‘It is the intention of Mr Ranil Wickramasinghe to generate a ‘mod’ farmer without hanging cheeks and whose buttocks are not visible as in the traditional clothing.’ So read a pre-election press release this month by one Dr Rajitha Senaratne, Sri Lankan MP and member of the leading opposition United National Party (UNP), whose leader, the aforementioned Mr Wickramasinghe, hopes to become president when the country goes to the polls in three weeks’ time.

There are many important issues being contested: recovery from the tsunami, an uneasy ceasefire in the long-running civil war, arguments over corruption. But unwittingly, it seems, Mr Senaratne has touched on an issue equally close to many of his compatriots’ hearts.

Sri Lanka is a conservative country. Westerners are advised to cover their shoulders and legs to avoid attracting attention, and Sri Lankan women bathing in rivers manage, in contravention of all laws of topology, to thoroughly clean themselves while barely ruffling their sari.

But there are contradictions. Although the ‘wet sari’ scene is about as risque as local films will venture, these garments - even on portly elderly women - often happily expose the midriff. And workers in rice paddies still wear the traditional loincloth. Known as the amude, this clothing (as the MP was keen to point out) exposes the buttocks. Kind of like an agricultural version of the G-string.

Farmers across the world are a notoriously militant bunch. When aggravated, they are prone to release sheep in inconvenient locations or drive tractors three abreast down motorways. So by wading into the great amude debate, Dr Senaratne was perhaps fortunate to get off with a mild roasting in the letters pages.

‘Dr Senaratne is talking nonsense,’ thundered a PB Godigamuwa from Maharagama. ‘In Sri Lanka, farmers work in a pool of muddy water. The loincloth is the most suitable attire. They get the wind blowing to their bare bodies, feet and buttocks to enable them to work hard the whole day.’

Back-pedalling soon followed. Proving that the art of spin has successfully crossed the Indian ocean, Dr Senaratne explained that his remarks were actually praising the farmers for having already modernised: ‘The JVP [the Marxist nationalist opposition party] assume that farmers have to be dressed in the amude. But things have changed and today farmers are working in shorts and socialising in jeans and T-shirts.’

It remains to be seen how this loincloth flip-flopping will ultimately play at the polls.

Ten years ago, the entire town of Jaffna, the largest Tamil population centre in Sri Lanka, streamed out of their homes ahead of a major offensive by government troops against their town. On October 30, 1995, half a million men, women and children walked several miles east, crossing the Navatkuli bridge into the neck of the peninsula. Many then made the dangerous boat journey on to Kilinochchi in the Vanni as to the north of Jaffna, heavy fighting raged as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) battled to keep the massed might of the Sri Lanka Army at bay.

The exodus, as it came to be known amongst them, undeniably marked a turning point in Tamils’ self-understanding. The context in which the exodus took place was aptly summed by The Times of London, whose correspondent, Christopher Thomas, wrote on October 30: “Many civilians have been killed by government shelling and bombing, which has hit residential areas of the town. There is panic among the 600,000 Tamils on the Jaffna peninsula. The greatest humanitarian crisis of the war is in the making...Tamil civilians in Jaffna are evidently terrified by the advancing of the soldiers and are looking to the Tigers to save them from what they are convinced will be a massacre.”

Despite claims by the Sri Lankan government and other critics of the Tigers that the LTTE had forcibly relocated the people of Jaffna, the simple fact was that as tens of thousands Sri Lankan troops blasted their way towards the town, its residents were desperate to get out. That they had to, and were able to, escape the onslaught, which an awed Indian Army general described in the anodyne term ‘broad front’ changed Tamil attitudes to the Sri Lankan state, the LTTE and the conflict.

The senior professors and lecturers of Jaffna University observed in a letter to the UN Secretary General on November 28: “if lives have not been lost or people have not been injured on an even larger scale it is not because of the sensitivity and concern shown by the security forces for the safety of innocent civilians but because of the precaution taken by the people in evacuating quickly from areas where intense shelling and bombing were taking place and seeking shelter elsewhere.”

Jaffna has been considered the cultural capital of Tamils in Sri Lanka for centuries. It was in the northern peninsula that the Tamil armed struggle against the Sinhala-dominated Sri Lankan state began in the late seventies, following decades of unsuccessful political campaigns. Following the 1983 pogrom, open conflict erupted between Tamil militants and the armed forces. In the 80’s the LTTE emerged through a series of clashes amongst the Tamil groups as the primary challenger to the state. The peninsula was the site of much of the fighting of the 80’s, first against the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) and in the late 80’s, the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF).

When the Indian army withdrew in 1990, the LTTE assumed control of Jaffna, except for the SLA base complexes along the peninsula’s northern cap and its neck. Following the second phase of the war (sometimes referred to as Eelam War 2), the LTTE entered into negotiations with the government of President Chandrika Kumaratunga. Those talks broke down in contentious circumstances. The government accused the LTTE of rebuffing its peace efforts. The LTTE said the government was insincere about the peace and was playing for time. What is clear is that when the war resumed in July 1995, the Sri Lankan armed forces had completely rearmed and expanded, acquiring helicopter gunships, heavier artillery and armour. Moreover, the SLA had gradually transferred substantial numbers of troops from the eastern province into the Jaffna peninsula ahead of a new military project.

The first SLA assault on Jaffna, codenamed ‘Operation Leap Forward’ came on 9 July 1995. Despite rapid initial progress, it was stalled by a major LTTE counter-offensive. Despite the success of their ‘Operation Tiger Leap,’ the Tigers realised that Sri Lanka had prepared for an offensive of unprecedented proportions. The LTTE, it is understood, promptly began to prepare a rear area in the Vanni, relocating strategic resources, including arms factories, and supplies whilst bolstering their defences in Jaffna.

