1.

It was a typical, lazy afternoon in Jaffna, a besieged city in the northern part of Sri Lanka and the epicenter of Tamil resistance during the civil war. After a rice and curry lunch, the staff of Saturday Review, an independent English language weekly, was snoozing or close to it. Ratna Raja the typist, with the magic finger had already slipped away for a siesta. Anton Saverimuttu, the sub editor, was smoking his after-lunch cigar (his dark, locally made stogies had a reputation for driving away all manner of mosquitoes). Only Gamini Navaratne, the old Sinhalese editor, was busy writing, his drained whisky glass beside him.

Seated on the patio of an old British colonial house that doubled as the papers offices, I was lazily proofreading the editorial page when I heard the unfamiliar growl of a military vehicle. I was used to the different sounds of military vehicles but this one was new and far more threatening. It came straight to our gate and stopped. For the next few minutes the silence was so complete I thought everything in the outside world had frozen. There was no gunfire. No thumping of military boots. Confused, I decided to stay seated. Sitting is the best form of defense. Run and you make a more attractive target. Suddenly they appeared inside the house, out side the patio and everywhere— armed men in dirty green.

One of them walked straight up to me on the patio and placed his sub machine gun against my head. The short barrel of the gun was firmly placed on the back of my head and it wasn’t moving. He muttered something in Sinhala that I didn’t understand, but I scarcely needed , the terror in my eyes and sweat on my face were all the answer he needed. To be honest, I didn’t expect him to shoot. A certain logic, the logic of assault, informed me that if he were going to do that he’d have opened fire when he and his mates first assaulted the house.

The soldier with the sub machine gun stood firm and confidant. A simple provocation or the sound of a cracker is enough. He could blow my head off at any moment. I was not looking at him but I could feel his gaze, intent and fierce, on my back, on my face, on my beard, and on my trembling fingers. Then I saw old Gamini being escorted out of his room, by two soldiers, carrying AK-47s. One of them was obviously an officer.
“Don’t harm him; He is our deputy editor.” Gamini told the officer.
“We are taking him too,” replied the officer.

I felt the snout of the sub machine gun swing away from my head but my guard’s eyes were still locked on me. A couple more soldiers came onto the patio and began rifling the book shelves and the stack of back copies. I could hear a lot of noise outside. There must be dozens of these guys out there I thought. They’ve got the place surrounded. I had no idea where Ratna Raja and Anton were, but I could hear the screams of Imelda, our secretary, as still more soldiers ransacked the office.

Gamini was doing his best to communicate with the officer in Sinhala, their common language, but the officer was having none of it. He simply gestured to us to follow. We fell behind him, trailed by half a dozen soldiers. As we walked out of the gate and onto the street, I saw two South African made Armed Personnel Carriers called Buffels parked right in front of the house. There wasn’t a soul in the usually teeming street. Even the dogs had disappeared.

They stuffed us into an APC. The stench of sweat, alcohol, and cigarettes was overwhelming. Gamini was curled up between two ragged seats with heavy, soldierly meat crushing him on both sides. His frail, old body shivered as he groped for his glasses which had fallen on the floor, where I had been forced to lie. As the APC shuddered forward, I felt the first searing stomp on my shoulder. Twenty-five stomps and about fifteen minutes later, they dragged us out. We were at Gurunagar, a dreaded military camp on the outskirts of Jaffna. The soldier with the sub machine gun led me through the well guarded entrance to a room about forty-five meters inside the camp. He shoved me inside, gave me a “you-deserve-this kind- of- treatment” look, locked the room and vanished.




2.

I joined the staff of the Saturday Review in 1984. It wasn’t a big newspaper. It averaged sixteen pages a week and the print run seldom exceeded six thousand. It was crude by North American standards, type set by hand and printed on two ancient letter presses. Yet its reputation as a champion of press freedom, fundamental rights and justice for minorities extended beyond the shores of Sri Lanka. In 1986 and 1987, the internationally respected journal Index on Censorship published articles recognizing the crucial role the Saturday Review was playing in the fight for democracy in Sri Lanka. The paper’s mandate, in fact, was to fill the void in reporting, comment, and analysis left by the main stream press, which vigorously towed the government line. The Review could be counted on not only to reflect the Tamil perspective, but, ironically, to provide a forum for the dissident opinions of the majority Sinhalese of the south. What’s more, it functioned as a reliable source for human rights monitors ranging from the UN to Amnesty International.

