankan Army whotold them to stay there until they sawsoldiers, then identify themselves withwhite flags. The group had run out offood and went foraging in an abandonedbunker nearby. “We found foodpackets—meat, chocolates,” the pastorsaid, and they took as much as theycould carry, dodging incoming fire.The next morning, a young man intheir group was fatally shot as he defecatedoutside.By evening, they could see soldiersapproaching. “Two or three of us wentout with several children, and we tookwhite flags, as the brigadier had suggested,”the pastor recalled. “But as weapproached they said, ‘Don’t come,’ andfired guns in the air.” The soldiers hadbeen told there could be suicide bombersamong the last Tigers, and in factseveral insurgents blew themselves up inthe midst of civilian refugees turningthemselves in to the Army. “We fell onthe ground. They were about fifty metresaway. We crawled back to the bunker,and then they fired at the bunker. Thewhole night, I could hear the Armythrowing grenades in the bunkers nearus. There were explosions, and peoplewere crying and saying, ‘Help us.’ ”At dawn, the pastor said he “feltcourage” and decided to go out and confrontthe soldiers. “I went with anotherpastor and a white flag,” he said. “Weexplained who we were, and they toldeveryone to come forward out of thebunker. They ordered us to kneel down.There were about fifteen soldiers. Theirfaces were covered with black cloth.One soldier said, in Sinhala—I understanda little—‘We have orders to shooteveryone.’ We were shouting for themnot to shoot.” After a tense standoff, thepastor was strip-searched, along withthe children, and then allowed to collecthis belongings from the bunker. “Apastor came behind me, but he waspunched in the chest by a soldier. Hefell down. He died later that day. Thesame soldier who hit him stuck hisfingers in the wounds of the young menwith us who had been injured.”After another strip search and a longinterrogation, the pastors were reunitedwith the children and put in a detentioncamp. When I asked the pastor howthe experience had affected him, hesaid, “It is in my mind. When I sleep,automatically it comes out—things Ionly saw in films in my youth. Bodieswithout heads. Bodies with the stomachopen and the liver coming out.” Headded, “At the end, we were walkingout through fire and past dead people,and the soldiers were laughing at us andsaying, ‘We have killed all your leaders.Now you are our slaves.’ You can imaginehow I feel about my country.”On the same day, May 18th, theArmy announced that the Tigerleader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, hadbeen killed, along with two hundredand fifty others, during an overnight42 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 17, 2011

Photograph by Patrick Brown.of them tea-plantation workers descendedfrom laborers brought to the islandby the British. Then a new law madeSinhala the country’s official language, replacingEnglish, and many Tamils workingfor the government lost their positionsfor being unable to speak thelanguage. In the seventies, legislation wasenacted to favor Sinhalese students inuniversity admissions, and soon after, anew constitution made Buddhism thestate religion. Tamil politicians called forGandhi-style campaigns of civil disobedience,but young radicals advocated anarmed struggle for “national liberation.”Militant groups formed and began squabblingover the way to bring about a separate,secular, socialist Tamil state. Sometravelled to Lebanon and received militarytraining from Palestinian guerrillas.In 1975, the pro-government mayorof Jaffna, the informal Tamil capital, wasshot dead as he arrived for prayers at aHindu temple. The assassin was VelupillaiPrabhakaran, a thin, goggle-eyedtwenty-year-old who had left high schooland gone into hiding to devote himself tothe fight for Tamil independence. Prabhakaranis said to have torn up all picturesof himself in the family’s photo album toprevent police from identifying him. (Hisfather, a civil servant, was horrified by hisson’s extremism, and remained estrangedfrom him. He died this month, in Armycustody.) At the time of the shooting,Prabhakaran was a member of a fledglinggroup called the Tamil New Tigers.Within a year, he had formed his ownbreakaway organization, the L.T.T.E.Prabhakaran—known to his followersas Thamby, or Little Brother—had aflamboyant touch: in his early days as theTiger leader, he