But another lesson was quickly learnt by the Tamils: heavy loss of civilian life was to be expected. On the first day of ‘Leap Forward’ itself 65 civilians were killed and 150 seriously injured when St Peters Church and the neighbouring Murugamoorthy Hindu Temple in Navaly were bombed by the Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF). Thousands of people from the Valigamam sector had fled their homes as they army advanced and most heeded notices dropped by the SLAF that they should seek shelter in places of worship to avoid being targeted. Hundreds had fled to the temple and church at Navaly.

From late July, the Sri Lankan armed forces began a continuous artillery and air bombardment to soften up the Valigamam sector. Civilian losses mounted steadily with occasional spikes such as the killing of 22 children at Nagar Kovil High School, bombed on September 22. The all-out ground assault to recapture the Jaffna peninsula from the LTTE began on October 1. The first phase, ‘Operation Thunder,’ was intended to capture parts of Valigamam sector to the north of Jaffna town. After two weeks the SLA succeeded, despite heavy casualties, in capturing key towns including Atchuveli, Avarankal and Puttur. With the SLA’s strategy to cut off Jaffna town becoming clear, the LTTE deployed forces to prevent SLA columns from advancing to the Navatkuli bridge which linked Valigamam with Thenmaradchi to the east.

The assault on Jaffna town itself, codenamed ‘Operation Riviresa’ (Sun Ray), began on October 17. Heavy fighting raged at several locations. On October 29 Sri Lankan forces overran LTTE defences in Neervely after a pitched battle. Only one major defence line, in Kopay North, now lay between them and a relatively easy progress towards the Navatkuli Bridge. It was the SLA’s battlefield tactics which panicked residents most. As former IPKF commander Lt. Gen. Amarjit Singh Kalkut later put it “[the SLA] followed a strategy of broad front; [it] is a very secure method, but you need large forces, which they have got; it is more time consuming, but they’re in no hurry; and thirdly it causes a lot of destruction.”

He explained: “You are actually steamrolling through the area. Step by step. Do a certain distance first, then clean up, and converge on the next one. Any building from which resistance comes or is likely, bring it down with air bombing or tank fire. You clean up. But then as you pass, you’re leaving rubble behind. So for that problem [the Sri Lankans] have resorted to censorship so that this doesn’t come out. … They have concentrated overwhelming force for a Broad Front and have made sure there is no adverse publicity. World opinion, the press, don’t know what is happening because it is all controlled.”

On the morning of October 30, LTTE Political Wing cadres appeared on the streets and made public announcements urging civilians to seek shelter the other side of Navatkuli bridge in Thenmaradchi. Virtually the entire population, half a million people, massed in the centre of the town and started the long walk towards safety, taking only what they could carry. The narrow bridge at Navatkuli became a bottleneck as people pushed to cross over to the relative safety of Kaithady and then on towards Chavakachcheri, in the southern half of the peninsula.

The Toronto Star’s Paul Watson, quoting Gerard Peytrignet, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Sri Lanka reported: “About half of the … refugees are living and sleeping outdoors in heavy monsoon rains. The rest are holed up in churches, schools and relatives’ homes. The refugees have very little food or proper sanitation. Doctors are already seeing cases of dysentery and eye infections, and while cholera hasn’t struck yet, the conditions are perfect for a deadly epidemic.”

Most of the refugees sought shelter in and around Chavakachcheri, a large market town few kilometres down the road from Navatkuli Bridge. The town was incapable of absorbing an influx many times own population and life quickly became a misery there with shortages of food, clean water, shelter and sanitation. Disease took hold quickly. The town also came under air attack. The Hindu, quoting Jaffna Government Agent, Mr. K. Ponnambalam, said 42 civilians were killed on October 31 alone.

Many people moved on to the Vanni. Without a land route – the Elephant Pass causeway being dominated by an SLA base complex – they crossed the Kilali lagoon, buffeted by the elements and under increasing air attack. Reuters, reporting that “the Tigers have ferried civilians in boats across the lagoon to camps on the mainland,” quoted refugees as saying “a number are at the mainland ferry hoping they may be on the next boat to cross the lagoon.”

AFP quoting Thillai Natarajah, a senior government official in Kilinochchi, reported that 60,000 refugees had poured into the area from Jaffna by November 4, and the total was expected reach 300,000 soon. “More than 10,000 people are streaming in every day. Most people are housed in school buildings and temples. But the situation is getting desperate,’ Natarajah told AFP. “Many of those were drenched in rain and without a second set of clothes.” He added that there were food shortages.

Having rationalized the military assault on Jaffna as a mission to ‘liberate the Tamils from the LTTE’ the Sri Lankan government first claimed the Tamils “were deserting the LTTE” and then, realising what was unfolding, said the “LTTE was forcing them out.” Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgmar also played down the scale of the displacement and rebuffed international offers of assistance for the victims.

Meanwhile, as the Toronto Star noted: “Sri Lanka’s military won’t let journalist cross into areas controlled by the LTTE [while] relief workers are so afraid of making the government angry, they refuse to photograph or shoot video of the refugees suffering and smuggle the pictures out to reporters.”

Nevertheless, observing that “reports of the massive displacement of the civilian population in northern Sri Lanka are a source of deep concern,” United Nations Secretary General. Boutros Boutros Ghali called for “humanitarian assistance on a significant scale to minimize the suffering.” The Belgian relief agency Medicines Sans Frontiers made a worldwide appeal for aid for an estimated 500,000 refugees, a figure the Sri Lanka government said was greatly exaggerated.

However Foreign Minister Kadirgamar claimed that only about 150,000 people had been displaced. Saying the government will not allow foreign relief agencies to operate independently, and blamed the U.N. and the international community for rushing to conclusions “without knowing all the facts,” said Kadirgamar: “We can take care of our problem.”

“We do not intend to permit any outside agencies, including the UN...to carry out independent operations”, Mr. Kadiragamar was quoted as saying by the BBC which reported on November 6: “Sri Lanka has banned international agencies from aiding Tamil refugees over fears that some are not impartial.”

