This Divided Island: Life, Death, and the Sri Lankan War

by Samanth Subramanian

prachanai. (The Tamil word translates into ‘the problem,’ which always reminded me of the Troubles, the Irish term for their own three decades of conflict.)

But then, in abrupt ways, the veneer would peel away just a little, and I would get a glimpse of the hidden warts and scars, the anxieties and tensions. This made Colombo constantly surprising and utterly disconcerting, a very easy city to settle into but a difficult one to get to know.

The date traditionally fitted to the start of the civil war is 23 July 1983, when the Tigers killed 13 soldiers in an army patrol in Jaffna. For nearly a week thereafter, in what came to be known as the Black July riots, Sinhalese mobs visited retribution upon Tamils across the south of the country, killing more than three thousand men, women and children, unhindered—and sometimes even abetted—by the police. Cars were stopped on the road and, if they were found to contain Tamils, burned without hesitation. Property was looted. Even before the practice grew notorious in South Africa’s race riots, Tamils were pulled out of their homes and necklaced: their torso inserted into a rubber tyre which was then set on fire.

The very being of Sri Lanka was racked with self-doubt and pain.

It provided a useful life lesson: anybody who asked you to trust them despite minor infractions was not to be trusted at all.

We can never be sure who will follow us through once we push a gate open, I thought.

Even more radical than a Buddhist monk in politics was a Buddhist monk advocating war and death.

Shrink the humanity of your enemy, and the fighting must seem easier, more just, less complicated. Warfare consists of several psychological tricks, not least the ones you play upon yourself.

I felt like a man who had picked at a loose floor tile and found a stash of corpses buried beneath.

The phrase ‘post-war’ lost its meaning. What country, after all, had ever passed cleanly from one epoch to another within the space of a day? Outright battle had stopped, but an unbroken arc of violence stretched from the war right into our midst.