posed for pictures with apet leopard cub, and spoke with admirationof Napoleon Bonaparte and Alexanderthe Great. His contemporary heroesincluded Sylvester Stallone and ClintEastwood, and he often showed theirmovies to his young fighters, whom hecalled his “cubs.” The Tigers soonemerged as the most ruthless of the Tamilmilitant groups, and eventually annihilatedall their rivals.On July 24, 1983, the Tigers killedthirteen soldiers in a land-mine ambush,and Sinhalese residents of Colomboturned on their Tamil neighbors. In amurderous orgy that spread quicklyacross the southern part of the island,they hacked, raped, burned, and shot asmany as three thousand people. The killingwent on for a week, and thousandsof Tamil homes and businesses weretorched and looted. The authorities, byand large, did not intervene, and in somecases coöperated with the mobs.The violence was a historic watershed.Hundreds of thousands of Tamilswho had lived in the south fled to thenorth and east; many of them enteredthe Tigers’ training camps, where amovement was growing for a separateTamil homeland. Another wave ofrefugees moved abroad, and these “diasporaTamils” began to support theTigers’ cause. India’s sizable Tamil populationwas outraged, and their politicianscalled for action. In response,Indira Gandhi’s government beganproviding the militants with covert financialassistance and military training.Sri Lanka’s civil war had begun.In December, 1986, I arrived in SriLanka with my brother Scott. Theconflict was only three years old, and itsbody count—around five thousand—wasstill relatively modest. But the Tigers werealready notable for their unusual disciplineand ferocity. In addition to carrying out afew massacres of their own (including anespecially brutal one in 1985, in which ahundred and forty-six civilians were killedin a raid on one of the holiest Buddhistshrines in Sri Lanka), the Tigers had instituteda reign of terror among their fellow-Tamils,imposing absolute authority,levying war taxes, and eliminating theirrivals. A master of battlefield innovation,Prabhakaran devised a form of executionfor collaborators with the enemy: the victimwas tied to a lamppost and blown topieces with Cordex explosive fuse wire.During our visit, Colombo was quiet,and the Sinhalese areas of the country remainedlargely untouched by the war. Inthe eastern city of Batticaloa, however, wefound an atmosphere of violence and containedhysteria. The Army’s antiterroristSpecial Task Force, created for the purposeof fighting Tamil insurgents, hadtaken over the city’s police stations; its soldierswere bunkered in behind sandbagsand razor wire, their guns pointing outthrough sniper holes. After dusk no oneventured out on the streets. Groups ofwomen in saris recognized us as foreignersand beseeched us to help them findtheir sons, who had been detained by theS.T.F. The Army had developed a patternof mass arrests, torture, and, withgrowing frequency, murder. A TamilCatholic priest, Father Chandra Fernando,told us that disappearances and indiscriminateshootings occurred daily inthe area, and that every male betweenfifteen and forty had been arrested at leastonce. The conflict had grown so terrible,he said, that he had come to question thevery existence of God.Through Father Chandra, we madearrangements to visit the Tigers’nearest camp, a journey that took us bymotorcycle, ferry, and jeep into a remotearea of sparse jungle. When we arrived,THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 17, 2011 45

Rajapaksa governments never went onehundred per cent all out to wipe out theL.T.T.E.,” Wickramaratne explained.“They used military force, but alwayshad a political solution in mind. Butthen came Rajapaksa, and he was prepared,rightly or wrongly, to go wholehog. If you look at the L.T.T.E., it’s acase of them arrogantly refusing opportunities.They thought they could justkeep telling the world that they werewilling to talk, but not follow through.They thought they were the exception,until Rajapaksa came along and said,‘I’m not going to let you do it.’ ”3. THE CONQUERED LANDSWith the Tigers’ defeat at Mullaittivu,all of Sri Lanka’s territorycame under government control for thefirst time in nearly thirty years. In thenorth and east, the Army occupied theland, pursuing a kind of clear-and-holdstrategy, in which it herded the Tamilinhabitants into a series of Army-run“welfare camps”—essentially militaryprisons—and did not allow them outuntil they were deemed harmless. Thecamps initially held three hundred andtwenty thousand Tamil civilians; an estimatedtwelve thousand Tigers werekept in separate facilities. With thenorth largely emptied out and the sitesof the fiercest fighting off limits to allbut military personnel, secrecy descendedover the former Tiger territory.President Rajapaksa had described hispostwar vision as “one nation, one people”—inwhich no single ethnic groupwould lay claim over any part of theland—and called for “economic developmentand prosperity” as the route to reconciliation.But many Tamils believedthat this was simply the first step towardcomplete Sinhalese domination. Withoutthe Tigers to defend the land, thegovernment would flood the north andeast with Sinhalese soldiers and theirfamilies; much as China did in Tibet,they would weaken the Tamil claim onthe region with unrelenting force and bydiluting the population.The military prohibited access to thenorth to all foreigners without specialpermits, but a Tamil social worker, whomI will call Siva, agreed to take me throughthe less guarded back roads of the Vanni.We set out by jeep for Kilinochchi, theTigers’ former capital. There were Armybivouacs every hundred yards or so, andlarger military camps every few miles.The soldiers scrutinized us closely as wedrove by, but allowed us through theroadblocks. The Vanni was a wastelandof low bushes and fallow farms and a successionof war-ruined hamlets.We stopped in one tiny fishing village:a welter of roofless houses, trashstrewnsand, and scrubby trees—andan Army post. The hundred-odd familiesthere had been released from thedetention camps five months earlier,and were now living in lean-tos madeout of sheet metal or U.N.-issue blueplastic; some had fenced themselves inwith woven palm palisades. No one inthe community spoke Sinhala, and thesoldiers did not speak Tamil; the communityleader told Siva that theywanted someone to be sent to live withthem who could talk to the soldiers ontheir behalf. In the past few nights,someone had tried to break into anumber of homes, and the villagers believedit was Sinhalese soldiers. “Wedon’t know if they are trying to steal orif they are looking for women to rape,”the community leader said.It was one of many allegations ofrape I heard. Over the years, groupslike the Asian Human Rights Commissionand Amnesty Internationalhave documented numerous cases inwhich Sinhalese soldiers raped Tamilwomen and girls. In the cell-phonevideo from Mullaittivu, thesoldiers appraise the deadwomen and make lewd commentsthat strongly suggestthat they have been sexuallyassaulted.We drove north on themain road from Colomboto Jaffna, the historic capitalof the Tamils. The road hadbeen reopened to the publicfor the first time in years; the Britisherarailway, whose rails and wooden tieshad been torn up and used as bunkerreinforcements by the Tigers, was alsobeing rebuilt. Cafés and picnic groundshad sprung up by the side of the road,with signs identifying them as “People’sRests” and “Army Welfare Canteens.”They were occupied by soldiers andbusloads of Sinhalese tourists. Siva remarked,“They are increasing, not reducing,their presence. This is permanent.”Entire military cantonments,made out of special materials suppliedby the Chinese, were being erected allover the north. We passed many moreArmy camps along the road.The Army had said that it was waitinguntil mines could be cleared to returnTamils to their homes, but Siva was dubious.“I wouldn’t be surprised if they arelooking for gold on the corpses,” he said.“The Tamil people are famous for likingjewelry and gold. I think that’s it; otherwisethere is no reason why they shouldn’tallow people to go back to their places.That and evidence of mass graves, warcrimes. Maybe they are moving thebodies.”Siva’s claims at times had the ring ofconspiracy theory. But later Major GeneralMahinda Hathurusingha, the securitycommander of Jaffna, confirmed for methat the cantonments were indeed intendedto be permanent. From the military’sperspective, the war continued.