The Toronto Star reported: “While Sri Lanka’s army fights to crush Tamil rebels, it’s battling on another front against foreign relief workers trying to care for 400,000 war refugees. The refugees, including hundreds of wounded civilians, are caught behind the civil war’s front line. Western relief agencies accuse the military of blocking desperately needed aid. Tight restrictions are preventing the delivery of drugs, tents and blankets as well as equipment to build latrines, said frustrated aid officials, who spoke on condition they not be named.”

In an outraged editorial, the Boston Globe said “Because the war zone has been closed to reporters and cameras, the human calamity visited upon the Tamils has become a tree falling unheard in the forest. Yet their suffering is as grievous as that of refugees in the former Yugoslavia.”

“The government of President Chandrika Kumaratunga has insisted that it be the entity to distribute international humanitarian aid … [But] since most of the refugees who fled the government forces closing in on the city of Jaffna are now in territory controlled by the Tigers, relief supplies channeled through the government could not help those in need, whatever the intentions of the government.”

The paper demanded: “For the sake of a single humane standard, the United States and other governments should insist that humanitarian aid to refugees be delivered under international supervision. There is also a need for outside parties willing to help broker a ceasefire and a negotiated peace between the Tamil minority and the Sri Lankan government. As in Bosnia, millions of civilians must be saved from the madness of their leaders.”

The people of Jaffna endured enormous suffering during the exodus and in its aftermath. But the Sri Lankan state’s reaction to the humanitarian crisis and the LTTE’s role in the battle for Jaffna has, despite criticism leveled against the movement, had a profound impact in the shaping of the Tamil national identity.

The Jaffna university professors’ letter to the Mr. Boutros-Ghali stated: “Tamils have now been completely alienated from the mainstream of Sri Lankan polities. The present government by its activities has helped communalism to raise its ugly head again in the South on an unprecedented scale. No part of Sri Lanka is now safe for the Tamils to live. After the recent events there is hardly any Tamil in the North and East who thinks that a settlement of the ethnic problem under a single Sri Lankan polity is desirable or possible.”

The point was inevitably made more forcefully by LTTE leader Vellupillai Pirapaharan in his Heroes Day address on November 27, 1995: “we see such tragic experience and suffering as a tremendous contribution by our people to the cause of national emancipation. This mass exodus proclaims to the world that our people are determined to live as free beings with self-dignity and that they are prepared to face any form of suffering to [do so].”

“The invasion of Jaffna is a gigantic historical blunder made by Chandrika regime. As a consequence of this act the Colombo government has closed all avenues for peace,” Mr. Pirapaharan said. And then he made an impassioned call: “It is only by strengthening our military power we could live with security; we could gain our lost territories; we could return to our homes as free men. The task of building the military power of the Tamil Nation has become the inevitable historical necessity today.”

Seven youth killed by Sri Lanka Army (SLA) troops near their camp in Nelliyadi on May 4 were not Tamil Tiger cadres, but young revellers on their way to a birthday party, press reports said.

The seven youth, travelling near Nelliyadi junction in Vadamaradchi, Jaffna, were killed when SLA troops fired rockets at the auto rickshaws in which they were travelling. The attack took place in a lane near the SLA Intelligence Camp in Navindil, 300 meters from Nelliyadi junction.

Military officials claimed the men were shot dead by security forces when they tried to attack a military sentry point at Nelliyadi in the Jaffna peninsula. Other military officials said the youths lobbed grenades into a nearby paramilitary camp near an SLA checkpoint.

However, Tamil parliamentarians and press reports said the youths, aged between 17 and 22, had been on their way to attend a birthday party in two rickshaws.

They claim the youths were fired at after a grenade attack behind the Intelligence camp in which three SLA personnel, including an officer, were wounded.

SLA soldiers used Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) launchers, killing all of them on the spot. Following the incident, the security forces launched a cordon and search operation in the area.

The youths were all from Rajakiramam, a village 500 meters south of Nelliyadi, which had already been tense after the shootings of 2 auto rickshaw drivers earlier. The situation was further intensified when Sri Lankan troops at the Intelligence camp and policemen threatened the parents to provide statement that the youths were LTTE cadres.

The government’s version was slightly different to that in the Tamil media.

Military spokesman Prasad Samarasinghe said seven LTTE cadres armed with hand grenades arrived in two three-wheelers and launched an attack on the two soldiers at the military checkpoint near the filling station at Nelliyadi and fled the scene.

However, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), in a statement rejected this version of events, pointing out that the youths were in a bar at the time off the attack on the SLA camp.

“The grenade attack on the Military Camp had taken place over 20 minutes prior to the killing of the seven civilians. There is absolutely no connection between the attack on the Military Camp and the seven civilians that were killed,” said the TNA. “In fact all seven civilians had been at a bar in Nelliyadi and were on their way to a private party for which they had to cross a Police Station and a Military Camp when they were targeted.”

Iraqi voters have ratified the United States-backed constitution despite claims of under-representation by minority Sunnis, officials said this week.

But voting was reported to be sharply along ethnic and sectarian lines, although final reports from Iraq’s Electoral Commission said 79 percent of voters backed the Constitution, with 21 percent opposed.

Shi’ite and Kurdish regions voted overwhelmingly 95-99 percent “Yes” while the Sunni-dominated Anbar region voted 97 percent “No.”

Of Iraq’s 18 provinces, only 2 reported “No” votes greater than two-thirds – one province short of successfully vetoing the Constitution. The swing province of Nineveh voted “No” by 55 percent, just short of the two-thirds majority needed.

Sunnis argue that Constitution will allow for the Shi’ite majority to deprive them of power and access to Iraq’s oil wealth. The Constitution includes recognition for federalism and the power of provincial governments to band together to combine local powers.

