Features | Sundayobserver.lk

It was February 9, 2009. Nimalini was trying to put her four-year-old daughter to sleep seated under a shady tree. They all needed a long rest after hours of long walk from Puthumathalan since the previous night.

She and many others, had reached a transit point at Vishwamadu for internally displaced civilians escaping from Puthumathalan area that morning. Her body was aching due to hiding and staying still in the mangroves of the lagoon until dawn.

She rested her head against the tree clinging her little one closer and in a split of a second she hears a huge explosion and she went flat on the ground. The next minute she wakes up only to find bodies of children, women and men scattered everywhere and the screams of people in agony and pain.

A LTTE suicide woman had blasted herself inside the IDP centre around 11.30 a.m. killing 29 people and injuring 64. Out of the entire number killed ten were civilians. This was how the LTTE tried to bring `liberation’ to their own people.

Where are they supposed to move on now? How are they going to survive? How many questions must be haunting the minds of these displaced Tamil civilians? It is a question of whether their sole saviour, Prabhakaran had ever thought of the desires and needs of his own people.

Obviously he was fighting for a separate Tamil homeland solely on a personal agenda along with few others with the greed for power.

Rasaiah (55) was displaced for nearly two years from his native place in Uyilankulam. With his wife Annamma (49) and his unmarried daughter Sivaneswari (20) were pushed by the LTTE further towards the Eastern coast until they were trapped inside the `No Fire Zone’. After losing all what he had earned the LTTE forcibly took his daughter away despite pleadings of her mother and father.

What liberation was Prabhakaran talking about when the entire population in the North of Sri Lanka had got displaced?

According to Major General G.A. Chandrasiri, Competent Authority for Co-ordination and Administration of Relief Work, 260,000 Tamil people have been sheltered in welfare centres. All of them are under the care and protection of the Sri Lankan Government.

In Vavuniya, 210,000 people - infants, children, women and men - are residing in 23 welfare centres with four villages getting into shape just enough to accommodate almost all these people until their lands are made suitable for habitation. In Jaffna district, 11,070 people are sheltered in 11 welfare centres.

This woman lost her little girl while crossing over the lagoon to Mullaitivu side to avoid ruthless LTTE attacks. LTTE were firing at the time when civilians started ferrying across to safety. In the melee she lost her girl. Her husband was killed by the LTTE the day before. Vibrations could be felt when the bullets hit the logs of the bunker. Regardless of being shot at this mother is looking for her baby in each tube that reaches the shores with the escaping people. Doesn’t this recall the Patachara jataka story? Does liberation mean a wife losing her beloved husband and a mother losing her precious child?
Pix. Thilak Perera

Those who always try to belittle the importance of the humanitarian mission have forgotten how the Tamil civilians were forced to live under the grip of LTTE iron clutches. They do not seem to be having the simplest sense of understanding of the agony and the misery these people have undergone. It is a fact, now that these displaced people breathed peacefully, slept in a quite environment only after they reached the safety of the Sri Lanka Armed Forces.

It was not the LTTE who let these people come out, but it was our own soldiers who cleared their safe passage, directed them and rescued them at the risk of losing their own lives and limbs.

Eighty six thousand people have reached Vavuniya welfare centres at the end of the war. All of them were living in an area of approximately two square kilometres and to any human being with a sense of understanding could possibly feel what a hell it could have been.

How would you feel if we were to live in an area where the sands turn burning hot during mid-day, with sick people mourning unable to bear the pain, people without proper medical care, smelling with gaping wounds and top of it with severe shortage of food and drinking water.

Tons of food, water and medicine which were sent to these areas by the Government until the last moment, were grabbed by the Tiger terrorists and the average man knew nothing about Government aid which never reached him. Civilians were fed on rice `kanji’ (porridge) and by the time they reached the cleared areas people had been reduced to mere skeletons.

Words failed to explain the agony these people had undergone. Eyes and faces reveal the tale.

Was self ascetism the path Prabhakaran chose for the liberation of the Tamil people while his was self indulgence?

It was not the Tamil people’s “Sole representative” the LTTE, but obviously the true patriotic citizens of Sri Lanka who rescued the helpless Tamil civilians.

Agony then... Ecstacy now