Madurai’s memoir: a Canadian refugee remembers Sri Lanka
Protests in Toronto (photo from Flickr under CC license)
Names have been changed to protect identity.
February 2009: Madurai’s longing for the country she would never again know had become a sharp pain. That morning, she had gone to Toronto to become part of a human chain protesting the Sri Lankan civil war. She, like many others, had desperately wanted to fly the flag of the Tamil Tigers in solidarity, but couldn’t, since Canada had labeled the rebels terrorists. About 45,000 people had shown up for the protest according to Canadian media, a human chain linking a mass of people to a fragile cause being blown away, bit by bit, by the army.
The same had happened in 1994.
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Rumors had abounded for weeks, faint whispers that the army is nearby. But the people stayed on, feeling safe under the protection of the Tigers.
Then one day in 1994, under a darkening sky that poured spikes of rain, a column of civilians left Jaffna.
M was 10, a small girl. She had already traveled much of northern Sri Lanka on foot. Born on the small fisherman’s island off the northwestern coast called Velanai, her family had fled in the middle of the brutal second Eelam War of the early 90s.
Velanai had been safe until 1990, when the bombs started falling. The planes had different sounds, depending on altitude, remembered M. They would come close to the ground to bomb, and there would be great noise. M’s family would hurriedly open the bunker below the kitchen floor and escape into the basement darkness to wait it out.
In that year, a census revealed that 22,000 people had lived around Velanai. Following military operations by the Sri Lankan Army and Navy, 14,000 Tamils left the region, a mass exodus in search of protection with Tigers.
M’s mother left the island without food, with 25 rupees, and three young children—M, her elder sister Vimali, and younger brother Arasan. They began their trek southwards to Jaffna, a hub of the Tamil Eelam.
Jaffna was an important city to the rebels, a showpiece to prove to the world that the Tigers are capable of forming their own nation. The rebels set up alternative administrative systems—police stations, banks, and schools where children learned to design models of mini-Eelams with clay.
M first came face-to-face with the Tigers in Jaffna. They lived in three camps behind her aunt Lakshmi’s house and helped her with her homework. It was a brief lull of piece in a wartime characterized by unending violence.
One day came the all too familiar noise of low-altitude planes scouting the region, a sign of bombing to come. M ran swiftly through streets of Jaffna toward home, until she met one of the ubiquitous stray dogs that littered the streets. Frightened by the whirr! of the planes, the dog bit her.
She heard later that an elementary school had been bombed.
Soon after, M and her family left Jaffna in a long cavalcade of displaced refugees. They carried food and clothing in small packages, balanced precariously on bicycles. They pushed the cycles along, even as the hard rain poked into their eyes. They moved east, to Chavakachcheri, a town 10 kilometers from Jaffna.
They went through a small forest and crossed a flooded bridge in an intense darkness created by the storm. M was submerged to her knees but her family was preoccupied with helping her 70-year-old grandmother cross the junction. They reached a bumpy road that cut through vast empty spaces and, after a single day’s trek, arrived in Chavakachcheri.
By 2009, Chavakachcheri no longer existed. In 2002, intense bombing by the army had left the town a mere shell of what M witnessed in 1994. Bombed out shops and hospitals served as a testament to a once-bustling town.
From Chavakachcheri, M left for the Vanni district, of which Killinochi is the capital. There she caught malaria, but medical help was far away. Her family waited for her to get cured before moving, once again to the south, to Colombo.
From Colombo, they arrived as refugees of the Sri Lankan civil war in Canada where her father was stationed.
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M, 24, felt like one of ‘them’—the Tigers who had given up so much to fight for her language, her culture. Arriving in Canada at the age of 12, she had been full of hope and childish excitement at a future in the great West. But soon her excitement gave way to a longing, amplified by the absence of any connection with her birthplace. Everyone in Velanai had moved away.
But in a way typical of immigrants who are ever in danger of losing their roots, M became a preserver of Tamil custom. Even after living in Canada for 12 years, she spoke English uncomfortably, with a heavy accent, as though it was not quite her native tongue. Often, she would use Google Maps to zoom into the little island and locate her home. It was next to the hospital and the elementary school, just as she remembered it. It had survived the years of war, through the Allaipiddy massacre in 2002, when masked gunmen killed 13 Tamils in their homes in her island.
Then in October 2008, the government began the final offensive against the Tigers. Intense fighting led to the capture of rebel-held towns of Killinochi and Jaffna. Today, most of the Tamil Eelam fought for by the Tigers over the past three decades has been won over by the government. For the refugees who fled, their sense of helplessness knows no bounds.
There are some 250,000 Tamils left in northern Sri Lanka, according to aid groups. They are trapped in a small area by the intense fighting between the army and the Tigers. When M tried to contact her cousins, they couldn’t discuss the war for fear of being overheard. Indiscrete people who challenge the government are often gunned down under mysterious circumstances.
“There are so many people trapped within, they don’t know where to go,” said M. “Before when we had the big displacement, we were able to move from Velanai to Jaffna to Vanni, but now they don’t have any places. They don’t have food and medicines. They don’t have proper shelter.”
The media has been restricted in airing footage, but M has different sources for news. She relies on underground Tamil television channels that broadcast footage from the warzone. These are picked up and rebroadcast through YouTube, an underground channel of communication watched by refugees throughout host countries that have labeled the Tigers and their cause terrorism.
It is through that network that M found out that only 26 Tamils had taken refuge in a 35-square kilometer safe zone created by the government. It was a good thing too, for the army soon bombed the area.
“People there don’t trust the government,” said M. “They want to be with the tigers.”
“If you know the tigers from inside, rather than from outside, you’ll know that what we want to do is fight for freedom and actually run a country,” she added, forgetting for a minute that she was not actually a Tiger.
Aid agencies have estimated that hundreds of civilians have been killed so far in the army’s offensive. Hospitals and ambulances have been hit. The United Nations chief in Sri Lanka labeled the situation as a “very grave abuse of human rights.”
But M is not without hope.
“Right now, it looks like the government will take over,” said M. “But it doesn’t mean that the Tigers are going to vanish forever. I think they are going to fight back when unexpected.”
She paused.
“That’s the hope.”