“The L.T.T.E. inculcation of the youth—this is a big problem for us,” he said. TheArmy needed to maintain a presence inthe north to insure that Tamil radicalismnever started again. To gather intelligence,another senior officer told me, ithad infiltrated the Tamil population andinstalled electronic surveillance systems.During the war, signs of the Tigers’presence were ubiquitous in Tamil areas.Throughout the north, hand-paintedbillboards advertised their sacrifices onbehalf of their people. Oneof them showed two Tamilmothers, both wonderingwhere their daughters were.On the left side of the billboard,one of the daughters,an adolescent girl in pigtailsand a pink dress, is depictedin three panels. In the first,she is at home alone, meeklyreceiving three armed governmentsoldiers. In the second, shelooks out through the bars of a jail cell.In the third, her pink skirt and legs protrudefrom a bush, while the soldiers diga shallow grave. On the right side, theother daughter, wearing tiger-stripedcamouflage, looks strong and determined;she wields a weapon during combatin the jungle, and steers a Sea-Tigerlaunch on the ocean.Now the Army had methodicallyTHE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 17, 2011 49

erased all traces of the Tigers in thenorth. Kilinochchi’s cemetery had beentotally eradicated. Pointing to mounds ofbroken gravestones and piles of rubble,Siva explained, “The Army has comealong and just bulldozed them.” In thecenter of Kilinochchi, the Army haderected a victory monument: a giant concretecube with a bullet hole cracking itsfascia and a lotus flower rising from thetop. Soldiers stood at attention before amarble plinth, whose inscription extolledthe Rajapaksas’ leadership during “a humanitarianoperation which paved theway to eradicate terrorism entirely fromour motherland, restoring her territorialintegrity and the noble peace.”Though the Rajapaksa governmentdenies plans for the “Sinhalization” ofthe north and east, it has done little toassuage the Tamils’ fears. These anxietiesare fuelled by a sense of communalhumiliation. During a stop at a friend’shouse in Kilinochchi, Siva complainedof “seeing soldiers everywhere, occupyingour places. But people are resigned.They feel they can’t fight the Armypresence anymore.” His friend addedthat he had heard a local Tamil vegetableseller calling out in Sinhala. Whenhe asked why, the vender told him,“Tamil has no place now.”Among many Tamils, as well as Sinhalese,the Tigers were despised for violentlyupsetting Sri Lanka’s delicatestatus quo. Middle-class and upperclassTamils were targeted forextortion; those who opposedthe Tigers’ separatist campaignrisked assassination.But in the backlands of thenorth and east the Tigers, despitetheir brutality, were theonly government that mostTamils knew, and were morerepresentative of their communitythan the postwar Sinhaleseadministration. Sivasaid, “After all, who were the L.T.T.E.?They were our children! O.K., maybeeven they were terrorists, but peoplehere, because they were their children,had feelings for them.”At one point during our trip, twowomen approached Siva. The older one,in her forties, with a long ponytail and ared bindi dot on her forehead, carried aphotograph of a slim youth standing infront of a shrine. She identified him as50 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 17, 2011her son, and explained that he had beenforcibly conscripted by the Tigers in2002. In the areas they controlled, theTigers had demanded that each Tamilfamily contribute at least one member tothe cause; children as young as fifteen,girls as well as boys, were often conscripted.If they weren’t produced voluntarily,they were taken by force.The other woman had lost herdaughter in 2006. The girl, twenty-fourat the time, had gone out to attend abirthday party and hadn’t returned. She,too, had ended up in the Tigers. Neitherwoman had heard anything of her childsince the end of the war. They told Sivaof going to the detention camps and gettingthe runaround from authorities.They had come to him because they hadheard rumors of a secret detention campand hoped he’d know where it was.The younger woman had last heardnews of her daughter from another femalefighter who had survived the siegeat Mullaittivu. “That girl told me thatthey had been together, that my daughterhad a chest injury, and that in thefighting she had lost sight of her. Shesaid that just behind her the Sri LankanArmy was coming, so it’s possible theycaught and saved her.” The motheradded, hopefully, “She was in Intelligence.She had finished high school,and she spoke some English.”The older woman said that other detaineeshad told her that her son wascaptured alive, and he hadbeen collaborating with