The government was not pleased with the Saturday Review. In July 1983 the security forces shut it down and sealed its offices. This was just three weeks before the government launched an ethnic pogrom against the Tamils. It was one of the worst in the history of ethnic relations in the country. Two thousand Tamils were killed and another 200,000 were forced from their homes. The Review’s founding editor S. Sivanayagam had to go underground to save his life. When the ban was lifted, the government replaced it with censorship. Significantly, the Saturday Review was the only paper in the country under direct government control. In those circumstances, no one was prepared to take on the editorship. Only Gamini Navaratne, a fifty-six-year-old Sinhalese journalist with a deep commitment to social justice, was willing to take the risk. Thus Gamini, as he was popularly known in the Sri Lankan media circles, became the sole Sinhalese civilian to live and work in Jaffna. All of the others were soldiers. Gamini had been associated with the Review from its inception in 1982. His column “ Political Causerie,” was one of the most read items in the paper. As a political correspondent and senior journalist he had come to know the country’s political leaders well, including then President J.R.Jayewardene. Under Gamini’s editorship the Saturday Review became a unique and at times, maverick newspaper.

I had been a regular reader since my university days. After obtaining a degree in chemistry, botany and zoology from the University of Jaffna, I decided to forego all those fields and follow the path of political journalism. I was twenty-two years old and already writing articles and poems. Some of my work had already landed me in trouble with the government and the rebels. I wasn’t a member of any of the thirty or so Tamil militant groups that were then active in Jaffna at that time. In fact, I was critical of some of their actions and their sectarian politics. As far as my politics, poetics, and polemics went joining the Saturday Review seemed the right choice for me. So it seemed at that time.




3.

My prison cell was tiny. No windows. No marks on the walls except a few bloodstains. For four hours I shared it with my extended memories and accentuated fears. That’s more than enough time for a double shower in your own sweat. Finally, the door opened and in walked a portly man in a T-shirt and khaki shorts. He was unarmed.
“Get up!” he barked in an unfamiliar Tami dialect. “Take off your shirt. Walk straight. Don’t look back.”
He marched me to a white building about a hundred meters away. Once inside, he grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and pushed me along a labyrinth of corridors. No kicks, no blows, no words. Five steps to the right, five to the left, then another five or six steps through a double door.
“Look there.” In the middle of the room six, maybe seven young men lay naked in a pool of blood. In the dim light the faces were hardly visible. They lay in silence. They showed no sign of life.
“OK. That was a good beginning. Let’s go.”

We climbed two stairs, walked a long corridor and ended in a room large enough for a Ping-Pong table and anomalously a love seat. In the gloom I could just make out the faces of two officers faces I would never forget.
“Welcome! Let’s give the great journalist a decent chair,” the younger one said with a cruel grin. I don’t remember the older one’s exact expression. But I did notice he was clean-shaven.
A couple more soldiers walked in. They were heavily built and wearing only T-shirts and khaki shorts. Before I could guess why they were there, I was doubled over by three powerful punches slamming into my stomach and neck. I screamed, crumbled to the floor. It was still damp, from a clean up after the last beating. Then I sensed something approaching from my right. A heavy boot caught me on the hip. I had never, ever cried that hard in my life. I could not stop. The fifth blow landed on my head and I lost consciousness.

When I woke up the officers were sipping cool drinks. The pain in my stomach was unbearable. There was a steady hum in my ears, like the sound of pouring rain piped through a controlled amplifier.
“ So how are you doing, courageous journalist?” The younger one said with the same cool, cruel grin. The thugs who’d beaten me up had gone and he seemed ready for a talk.
“Officer, please listen to me.” I pleaded , looking alternatively at each of them. “ I’m not a rebel. I’m just a proofreader, aspiring to become a journalist. I have nothing to hide. Don’t hurt me!” At that moment I felt shame and fear simultaneously.