It has been argued that instead of allowing minority areas to be protected in solidarity against a possible tyranny of the majority, this constitution will allow Shi’ite regions to gain control over oil-rich provinces in the South, leaving Sunnis in control of small, non-oil producing regions in central Iraq.

The United States hoped the Constitution would offer a strong base for progress towards Iraq’s emergence as a secure, stable democracy. However, Sunni politician Saleh Mutlaq, said the vote could backfire on US efforts by persuading Sunnis they had no role in the political process.

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan’s representative in Baghdad, Ashraf Qazi, commented that the poll demonstrated how dangerously polarized Iraq has grown.

Three major Sunni parties have agreed to take part in December elections for the National Assembly, which will then have power to make changes to the Constitution. However other Sunni groups such as the Muslim Scholars Association continue to boycott political processes occurring under the leadership of foreign forces.

“All of us are against terrorism and consider it a crime regardless of its forms. However, we must differentiate between the legitimate Iraqi resistance and terrorism” Association spokesman Muhammad Bashar al-Faydi told Al-Jazeera in response to Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Ja’fari’s demand that “terrorist” groups not be invited to a reconciliation conference.

In addition to minority protection, the United States hoped the Constitution would further the rights of women, but it appears it may fall short here too. Another potentially problematic article in Iraq’s new Constitution is Article 39, which states Iraqis will be allowed to choose their applicable family law based on their own religious domination.

This has raised concerns among women’s rights activists who argue women in Iraqi society who now feel threatened upon leaving the house, are unlikely to have the freedom to decide which laws to apply for their case.

Though Article 14 of the Constitution explicitly states that Iraqis will be equal with no distinction based on sex, women’s activists are concerned over the granting of greater control to religious, instead of secular, authorities.

Up to fifteen thousand Diaspora Tamils rallied at the European Union Secretariat in Brussels Monday to protest against EU bars on LTTE delegations visiting member states.

They called upon the EU to affirm Tamils' right to self determination, and asked for backing for a peace process based on the Interim Self Governing Agreement (ISGA) proposals submitted by the Tamil Tigers in 2003.

Despite the rain, thousands gathered on Monday with Tamil Eelam flags and posters of Vellupilai Pirabakaran, leader of the LTTE.

The demonstrators called attention to the hundreds of thousands of Tamils still displaced in Sri Lanka's Northeast as well as the stalled Post-Tsunami Operations Management Structure (PTOMS), an agreement signed by the Tigers and the government to facilitate the distribution of tsunami-related aid.

Tamils arrived in Brussels Monday from many of the EU countries with Diaspora concentrations, as well as from non-member states including Switzerland and Norway, packing out the city centre despite the cold rain.

Police reported at least 220 coaches pouring into the city ahead of the event. Coach parking bays quickly filled up, forcing some to park far from the rally point. Among them were at least ten coachloads from Britain, which is heading the EU at present.

Ten coaches from France parked five kms from the centre, their occupants taking taxis and public transport or simply walking to the rally site despite the heavy rain.

Police were quoted by radio stations as estimating that up to fifteen thousand Tamils attended the rally.

“Many people could not travel due to difficulties in getting visas in time,” officials from Tamil Youth Organisation (TYO), one of the leading community organisations involved in organising the rally, said.

Many Tamils in Switzerland, a hotbed of Tamil nationalism and which is not in the EU, were unable to get attend, they said by way of example.

Interestingly, although there are no major Tamil organisations in Belgium itself, the event was prepared by Tamil groups in other countries. Activists from the tiny Tamil community in Belgium helped youth organisations in Germany spearheading the efforts, they said.

Following the rally, Tamil representatives and legal experts met for two hours with EU officials regarding issues related to the peace process.

Mr. Francis Boyle, a leading practitioner of international law, and Mr. V. Rudrakumaran, legal advisor to the Tamil delegation at the peace negotiations, along with Tamil National Alliance (TNA) Jaffna MP, Mr. Gajendran Selvarajah met with EU officials.

Academics from prominent universities across Europe also participated in the rally.

The demonstrators’ declaration given to the European Commission stated the EU has threatened Sri Lanka’s peace with its recent ban on travel by members of the Tigers in member states and demanded the EU rescind its decision.

The EU ban “places Tamils at a distinct disadvantage … [by] undermining the LTTE’s status as an equal partner and thus constraining its capacity to negotiate,” read the demonstrators’ declaration given to the EU Secretariat.

“It was the gross, consistent, and continuing oppression on the Tamil people and the violence unleashed against them during the past several decades by successive Sri Lankan governments that led to the Tamil people getting involved in armed resistance,” the declaration stated.

The demonstrators also protested against the paramilitary groups whose attacks on Tamils in Army-controlled areas of the Northeast have escalated in recent months, in violation of the Ceasefire Agreement. The Tigers have stated the Sri Lankan Army is providing weapons and support to five armed groups to fight a covert, shadow war in the Eastern province.

Amid efforts to promote peace in Sri Lanka, an oft repeated assertion is that the Northeast needs to be ‘democratised.’ This claim, put forward amid the Liberation Tigers’ dominance over the Tamil areas is leveled by those committed in principle to democracy, but also, more often than not, by self-interested opponents of the LTTE. The argument goes thus: the LTTE is a military organization that suppresses democracy in the Northeast primarily to safeguard its claim to be sole representative of the Tamil people. By extension, without an electoral mandate, the LTTE is not entitled to the claim as there are Tamils opposed to the movement and its political project and only by allowing these sentiments through can a genuine solution be arrived at.

The cause of democratizing the North-East which will doubtless have the support of the residents of the North-East when it is situated in the wider context of restructuring and reforming the Sri Lankan state in its entirety, say towards a strong federal model of power-sharing. But in the immediate future, Tamil focus is on establishing a secure and autonomous region within which they may manage their own affairs. The LTTE is the most viable vehicle for this. And despite the invectives of many of its critics, most Tamils – including many who are critical of the movement – accept that the LTTE grew out of a need to halt a multifaceted state-run campaign of discrimination and violence, sometimes characterized as a ‘slow genocide.’