theArmy by leading it to the Tigers’hidden weapons caches.If the reports were true, shesaid, sobbing, it meant thather son had been tortured. Iasked Siva what the chanceswere that either of the women’schildren were alive. “Verylittle,” he said. Of the woman’sdaughter, he told me, inEnglish, “Most likely they killed her onthe spot.”4. THE POSTWAR CAMPAIGNMajor General Kamal Gunaratnewas the field commander of theSpecial Forces troops that finished offPrabhakaran. During my visit, he wasrunning the north from his base at Vavuniya,a town that, in the old days,marked the northern limits of governmentcontrol. He and his officers metme in a dark wood-panelled conferenceroom, where framed photographs showedthe General and his soldiers standingover Prabhakaran’s body. Gunaratne, atall, blustering man wearing a red beretand a camouflage uniform with a chestfulof medals, described the war in heroicterms: “Our youth is gone now, butwe had no choice, we had to live withthis problem. But we didn’t want ourchildren to live with it, so we decided toend it. It was a mammoth task, but wehave done that for the nation.” His menhad paid for Sri Lanka’s peace with their“blood, sweat, and body parts.” In theend, he said, the three-year offensivekilled six thousand of his soldiers andtwenty-three thousand Tigers. Headded, “Since the death of the ruthlessterrorist leader Prabhakaran, there havebeen no deaths in Sri Lanka from a terroristact.” Gunaratne was echoing theSri Lankan government’s official dogma:the postwar peace justifies whatever wasnecessary to achieve it.Gunaratne showed me some privatesnapshots of the dead Prabhakaran, includingone in which the handkerchiefthat covered his forehead had been removed,revealing a gaping hole in hisforehead. It suggested an exit wound, asif he had been shot from behind at closerange. Gunaratne had taken Prabhakaran’sdog tags, which he had given toSarath Fonseka, the Army commander,and his Tiger I.D. card, which he hadkept for himself. He pulled out his walletand extracted it from among hiscredit cards. The serial number on theI.D., he pointed out, was 001. I asked ifhe intended to keep his trophy. He tookthe card and looked at it for a moment,then put it back in his wallet. “Maybeone day I’ll give it to the Army for itsmuseum or something. But right nowit’s mine. I think I’ve earned it.”For nations operating in the age of instantmedia, counter-insurgency isin significant measure a public-relationsproblem. What should victory look like?No matter what else happened in Vietnam,many Americans’ image of the warwas formed most vividly by the photographof the huddled civilians of My Laimoments before they were killed by U.S.soldiers. Since the cell-phone video from

Mullaittivu leaked out, the Rajapaksagovernment has fought a second campaignto define the massacre as a gloriousvictory. Sri Lanka has found friendswho are willing to agree, or at least notto care; these include China and otherEastern nations, as well as military expertsfrom around the world who are impressedby the effectiveness of its tactics.The government has largely ostracizedthose who disagree; within its borders, ithas silenced them by force.A week after the war’s end, the U.N.Human Rights Council in Geneva wasthe scene of a political standoff betweena bloc of Western nations that calledfor an investigation and another—ledby Sri Lanka and including Brazil,Cuba, India, and Pakistan—that calledfor a resolution praising Sri Lanka forthe “promotion and protection of allhuman rights.” The latter resolutionwon, with twenty-nine votes in favor,twelve against, and six abstentions.In the following months, lawyers inthe U.S. Justice Department began exploringthe possibility of war-crimesprosecution of Gotabaya Rajapaksa—who lived in the United States for a timeand acquired citizenship—as well as theformer Army commander Sarath Fonseka,a green-card holder. On a visit tothe U.S. in the fall of 2009, Fonsekadodged an interview request from HomelandSecurity and flew back to Sri Lanka.For the most part, though, the ObamaAdministration has maintained a policyof circumspection.One senior Administration officialtold me, “With regard to Sri Lanka, I canassure you that war crimes and crimesagainst humanity are a big part of our bilateraldiscussions.” But the Administration’sonly public acts have been to sendStephen Rapp, the State Departmentemissary on war crimes, to Sri Lanka, aswell as its two senior human-rightsofficials on the national-security council,Samantha Power and David Pressman.Rapp filed two fact-finding reports withCongress, while Power and Pressmanurged the Rajapaksa government to showgreater accountability for its actions duringthe war.Rajapaksa, meanwhile, has said thathis government was “looking east,” andhe signed a number of economic dealswith China, including one for the constructionof a large port in his home dis-SKETCHBOOK BY ZACHARY KANIN