“Proof-reader?” the older one asked with a skeptical smile. “All right, all right. I’ll give you six hours and plenty of paper. You’re going to write all you know about these terras , ok?”
“ Officer, I’ve already written several articles about the history and organization of the rebels. I’ve also published their manifestos and political programs. You can read them in the back issues of our newspaper. I don’t have anything new to write.”
“I don’t need that shit. I want the names and details of all the terras you know, their descriptions, and the names of all the foreign journalists visiting your newspaper office. Nothing more, nothing less.”
They left me in the room. Seconds later, a pad of paper arrived with a thud. I was at the bottom of misery.
I could not write anything specific about any of the rebels I had met. There were too many of them. I didn’t even know their real names. Their noms de guerre were easy and short. I knew a couple of Reagans, half a dozen Ghaddafis , a handful of Gandhis, and at least two Idi Amins. But none of them ever told me their secrets. Any attempts to describe them would be futile. But I had to write something. I could not afford to face another day as dreadful as this one. The clean-shaven officer wanted something substantial. So I must write. I managed a few pages about two of the rebel leaders who had been living in Southern India, trivia, such as where they were born, where they studied, and what happened to their girl friends when they abandoned them. The information was not new to anyone familiar with the Tamil political scene. But it was all I knew. It was all anyone in the community knew.
I was half asleep when the officers came back next morning. I gave them the few pages. The older one seemed uninterested. The younger one yawned.
“This is all I know. I don’t know whether it’s useful to you. But, I am afraid, I know no more.”
“ We will give you two more days,” the older one said. We want you to write everything, everything you know. The exact times you met with those terras, the weapons they had at that time, the type of vehicles, where their villages are ....”
`I stood there in silence. Should I write fiction?
“Are you hungry?” the younger one asked.
“ Yes, officer, very, “ I replied.
“ What would you like? Chicken, pork ,or beef?”
“ No meat for me. I am a vegetarian. I can eat anything vegetarian, anything green”.
I knew from the grapevine that this camp was called the Meat Shop. I also knew there were forms of torture peculiar to various camps and prisons. Professional torturers are creative. They have delicate names for torture. One, for example, called Dharma Chakra which normally refers to the wheel of life symbolizing the Buddha’s teachings. But in this version, prisoners were stripped naked and tied in a squatting position, with their wrists bound together around their shins and their ankles tied. A pole was passed under their knees and they were suspended upside down. Then they were rotated . I knew of Sweet Shower. I knew of Joy Ride and Heli –Tour, but little did I know that Chicken, Beef, and Pork were also the names of different kinds of torture. Still, what else did I expect in a meat shop?
The officers too must have been confused since they had no torture called Vegetarian. Finally, the younger one said: “We’ll get you some vegetarian stuff.”
Half an hour later the older officer returned with two soldiers. They brought a plate of grass, dirt still on the roots, and a bunch of bitter neem leaves.
“Well, you’re going to have a great salad,” he said.
The moment they left I threw up.




4.

A strange evolution of images and names describe the country I come from.

Mango is the shape of the country if you’re a tourist, pampered on the palm-fringed beaches. Serendip is what the Arab traders and travelers called it in the 6th century; Ceylon is the name the British gave it; Tear Drop is its shape as I see it; Tea and Blood are the only substance that run through its wounded veins; Lions and Tigers symbolize the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils who have been ripping the country apart for sixteen years.

Sri Lanka gained its political independence from the British colonialists fifty- one years ago. Those years have been marked by long periods of emergency rule, ethnic pogroms and wide-scale human rights violations. The current civil war is being waged by the Sinhalese dominated government and the forces of militant Tamil nationalism, spearheaded by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, popularly known as Tamil Tigers. The war is the result of brutal treatment of the minorities by the state and the minorities’ violent response.