The LTTE is thus primarily a military organization geared to defeat the state’s coercive apparatus. But as the territory under its control expanded, the LTTE recognized the need for governmental structures to provide security, law and order, contract enforcement, medical services and education. Criticism of the LTTE’s leadership structure as undemocratic therefore misses the point: the movement evolved out of a security need that has not been filled by the peace process. Moreover, its leadership progression is understood as meritocratic while the organization as a whole is renowned for its lack of corruption and the discipline of its cadres.

Democratisation of the Northeast, meanwhile, is deeply implicated in the Sri Lankan state’s efforts to promoting other, more acquiescent Tamil groups as ‘alternatives’ to the LTTE as leaders of the Tamils. Perhaps unsurprisingly the state and its allied Tamil groups have therefore been amongst the LTTE’s most vocal critics. The central charge has been that the LTTE is a fascist, uncompromising organization pursuing hardline policies to perpetuate the conflict for its own self-aggrandizing interests. Conversely, the other Tamil groups are projected as beleaguered ‘moderate’ actors braving a hostile rival.

As the conflict shifted from an insurgency to a fully fledged conventional war, these characterizations were dissonant with manifest ground realities. There is now a shift: the LTTE is suggested as dominant with a limited measure of political support in the Northeast and the other Tamil groups portrayed as political rivals braving its dangerous hegemony.

There are multiple objectives behind the campaign to reject the LTTE’s sole representative claim and the attendant call for democratization of the Northeast. The first is to introduce Tamil organizations loyal to the state into the negotiation process, thereby widening it from a bilateral to a multilateral one - and thus to dilute the autonomy challenge. A secondary goal is to shift the focus away from the substantial alterations of Sri Lanka’s own constitution that are necessary to address Tamil demands.

Whilst there is common acceptance that Sri Lanka’s constitution needs to be changed as part of a solution, the most obvious of amendments is not being discussed even now: the repeal of the 6th amendment. This clause rules any advocacy of separation or independence illegal in principle. Even an unarmed LTTE therefore cannot be a legitimate political entity in Sri Lanka. It is well-known that the 1977 Parliamentary elections were a de-facto referendum on independence with the Tamils endorsing the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) and its call for Eelam. After the 6th amendment came into being, there has simply been no way of testing Tamil sentiment on independence.

It is in this context that the ‘lack of democracy’ claim fits into Colombo’s strategy of subverting a negotiated solution. An unusual mix of paramilitary groups and marginalised politicians who at various stages have supported the state, militarily or politically, are being put forward as the actors through which the project of democratizing the Northeast ought to proceed. These include the paramilitary Eelam People’s Democractic Party (EPDP), the ousted former leader of the TULF, V. Anandasangeree, and even the renegade LTTE commander Karuna.

Many of these actors enjoy visibly limited legitimacy in the Northeast. Apart from being perceived as having militarily and politically implicated with a Sinhala-dominated state and its repression, they have also been associated with paramilitary violence, corruption, racketeering and in some cases, rights abuses. However, Colombo has sought to bolster these actors through military force and state-funded patron-client networks. The latter has been most vividly illustrated by World Bank investigations of Sri Lanka’s rehabilitation ministry whilst the EPDP leader, Douglas Devananda, was in charge: despite having over 1300 employees, the World Bank team said they couldn’t find a single person who had been helped by the ministry.

Moreover, the paramilitary organizations, working closely with Sri Lanka’s military, are also engaged in a shadow war with the LTTE. Although Colombo has consistently denied it, their complicity in the murderous violence in the Northeast has, amid a rising bodycount, compelled even the Co-Chairs of Sri Lanka’s donors to demand they be disarmed to protect the peace process. The Tamil groups, for their part, seek to project their casualties in this covert conflict as further evidence of the LTTE’s anti-democratic nature. The killings are however integral to the cycle of violence between their Army-backed gunmen and the LTTE’s intelligence wing.

The LTTE, meanwhile, appears to be in tune with popular political sentiments amongst the Tamils, illustrated most vividly by the results of the April 2004 Parliamentary elections in which the LTTE-proxies, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), received a thumping endorsement. The TNA manifesto explicitly backed the LTTE’s sole representative claim and, moreover, the notion of a Tiger-controlled Interim Self Governing Authority (ISGA) for the Northeast. Indeed, the TNA explicitly urged voters to view the election as a referendum of their support for the LTTE’s contemporary political positions and won a record 22 seats.

These popular sentiments were also underlined by a survey conducted by the Colombo-based think-tank, the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA). The survey revealed that LTTE policies enjoy the overwhelming support of the Tamils. In excess of 90% of respondents expressed support for policies such as ISGA and the removal of the Sri Lankan military’s High Security Zones(HSZs) from Tamil areas (interestingly over 50% of the Northeast’s Muslim community also supported the ISGA). Significantly the survey was carried out anonymously and only in government controlled areas, discounting undue LTTE influence of the results.

The Sri Lankan state and its allied Tamil groups counter that the 2004 polls are an inaccurate reflection of support for the LTTE as its grip on the Northeast prevents residents from dissenting against its policies. However, these accusations are suspect given that Tamils crossed into government-controlled territory cast secret ballots and given the substantial effort the LTTE put into ensuring people in its controlled areas were transported to crossing points. Whilst there have been allegations of electoral malpractice in Jaffna in favour of the TNA, Sri Lanka’s electoral commission ruled that the outcome could not have been altered by tampering: the TNA was returned with landslides in almost all Tamil-dominated districts.

