Fear, hope and despair!

Sunday Observer staffer Ranga Jayasuriya revisits Jaffna to witness a dreadful silence of a people locked in a low intensity war.

For the uninitiated, Jaffna is the bicycle town in Sri Lanka.

One and half years ago, I travelled in Jaffna on a bicycle during my one month stay in this citadel of Tamil cultural identity.

It had been a wonderful experience to cycle in the semi- lit, tree lined main street running before the Jaffna hospital and also leading to my guest house in the night especially after a beer from the Colombo Bar on the Kasthuriyar road.

Those were not trouble free times, but there was plenty of room for hope and reconciliation.

I revisited Jaffna last week, but, this time in a BTR armoured personnel carrier. I was among a bunch of journalists visiting Jaffna on a tour arranged by the Media Center for national security, escorted in mine proof entourage.

The comparison between my two visits would lead to exaggeration unless I say that the security forces did not leave any stone unturned as for the security of media men it invited to Jaffna. Eight APCs were provided for the transport of fifty odd media personnel, while black clad Special Forces commandoes riding motor cycles led the convoy.

The objective of the organisers was to offer the media men a first hand experience of the security situation in Jaffna.

Of course, the security force's control in Jaffna is beyond doubt. Nearly 35,000 army, 2000 police, 2000 navy and 1000 air force personnel deployed in the peninsula mean that a formidable defence is in place for any kind of eventuality.

Jaffna is not safe either. The threat is not a large scale assault on the town by the Tigers. But, a lone gunman on a hit and run attack or a newly trained civilian militiaman exploding a claymore fragmentation mine from the distance.

Hence journalists should be pardoned in travelling in the APC or the security forces stopping public traffic to facilitate the movement of their convoy.

Some eighteen months ago when I was in Jaffna, I did not see APC's on the streets, nor did I see this much of military presence in the town.

That was a time security forces had withdrawn most road blocks which were in place since the recapture of Jaffna. That was a time the security forces in a way made it redundant to facilitate the normalisation in city life.

Those days, despite the deadlock in the peace talks, there was still room for hope. Indian ocean tsunami had killed 34,000 people. But a new sense of solidarity was emerging between the North and the South in the face of the worst ever natural calamity.

All that began to crumble as Tigers intensified violence against security forces. Writing was on the wall even at that time. The list of the victims of the LTTE was too long even at that time and the Tigers were planning an exit from its political work in the peninsula.

I spoke to Ilamparithy, Jaffna political leader of the LTTE, who has now shifted his office to Palai in the Tiger territory. Ilamparithy, at that time, complained of intimidation by the EPDP. But, as he complained of harassment, his movement was on a sinister mission to eliminate political rivalries from the scene.

Within months, the LTTE entered Jaffna for political work, an LTTE sniper gun man shot dead Robert, one of the most respected alternative voices in Jaffna. Since then the LTTE had a free ride over the corpse of its dissidents. Most LTTE political cadres played a dual role while most of them were intelligence cadres.

The LTTE later withdrew its political cadres from Jaffna citing security reasons. But, most cadres who went back to Kilinochchi, returned to Jaffna as civilians and continued to carry out the dictates of the Kilinochchi leadership. At the same time, LTTE trained local civilians in weapon's and sent them back to Jaffna having armed them with small arms and grenades and claymore mines.

The LTTE initially used its trained civilians to organise civil disturbance, SSP Charles Wijewardene was abducted and killed by the LTTE in such an incident.

In a context of loose security, which was relaxed to facilitate normalisation programme, the Tigers could easily target the security forces, when they decided to intensify attacks. Initial casualty figures were alarmingly high. Buses transporting sailors going home were blown up. tractors were caught in claymore mines.

Then Armoured Personnel carriers came to the streets and new check points were set up. Cordon and search operations were introduced. All that is bound to cause inconvenience to civilians. But the emergence of new check points began with the claymore blast on Kondavil and then in Irupayai soon after the electoral victory of President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

That is a point most apologists of the LTTE violence find it difficult to grapple with. A greater propaganda war is fought on the television screens and newspaper columns away from the low intensity war in the North-East.

How concerned the government is in the implications of the media reporting was evident in the tour it arranged for the journalists.

A foreign journalist taking part in the visit suggested to me that it was the fear of losing out in propaganda war that led the Media Center to arrange this tour.

To their credit it must be noted that the security forces wanted the journalists to move with civilians and to talk to them, even though one advice was never to isolate oneself among civilians.

However I had my worries as to how a civilian would feel when approached by a journalist, clad in flack jacket alighting from an armoured personnel carrier.

The Jaffna I saw last week not the same town I visited eighteen months ago.

It is losing its spirit, its people helpless, caught in the middle of someone else's war.

There seems to be no escape either for most of them.

In Kayts where unidentified gunmen massacred 13 civilians, the air is still thick with a sense of despair. In the aftermath of the killings, over 800 families left the village, Allapitty, seeking refuge in Jaffna and Wanni. The Navy and the LTTE blame each other for the killing.

Most families have returned to the village after a security guarantee by the government. There are only 183 people yet to return.

As we arrived there, Navy was meeting returnees.

It struck me how vulnerable these poor fishermen are when one after the other declined to talk to me offering humble excuses.

I through a Tamil friend asked how they were doing? The barefoot elderly man siting on the floor covered his face with arms, a faint smile on his face not to embarrass us. Then said he was not well and it was difficult to talk.

Then my friend and I approached another man, he offered sore throat as an excuse to not speak to us. Then we moved to another old man and asked what happened after the killing. Not one of us wanted to ask who the killers were, not because the issue is before the court, but simply because it was too tough a question to answer. The man said he went to a church in Jaffna for refuge along with his family. My friend asked why did he go? He replied," because they asked us to go". My Friend asked whom he meant by they. "You all know who they are", he replied.

Then some twenty something youth intervened - we later identified him as his son in law- telling us not to take his father in law seriously and that he is gradually loosing his mind and his hearing also. We realized that this vigilant youth did not want to invite trouble for his Father in Law.

Later one civilian who talked to us after much persuasion told us he and his family left the village after LTTE in a notice pasted on the wall of the Allapiddy church told people to vacate the village.

That's the version of one man, the only one who dared to speak.

Life in Jaffna is enveloped in a dreadful self imposed silence. I could see a people ambitiously wait for the peace, being forced in to a dark tunnel of fear and despair.