The international news media estimate that some 50,000 men, women and children have died as a direct result of the conflict. This figure does not include the 60,000 or more people formally designated as “disappeared,” that is arrested, tortured, and killed without leaving a trace. The war has cost one million people their homes and forced another 700,000 , mainly Tamils, to seek asylum in various European countries, India, and Canada, which has been one of the largest recipients of Tamil refugees—150,000— in the past seven years. The UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Removal of Persons ( a euphemism for disappearances ) ranks Sri Lanka number two in the world in disappearances, next only to Iraq. Yet the war is one of the forgotten wars: while international media focus on Kosovo, Sri Lanka seems too far away both metaphorically and literally, from the strategic and “humanitarian” concerns of the West.




5.

On the second day of my confinement, new soldiers came to my room. One who appeared to be an officer approached while I was still lying on the floor where I had slept.
“ We need to test you,” he said with a smile.
The officer said something in Sinhala to a tall, muscular soldier who was standing behind him. The guy looked ferocious. He pulled me up, dragged me a few metres, and flopped me
on a table. I lay there helplessly on my back, waiting for another round of blows. Instead, the soldier tested my body by tapping my rib cage, chest and neck with a curled index finger.
Instead of hearing a thud, thud, he must have heard a thung, thung, indicating how fragile my Ninety six pound body was.
“ This fellow can’t withstand another round, sir,” the soldier reported. I could not guess from his voice whether he was disappointed or relieved.
“OK.” the officer said. “Then let’s go.”
The door closed. A flicker of hope ran through my mind. What if he came back and told me something completely unexpected? What if he said, you are free to go? Yet I knew that if I gave into that hope that’s when an unexpected blow would be delivered.
The officer came back alone. “ We got orders from the top” he said. “We don’t want to keep you here any more. You’re released.” He looked puzzled by this turn of events.
“ Thanks, officer,” I said.
“Are you happy ?”
“Well, it is a good thing to be out of this place.”
“I bet. But don’t continue with your cock and bull stories about us. Right ?”
It was my turn to smile.
“ Are you a graduate ?” he asked me.
“Yes. I did Chemistry and Zoology”
“What? Chemistry? That is even better. I was going to suggest that if you are a graduate why not get a decent job. I did history and that’s why I am here , you know.”
The time was five thirty. I knew the six o’clock curfew was still in effect. No way I could get to my office by six. But if didn’t it would mean one more night here. No. That was unthinkable.
“ Officer, how I can go home at this time?’ I asked.
“ Where do you live?”
“ My home is far away, officer and I don’t want to be walking on the streets during curfew. I would appreciate it if you could drop me at my office in town.”
“ That’s impossible. All I can do is to take you to the main gates. You can run from there. I will tell my sentries not to fire.” There was no choice. I ran and never looked back. Later I learned that Gamini had been released the same day and had pulled strings in high places to get me out. We both went back to work at the Saturday Review.




6.

Before 1983 there was only a handful of Tamil rebels or Tamil terrorists , depending on your bias, in Sri Lanka. The pogroms of July 1983 and the military and political support accorded them by neighbouring India emboldened the rebels dramatically. By the end of 1984 there were thirty-five rebel groups espousing a wide spectrum of political ideologies from nationalism and Marxism to an unholy blend of both. As ambushes and attacks on military convoys and camps increased, various Tamil rebel groups began competing for better and bigger publicity for their successful operations. A grenade-carrying rebel often accompanied press releases. We were expected to publish or perish!

The army wasn’t far away either. A major encampment was within mortar range in an historic Dutch fort. We had already had nights of shelling, so dreadful that Review’s management installed bunkers beside the office. Whenever a military officer passed by our office to collect a copy of our newspaper, he was always accompanied by a convoy of nine or ten military vehicles.

As if coping with censorship weren’t enough, we were also having a legal battle with the Oxford-educated Minister of National Security, who was hell bent on closing our newspaper by whatever means possible.