Meanwhile, an often ignored constituency in the ‘democratisation’ debate is the Tamil Diaspora. The substantial political, moral and financial support accruing to the LTTE from the Diaspora underlines the legitimacy the organization enjoys amongst Tamils clearly not subject to its direct control. Moreover, most of the Diaspora has family and community links to Tamils in the Northeast and the claim the former would contribute to the repression of the latter defies logic. Conversely, it is significant that none of the LTTE’s critics have been able to mobilize support of any standing amongst Diaspora Tamils in the West.

Sri Lanka has sought to redirect international support for better governance on the island toward the legitimization of paramilitary actors aligned with the state’s interests, hoping that the LTTE can be weakened as a Tamil representative and corralled into diluting its firm stance on self-rule. Introducing a multitude of anti-LTTE players to the negotiating process, the state hopes, would also blunt demands for the substantial constitutional reform that it might be compelled to effect. The unprincipled nature of these groups is exemplified by the EPDP this month campaigning vigorously for Mahinda Rajapakse, the only Presidential candidate who has explicitly rejected power-sharing with the Tamils or weakening the unitary state in any way.

There are, of course, aspects of the LTTE’s governance structure that fall short of liberal ideals. However, these criticisms must be evaluated in the context of the threats, including military incursion, faced by the embryonic administration that the organization has established. However, the LTTE has consistently demonstrated that its policies on the major issues affecting the residents of the North-East are in tune with popular opinion.

Moreover, a conviction the organization acts largely in the interests of the people it claims to represent has been substantially enhanced by its conduct since the February 2002 and especially in the wake of the December 2004 tsunami. The LTTE is recognized as running an efficient, uncorrupt administration which has successfully mobilised the Diaspora to deliver benefits to the residents of its controlled areas. Its pro-active engagement with foreign Non-Govermental Organizations (NGOs) has circumvented the state’s unmistakably racist obstructions to ensure the efficient delivery of international assistance. The LTTE is the single largest employer in its controlled areas, though private business ventures both from the Diaspora and local Tamils are being encouraged and supported.

The point is that, despite its non-participation in electoral politics, the LTTE is attempting to govern efficiently and humanely. Whilst articulating a clear cut political stance – self-rule and autonomy for the Tamil people – the movement is also facilitating and promoting development activities that can make a concrete difference to the lives of ordinary people. None of its so called rivals or self-styled ‘moderates’ can compare in achieved results.

This is not to say there isn’t expectation of greater democratic freedom in the longer term; self rule is inextricably linked on a people’s ability to influence their governors. But this democratic freedom is acknowledged as conditional on the establishment of a stable, unassailable Tamil entity, federal state or otherwise. However, ‘democratisation’ in which parties serving the interests of parties external to the Tamil polity, most notably the other protagonist in the ethnic conflict, the Sri Lankan state, is not the same thing. Neither is the foisting on them of ‘alternative’ leaders whose alignment with the repressive Sinhala-dominated state is unabashedly displayed. As the ‘democratisation’ advocates argue, a failure to heed the sentiments of the Tamil people will prove a major obstacle to finding a long term solution to the ethnic-conflict. But the Tamils, both the Diaspora and residents of the Northeast have been repeatedly asserting their loyalties and preferences for several years now.

EPDP: examining an alternative [Oct 19, 2005]

Whilst Sri Lanka’s largest Tamil party, reflecting popular discontent with Sinhala political leaders, is staying neutral in the country’s forthcoming Presidential elections, a paramilitary ally of the ruling party is throwing its weight behind Premier Mahinda Rajapakse – the arch-Sinhala nationalist of the two leading contenders.

The Eelam People’s Democratic Party (EPDP) announced this week they will back Rajapakse, and urged all Tamil speakers to vote for the Premier whose campaigning kicked off with electoral pacts with hardline Sinhala parties ruling out power-sharing to resolve the island’s ethnic conflict.

“Premier Mahinda is the best option available to the Tamil-speaking people to resolve their problems non-violently and build a secure future to achieve their cherished goals of a federal constitution,” EPDP Leader and Minister Douglas Devananda was quoted by ColomboPage as saying.

However, Tamil newspapers and parliamentarians have sharply criticized Rajapakse for rejecting the notion of self-determination as well as crucial steps in the peace process, including the Post-Tsunami Operations Management Structure (P-TOMS) – an agreement on sharing tsunami related aid which has been frozen by Sri Lanka’s supreme court.

Power-sharing, particularly federalism, emerged as a likely solution to the protracted conflict in peace talks between the previous Sri Lankan government and the LTTE, and have generally been backed by the international community as the groundwork for a lasting peace.

An editorial in Uthayan, the popular Jaffna daily, last week slammed Rajapakse for having “joined the extreme nationalists rejecting all agreed instruments of reconciliation.”

The LTTE-backed Tamil Nationalist Alliance (TNA), which polled over 600,000 votes from the Northeast in April 2004, winning it 22 members in parliament, has refused to back either Rajapakse or United National Party (UNP) candidate Ranil Wickramesinghe.

“None of the candidates are representing Tamil aspirations and we find it difficult to support any of the presidential candidates,” M. Raviraj, Jaffna District TNA MP was quoted by ColomboPage as saying.

He said both Rajapakse’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the UNP have used the Tamil question to their advantage while offering nothing to the Tamil minority in return.

TNA parliamentarians at last Saturday’s Tamil Resurgence rally in Trincomalee accused the Sinhalese candidates of trying to get Tamil votes without intending to address their concerns.

Rajapakse is backed by a coalition of Sinhala nationalist forces, raising questions about the rationale behind the paramilitary EPDP’s backing, though the Premier’s hostility to the LTTE is clearly a point in common.

Rajapakse, who secured the backing of the stridently Sinhala nationalist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) parties early in the campaign process, has vowed to defend Sri Lanka’s unitary status.

He pointedly signed his agreements with the hardline parties in front of the Buddhist Temple of the Tooth, a cultural icon symbolizing Sinhalese power.

