Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

CAN SRI LANKA HOLD ON TO ITS FRAGILE PEACE?

Scouts prepare to sing for the president as a policeman in his security detail stands watch. The national jamboree was held this year in Jaffna, the first time it has been in the Northern Province.

At a camp for displaced Tamils, a man hides behind his child. The memory of the war, which ended in a bloody attack, looms large. Tens of thousands of Tamils are still waiting to be resettled.

A worker with HALO Trust, a British nonprofit, removes land mines in Jeyapuram, once a Tamil Tigers stronghold south of the Jaffna Peninsula. The organization hires mostly Tamils—about half war widows—and has removed more than 212,000 mines. The government is aiming to clear most remaining mines by 2020.

Uniformed students from Royal College watch the school’s 137th annual cricket match against archrival S. Thomas’ College. A Colombo tradition, it’s known as the Battle of the Blues, after the most prominent color on the school flags.

. A few miles west of the town, women pick tea near St. Clair Falls, known as the Little Niagara of Sri Lanka. A major source of foreign currency, tea exports bring at least $1.5 billion a year to the economy.

A student strides home from school on the railroad tracks near the station in Nanu Oya. The British colonial government built the railway to transport coffee and later tea from the hill country in the Central Province to Colombo

Tamil Hindus celebrate Masi Magam at Point Pedro, on the Jaffna Peninsula. During the festival, temple idols are carried to the sea for a ceremonial bath and devotees wash away their sins. Nearly 13 percent of Sri Lankans are Hindu, including most Tamils.

(A military color guard lowers the national flag on Galle Face Green, a popular park in Colombo. The country’s largest city shows few signs of the strife that divided the Sinhalese and Tamils for 26 years.)

Seven years after a brutal civil war, the South Asian nation faces the aftermath: the tens of thousands homeless or missing.

By Robert Draper-11/10/2016

Photographs by Ami Vitale

The photograph the young woman holds is barely the size of a postage stamp. But it is the only one of her husband she could find here in her parents’ house. They had not approved of her marriage, given that he was just a fisherman from the coastal town of Mannar, while her family has lived in Jaffna, the capital of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, for generations. But as the photo attests, her husband, a Tamil like herself—is broad-faced and confident. Staring at the tiny image of the man who went missing a decade ago, her mahogany eyes brighten as she loses herself in memories.

They’d fallen in love at a refugee camp in southern India in 1999, when she was 17. Both had escaped Sri Lanka’s wantonly vicious civil war, pitting the army, controlled by the majority Sinhalese, against Tamil rebels. She had fled Jaffna with her family, leaping over the corpses of neighbors as the military’s bombs plummeted from the sky. He had escaped Mannar after he saw an army officer shoot his youngest sister to death in their home. They had married under the withering glare of her mother.

They returned in 2002 to Mannar, where he could take his boat and his nets out to sea. They had a boy, then a girl. To supplement his modest income, he sold canisters of gasoline to Tamil resistance fighters. She saw little risk to this practice, which was common among Tamil men in Mannar. And when he said to her, “If something ever happens to me, you shouldn’t try to look for me—go back to your mother,” the words simply did not register, until December 27, 2006, when he took his motorcycle out and didn’t come back that evening or in the days that followed.

A rooster zigzags past her bare feet. Stirred from reverie, the fisherman’s wife puts down the photo and returns to the cooking chores with the other women in the ramshackle, barely lit house. Today her family has gathered to memorialize her mother’s sudden death from stomach cancer a month ago. One brother couldn’t make it. He’s in Paris, illegally and without a job. The Sri Lankan military had tortured him, and if he were to return home, he fears he might well be apprehended from the streets, as the fisherman was, as thousands of Tamil men have been—without warning, justification, paper trail, or even official acknowledgment.