The Minister had no problem with the other three English language papers, two of which were state owned. They were published out of Colombo, the state capital, and they all faithfully followed the official government line. In fact, a well -oiled media unit which supported the Minister, contained a bunch of popular and efficient Sinhalese and English language journalists. For the Minister, whom the Review held responsible for at least 10,000 deaths, our paper was the only threat. We were required to send all our contents including advertisements and obituaries to the authorities in Colombo, 400 km away. The postal situation was dismal. We never got our copy back in time for the next edition and even when we finally got it, stories would be marked: Materials have been wholly censored. We had no choice but to call ourselves, “the only wholly government censored newspaper.”

We found inventive ways of coping with the censorship. Since the censor wasn’t interested in stories from other countries or the headlines we put on them, we’d run an atrocity story from, say Guatemala, in which government troops had murdered hundreds of civilians, and call it “ this week’s killings.” Or we’d simply leave a chunk of white space where a censorship story should have been and headline it: “Who killed cock robin?” We’d write about the rising cost of burials now that they were so much in demand, or the proliferation of dogs and squirrels in Jaffna with fewer and fewer people around to control them. Our readers always got it; the government never seemed to.




7.

Dead men tell no tales. Nor dead women. Nor even dead children. It saves much explaining This was brought home to me as never before one day in 1985. I went to the coastal village of Valvettiturai to interview two families who had lost relatives in a naval shelling the previous week. The families were poor. It was difficult to ask about the dead, two of them children. But after a slow, painful start the women started to talk. Seated near them on the floor, the men listened with occasional nods. Soon the women’s tales of their sorrow came in torrents. Just as I was about to ask them for photographs of the children an explosion shook the house.

“Army is around,” said one of the older woman, expressing more concern for me than for herself. “ You must leave this place now.” She showed me to the backyard.

“ But I need my bicycle,” I insisted.

One of the younger women in the family grabbed the bicycle and I left with the other men. The women stayed behind as a buffer, for it was the army’s practice to round up all men under forty-five and take them to remote parts of the country from which their chances of ever returning were slim. Nobody here was taking chances. We were on our bicycles, pedaling as fast as we could. Half an hour down the road, we ran into a swarm of terror- stricken villagers.

A young man among them approached us, sweat streaming from his forehead, neck ,and chest. “It looks like they are gone now,” he stammered. “They took several young men with them. They did not see me. I was hiding in the kitchen and they did not have time to search everywhere. They were in such a hurry. Then...then.. we heard gun fire and explosions. We are too scared to go and find out....”
Suddenly he started crying: “ Aiyo, they took my brother .”




8.

It took us over an hour to pull ourselves together and to set out in the direction of the explosion. By now all of us sensed that something terrible had happened , so we decided to avoid the road. A middle- aged villager guided us along a narrow path through the bush. When we got to the village it was empty. No sign of the army. Approaching the middle of the village , I noticed a trail of blood that led to the community centre and the most ghastly sight I’ve ever seen: twenty-four youths, their hands tied behind their backs, had been herded into the center. Moments later, explosives had been placed inside the building and detonated ( the blast that interrupted my interview). Most of the bodies were mutilated beyond recognition. Pieces of skulls and teeth littered the rubble. On a nearby tree hung a blood-spattered sarong. About a hundred meters away from the center , another twelve youths had been gunned down. The entire area looked like a slaughter house.

When I returned to the office next day I got a hand delivered letter. It was from Ratna Raja, our typist. “My son was shot dead by the army yesterday,” it said. “Please excuse my absence next week. I am not in a fit frame of mind to attend office.”

Ratna Raja was a gentleman. After decades of service to the state, latterly as a stenographer in the Supreme Court, he was living in quiet retirement enjoying his work with the Saturday Review, his only major worry the marriages of his two remaining daughters.

The previous week his son, Mohan, had come to visit and was returning to his home his eight –months pregnant wife, when he found figures in khaki barring his way. His corpse was one of those in the community center. I knew Mohan, but I would not have recognized his body in the pile of disfigured flesh and bone. Nor would have his father.




9.