“And of course Allen continues his work with super-sized hamsters.”trict of Hambantota. In August, he presidedover a lavish ceremony to mark theopening of the port’s first phase, which athousand Chinese laborers and engineers,along with Sri Lankans, had completedin a year of around-the-clockshifts. Before an audience of hundreds ofdignitaries, Rajapaksa stood at the helmof a giant model ship, turned the wheel,and watched the seawater enter themuddy basin carved out by the Chinese.In the not too distant future, SriLanka may be seen as an early skirmishin a new “Great Game” of influencebetween China and the United Statesand their proxies. “Sri Lanka has readthe situation and seen that the West’sinfluence is diminishing,” Harim Peiris,a Sri Lankan political analyst, said.“So this government has made somestrange friends: Iran, Pakistan, Myanmar,Russia, and Japan. China is probablyour biggest single investor. Theseare ‘softies’—soft loans without pressure.So who’s putting the pressure?Oh—Sweden and the E.U.!” Peiris• •laughed derisively, and said, “There isno serious international pressure.”A Western diplomat in Colombosaid, “We don’t have a lot of influencehere. We’re not a big fish. China is. It’spouring in billions of dollars that aredescribed as soft loans, but somedaythey will have to be paid back. Andthey don’t ask about human rights.”Jaliya Wickramasuriya, another relativeof President Rajapaksa’s, is Sri Lanka’sAmbassador in Washington. Hesuggested to me that the U.S. was missingout. With the war over, Sri Lanka wasgoing to boom economically. “We wantthe U.S. to come in,” he said. “America,hurry up!” Laughing, he added, “Butthere are a lot of suitors, and if the suitortakes a lot of time . . . however goodlooking,there are always others!”The Sri Lankan government doeshave supporters in the U.S., particularlyin military circles. Senior officialstold me that their government owedmuch to a Pentagon official named JamesClad, “a great friend of Sri Lanka.” Cladwas the Bush Administration’s DeputyAssistant Secretary of Defense for Southand Southeast Asia, in charge of the Pentagon’sdealings with India and Sri Lanka,until he was replaced by the Obama Administrationin January, 2009.I telephoned Clad, and he invited meto his home, in suburban Washington,D.C. Clad is an articulate man in his latefifties, with a ready sense of humor. Citingofficial oaths of secrecy, he demurredwhen it came to questions about U.S. aidto the Sri Lankan military, but he madeit clear that he had been supportive of theSri Lankan government’s war effort, andthat he felt that the criticisms expressedby the West had been counterproductiveto Western interests.“The self-imposed marginalizationby the U.S. and other Western countriesin Sri Lanka has led directly to increasedinfluence by China, Pakistan, and Iran,none of which share the Western humanitarianagenda, to put it mildly,” hesaid. As evidence, he mentioned a Chinesearms dealer that had advanced ammunitionto the Sri Lankan governmentthroughout the military campaign; thedebt was later satisfied by arrangementsthat gave China commercial advantagesin Sri Lanka.Clad has known the Rajapaksas formany years. He referred to the President’sbrother Gotabaya, the defenseminister, as “Gota.” A fierce critic ofthe Tigers, Clad said that the organizationhad assassinated several Sri Lankanswhom he regarded as personalfriends. “The L.T.T.E. was the mostdeliberately ruthless terrorist group, barnone, certainly in Asia,” he said.In order to reform Sri Lanka’s publicimage, Clad, who recently retiredfrom the Pentagon’s National DefenseUniversity, recommended to GotabayaRajapaksa that he host a meeting onmaritime-security concerns in the IndianOcean. It would help Sri Lanka“get out of its box as a ‘single-issuecountry’ and reconnect it with an earliermaritime heritage,” he said. In August,Clad invited me to the Galle Dialogue,a two-day conference attended by seniornaval officers from more than adozen countries. The conclave was heldat a luxurious seaside hotel outside theold colonial fortress city of Galle, inthe south.52 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 17, 2011