The EPDP has, meanwhile, begun campaigning in the Northeast, starting with a barely-attended meeting for volunteers in Jaffna. The paramilitary group has also tried to entice Tamil teachers to help during elections by offering permanent appointments, but TamilNet reported only a handful attended.

The EPDP was reported as saying participating in elections were difficult in the political climate of Jaffna.

The EPDP has asked Election Commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake to relax election laws in the Northeast so they can better campaign in these regions.

Citing ‘security concerns’, the Army-backed group claims it is unable to campaign at the ground level, and is thus asking for permission for more airtime and to put up posters.

Analysts say the peace process would probably progress further under Wickremesinghe’s leadership than his archrival, though Tamil commentators point to a string of unfulfilled promises which prompted the LTTE to suspend its participation it the Norwegian-brokered talks.

They also say that the minority vote will play a decisive role in the neck-and-neck race for the Presidency, to be decided on November 17.

EPDP: examining an alternative [Oct 19, 2005]

Tamils and Muslims from all over Trincomalee district gathered Saturday along the town’s Inner Harbor Road in the latest of a series of major demonstrations to demand Sri Lankan troops vacate the Northeast.

Tamil parliamentarians, human rights activists, students, and even a Buddhist monk rallied against the Army’s occupation of Tamil areas in the event which followed others held in the past few months in Mannar, Batticaloa, Mullaitivu, Kilinochchi, Vavuynia and Jaffna.

“After a half century since the independence of the Sinhala nation, Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism has shut all the doors to a democratic and peaceful settlement of the problems of the Tamil speaking people,” read the Declaration delivered at the event.

“We proclaim that an environment should be created to enable us to decide our destiny in our land on our own strength and for our people to continue to rise as a formidable force to procure the goal of a sacred and higher life of freedom.”

“Whilst making [this] Declaration, we seek the recognition by the international community of our basic rights and life of freedom with peace on the basis of our traditional homeland, our nationhood and self-rule and struggle for sovereignty.”

Tharmaratna Thero was the first Buddhist monk to ever take part in a Tamil uprising event, underlining the multi-ethnic character of the formerly Tamil-dominated district that has seen large scale state-sponsored colonization since independence from Britain.

“All Tamils living in Trincomalee are my relatives. For all those who live according to Lord Buddha’s teachings, everyone in the world is a relative,” the Thero said, speaking first in Sinhala and then in Tamil.

“Tragically today some Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka are not living according to Lord Buddha’s teachings,” he said, referring to the powerful clergy which sees non-Sinhalese as interlopers on the island.

“The past and present government of this country did not rule it according to Buddhist dharma. Instead they are acting like senseless mad people. The country is suffering for their misdeeds. The basic cause of the ethnic problem is the failure to act according to Buddhist dharma.”

Sakul Hameethu, a former principal and a Muslim representative, also addressed the rally.

“Tamil speaking people must come together. The mistakes of our political leaders have split us. We can achieve the rights of the Tamil speaking people only when our two ethnic groups join together,” he said.

Unlike previous Resurgence events, there were no Sri Lankan police or army personnel present. However, the Senior Superintendent of Police protested at the raising of the Tamil Tiger’s flag at a location he said was “state property.”

International truce monitors from the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission were on hand to observe the situation and handed the police complaint to Mr. R. Sampanthan, leader of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA).

The headquarters of the TNA was declared open in Trincomalee town on the eve of the rally. Mr. Sampanthan hoisted the Tamil Eelam flag at the ceremony Friday evening at the office which is located along Avvaiyar Road in the heart of the town. The event was attended by 15 of the TNA’s 22 MPs, drawn from all the Northeastern districts.

Earlier last week, Mr. Jeffry Lunstead, the US Ambassador to Sri Lanka, paid a one-day visit to Trincomalee town on Wednesday and held discussions with the heads of armed forces and Police and the SLMM.

The Liberation Tigers have warned that Premier Mahinda Rajapakse’s vow to alter the four-year-old ceasefire agreement if he is elected President next month could lead to the truce’s collapse.

“According to the ceasefire agreement (CFA) and the peace process, the government of Sri Lanka and LTTE are the only equal partners,” Mr. S Puleedevan, head of the LTTE’s Peace Secretariat told Reuters.

“Nobody can take unilateral decisions ... that means that that’s the end of the ceasefire agreement,” Mr. Puleedevan added. “So nobody can change it. Nobody can touch it.”

He was responding to undertakings in his manifesto by Mr. Rajapakse – the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party’s candidate for the November 17 polls – to alter the February 2002 truce soon after being elected.

Mr. Rajapakse, who has wide grass roots support among the Sinhalese majority, has vowed to take a different approach to the talks from his archrival Ranil Wickremesinghe, whose United National Party (UNP)-led government signed the truce and held several rounds of talks with the Tigers.

Attacking Wickremesinghe for “weakening” Sri Lanka’s security forces by signing the ceasefire with the LTTE, Rajapakse said in his manifesto he would “readjust (review) the CFA in a manner that terrorist activities have no place. I will take remedial action after reviewing the CFA monitoring process.”

He added, without elaborating: “I will get regional co-operation [for this]” – which has been widely interpreted as securing India’s support in changing the CFA.

“Mainly due to the UNP’s action to enter into a Ceasefire agreement without farsightedness there has been several problems created,” Rajapakse also said.

“The agreement had been reached without the consensus of the people of the country. Attempts were made to forcibly put this agreement on the public, but the LTTE themselves have broken away from this agreement.”

Elaborating on Rajapakse’s stance, his chief election campaigner Mangala Samaraweera told reporters: “the role of Norwegian facilitation and the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) will be reviewed immediately. They are not actually doing what they should be doing and we will review it.”

The truce has been under strain for the past two years amid an escalating shadow war between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan military.

Scores of LTTE members, Army intelligence officers, paramilitary cadres and civilians have died in a cycle of violence which escalated last year in the wake of the defection to the Army of a renegade LTTE commander, Karuna.