Reporting atrocities on a regular basis began to get to me. But I couldn’t avoid it. The Saturday Review had to keep reporting what the mainstream press wouldn’t - the story from the victims’ perspective. After a while, the only way I could keep my sanity was to write occasional pieces with a twist of humor, “cock and bull stories” as my interrogators would have it. These not only offended the military hierarchy but has also gave the newspaper a distinctive voice. This one was a direct hit:

“Cows have a habit of straying. It happens all over. But they should have the sense not to stray into ‘prohibited zones’ like Harbour View Hotel in Kankesanthurai, now an army camp.

“One night they strayed there, probably thinking that they could have a hearty dinner, including the left overs of imported cheese and other goodies.
“The ever alert soldiers thought that the approaching figures were terrorists crouching low.
And they opened fire.
“They scored a bull’s eye in each case.
“Finally, seven cows lay dead.
“But not for long. Satisfied that the cows were not carrying grenades strapped to their udders, the lucky soldiers ended up eating them. A fine barbecue it was.”




10.

On April 24, 1987, I left our office to go to the printing plant , a few streets away. The Saturday Review had to be out by two p.m. that day, as usual . When I got there, I went straight to the composing room to put the finishing touches on the front page. The sturdy old Heidelberg press began to roll. I took a proof of the front page over to our printing manager’s table, sat down, and started chatting with him.

Suddenly someone screamed “ Bomber.” I didn’t have time to get out of my chair before a deafening blast shook the plant. Everyone ran. I bolted across the road to the grounds of a maternity hospital and jumped into a shallow, open trench which served as an air raid shelter. I huddled there for nearly an hour and a half as the bombers screamed and swooped overhead. Every few minutes we covered our ears and ducked as more bombs rained down. Pleas of “Jesu” and “Muruga” went up from the trench. I started counting the bombs. Journalist habit, I guess. After dropping ten of them, the planes disappeared as swiftly as they had came. Then the helicopter gun-ship appeared - it was an old nemesis. I was very familiar with that machine., its arrival often signaled the end of the the bombing raid. The old nemesis strafed the area and then vanished.

When the skies were clear, we left the trench. The printing plant was in shambles. But the damage could have been even worse; a bomb that had fallen just behind the plant hadn’t gone off. The rest of the area was devastated except, ironically, for one building that escaped unscathed: the political office of the rebels. That prompted me to write a short piece for our next edition in which I offered this advice: “If you happen to see a bomber swooping down, simply throw yourself into a rebels’ camp or office. There is a one hundred percent probability that you will never, never be hit.”

With our printing plant inoperative, we postponed publication, but only for a day. With the support of other printers we came out with a special issue: the Bomber Supplement, in which we reported that twenty - five people had been killed and one hundred injured in the attack. In that supplement I wished the Minister of National Security, The Joint Military Operations Commander and their cohorts, “sweet nightmares.”




11.

Shortly after my release from prison the government of India mediated a truce between the Tamil rebels and the Sri Lankan government, in which the military was confined to the barracks. The negotiations failed and by the time war resumed two months later, with even greater hostility the rebels had total control of Jaffna. Now it was their turn to control and command. They were as ruthless as the military, not only in the war they waged against the government, but also in the wars they waged against each other. The power struggle among the rebel factions resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people including several of my close friends. Assassinations and executions became the regular means of resolving political differences. In the Saturday Review I was scathing in my criticism of the “friendly fires,” as the internecine war was known. In early 1987, the Tamil Tigers, the most powerful of the rebel factions, gave me notice of warning: leave the country or face the consequences. I left my home in July. The Saturday Review survived just for three more months.

Apart from the realization that censorship is the mother of all metaphors, what did I learn from three years of writing dangerously?

The relationship between a writer and political power should always be at arm’s length. Adversaries of each brutal power are consciously or unconsciously advocates of another. The challenge for a writer is to transcend these polarities. What better purpose for the writer than dedication to the cause of freedom? To remain honest and to maintain moral and creative integrity under any circumstances is a difficult path. But I have no other.