“Are those sharks?” I asked him.“Yes,” he said. “Do you want to seethem?”We crossed the lawn and stood infront of the tank, which was eight feettall and twenty feet wide. There werefour sharks, each about four feet long,swimming among smaller fish.I told Gotabaya that they looked likeblack-tipped reef sharks. He shrugged.“They’re my wife’s,” he said. She kneweverything about them, he explained,but she was away on a visit to the States.All he knew was that the tank needed tobe changed with fresh seawater everytwo weeks. “They bring it in specialtanker trucks,” he said, watching thesharks. He giggled softly.“I5. RECKONING“The entrance to my cubicle is three feet away. Please respect my partition.”s it over?” I asked a Sinhalese politicianin Colombo.“The war is over, but the conflict isnot,” he replied. “The problem goes beyondthe existence of the L.T.T.E. Theproblem is that this country does not accommodateits minorities well.” Severalof Sri Lanka’s governments had attemptedto make political accommodationsto the Tamils, he said, but Sinhalesenationalists had always vetoed them.“This is the perfect time to offer an accommodationto the moderate Tamilswho have rejected violence.” But, hesaid, “I think Rajapaksa will not makeconciliatory gestures, because he is himselfan ardent Sinhala nationalist.” Thepolitician explained that he needed tospeak off the record, because, althoughhe knew Rajapaksa personally, it wouldbe “counterproductive” to voice his criticismspublicly.By the second anniversary of thewar’s end, the Army’s “welfare camps”had been largely emptied out. But manyof the Tamils I encountered felt that thepeace was perilously fragile. In an easterntown called Vakarai, a Tamil youthleader who went by the name Prabhakarantold me, “We only hope the internationalcommunity can bring pressureto bear on the government, because adignified and honorable solution is necessaryfor the Tamil people.” Withoutit, he said, “we cannot say that a secondwar will not come. It will bring greatdestruction if and when it happens.”In Lasantha Wickrematunge’s posthumouseditorial, published four monthsbefore the Tigers were crushed at Mullaittivu,he wrote, “There is no gainsayingthat [the Tigers] must be eradicated.”But, he argued, a “military occupation ofthe country’s north and east will requirethe Tamil people of those regions to liveeternally as second-class citizens, deprivedof all self-respect. Do not imagineyou can placate them by showering ‘development’and ‘reconstruction’ on themin the postwar era. The wounds of warwill scar them forever, and you will havean even more bitter and hateful diasporato contend with. A problem amenable toa political solution will thus become afestering wound that will yield strife forall eternity.”The same might be written about anynumber of entrenched conflicts aroundthe world. To solve these problems, GeneralDavid Petraeus and others haveplaced great hope in a doctrine of counter-insurgencythat tempers military actionwith nation-building and carefulcommunity work. But it should not beforgotten that the more effective counterinsurgencies,like Sri Lanka’s, are hideousin practice. They involve killing many• •people and terrorizing many more. In Afghanistan,Petraeus has told his fieldcommanders to “drink lots of tea” withthe locals. This effort had at best mixedresults. At the same time, along the borderwith Pakistan, the C.I.A. has beensuccessfully sponsoring the CounterterroristPursuit Team, a paramilitary groupof three thousand Afghans. It was withthe help of such proxies that Petraeusrolled back Iraq’s insurgency in 2007 and2008. That effort involved a great deal ofoutright killing, both on and off thebattlefield. In the end, it mostly worked.We know that Sri Lanka’s conflictended in a bloodbath, even though itoccurred, as intended, out of sight. Inthe face of all the official denials and thediplomatic language about accountability,there is Wickrematunge’s grim predictionof his country’s future and hisown. And there is the stubbornly ineradicablevideo of naked Tamils beingkicked and shot and laughed at by theiruniformed killers. applenewyorker.com/go/outloudJon Lee Anderson talks about Sri Lanka.