Learning the rules of engagement
August 29, 2013
- The Sri Lankan Government, in a rare show of restraint, has decided to adopt a temperate approach to the visit of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, granting her unprecedented access and attempting to put its house in order ahead of her mission
The small strip of coast beside the emerald waters of the Indian Ocean, in the Mullaitivu District, was a rapidly shrinking space between February-May 2009. The 12-kilometre beach strip that would become a lasting legacy of Sri Lanka’s protracted conflict lies on the left bank of a large lagoon known as Nandikadal.
Four years after the end of the war, the thick jungles, waterways and blue-green seas of the Wanni remains largely unexplored territory for the average Sri Lankan. But any Sri Lankan, whether a peacetime visitor to the Wanni or not, will speak with intimate familiarity of Nandikadal. In these bloodied and murky waters was found slain the country’s most dangerous criminal, creator of the human bomb, megalomaniac and sworn enemy of the nation, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, who had ruled land, sea and waterway in the Wanni uncontested for years.