The violence, once predominantly occuring in Sri Lanka’s restive east and occasionally in the capitol, Colombo, has spread to almost other parts of the Northeast.

The LTTE accuses the SLFP-led government, headed by President Chandrika Kumaratunga, of backing a covert war of attrition against them, saying Sri Lankan military intelligence is deploying five paramilitary groups in a concerted campaign of violence against its members and supporters in the eastern province.

Although Rajapakse’s strident Sinhala nationalist policies have made Wickremesinghe the seeming de-facto choice for the island’s minorities, the LTTE is sceptical of his commitment to reigning in the paramilitaries.

Notably, neither of the leading contenders for the Presidential race have commented on the paramilitary campaign, despite demands by the Co-Chairs of Sri Lanka’s donor community that the irregulars be disarmed as stipulated by Clause 1.8 of the CFA.

“There’s less prospect (of progress after the election) frankly speaking, because we can’t find any difference between the candidates,” Mr. Puleedevan told Reuters, referring to stalled peace talks.

“No big changes will happen until the international community exerts pressure on the Sri Lankan government’s side,” he added, critical of the recently imposed EU travel ban on Tigers to its member-states. “They are exerting pressure on the wrong side.”

Survivors of last year’s tsunami in Asia are suffering human rights abuses including sex assaults and arbitrary arrests, as corrupt or incompetent officials mismanage relief, a US report said last week.

“The tsunami exposed groups already suffering from discrimination and other human rights abuses to greater harm,” the study by the University of California, Berkeley Human Rights Center and the East-West Center in Hawaii.

“Vulnerable groups, such as women, children and migrant workers, have suffered violations of human rights, including sexual violence and arbitrary arrest, during the relief phase and remain at risk as reconstruction begins.

“In addition, children living in conflict zones have been forced into armed groups. In some areas, government officials have refused to allow people access to aid in order to secure military goals,” it added

Human rights researchers visited five countries stricken by the December 26, 2004 killer wave - India, Indonesia, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Thailand - in March and April 2005 and interviewed hundreds of survivors and informants.

They discovered what they termed “widespread inequities” in aid distribution on the part of some government agencies as a result of favouritism, political influence, red tape, incompetence and caste affiliation.

The host of problems stem mostly from government incompetence or corruption, discrimination and a lack of public accountability, the report maintains.

Abuses against survivors of the tsunami that killed 217,000 people also included corruption, threatening of property right and violence against women, the report said.

“Government authorities rarely, if ever, investigated such abuses,” the report said, adding that government agencies and aid groups also often failed to consult survivors about aid distribution and reconstruction.

The report warned that US officials should heed the lessons of the Asian tsunami when offering shelter, relief and new communities to the more than one million people displaced by Hurricane Katrina, which hit the US Gulf Coast on August 29, laying the city of New Orleans to waste.

“Tsunami survivors, like many victims of Hurricane Katrina, are angry and frustrated,” said Laurel Fletcher, a co-author of the study and a clinical law professor at Berkeley’s School of Law.

She said that after many months, tsunami victims were still living in refugee camps, exposed to violence and threats and have virtually no say in how their towns and communities will be re-built.

“What the tsunami taught us is that we must be especially vigilant that the human rights of victims of natural disasters are respected,” said Harvey Weinstein, a professor at Berkeley’s School of Public Health.

Canadian police say they are continuing to ‘actively investigate’ the deaths of two Tamil youths mown down by a speeding car a month ago and an arrest has been made in the United States in connection with the killings.

Two brothers, Soumiyan Nagulasisgamany, 19, and Chandrasegar Nagulasisgamany, 21, both of Scarborough, Ontario were killed on September 23 by a speeding car following a dispute outside a Waterloo night club. The motorist fled.

On Monday this week, Canadian police in partnership with the FBI’s Fugitive Squad arrested 21-year old Paul Jeyarajah Alexander, originally from Toronto at a residence in Ridgefield, Connecticut, USA, police said.

“As part of the large scale investigation, police obtained a Canada wide arrest warrant for Alexander charged with two counts of 2nd Degree Murder and two counts of Attempted Murder in relation to alleged offences in the Dearborn Place incident,” a police statement said.

Homicide investigators liaised with the FBI to obtain a Provisional Warrant for execution in the US and Alexander is facing extradition to Canada, it said.

Police have seized a vehicle and it is undergoing expert examination at the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto, it added.

“Members of the investigative team continue to work to bring a sense of closure to the Nagulasigamany family and our community,” said Larry Gravill, Chief of Police.

“The efforts and sharing of information between Toronto and Greater Toronto Area police services and the FBI are a tremendous example of integrated law enforcement, and I am proud of their investigative work,” he added.

On Friday, September 23 three Tamil men were struck by a vehicle. The brothers were pronounced dead in hospital. The third man, whom police have identified as the target of the attack, was released the same day from hospital.

People with information in relation to the incident have been requested to contact the Homicide Branch at (519) 653-7700 extension 8669 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS.

Mothers took to the streets last week in Jaffna, demanding justice for sons, daughters and other relatives who disappeared after being arrested by the Sri Lankan security forces in the northern peninsula in 1996-97.

Parents and guardians of those who went missing in military custody demanded that Sri Lanka’s government either reveal the fate of their loved ones or compensate the bereaved families for their deaths. They marched through the town’s streets to hand a letter to Mr. K. Ganesh, the top government official in Jaffna district, calling for attention to their ongoing suffering.

“We have been waiting for our sons to return for all these years. We demand that the government reveal what happened to them,” said Kamalanayagi Thuraisingham of the Missing Persons’ Guardian Association (MPGA).

Thuraisingham’s 19-year old son, Senthilnathan, disappeared after being arrested in 1996 when he was in high school. She condemned the government’s lack of response with hundreds of others in the MPGA.

At least 540 Tamils disappeared after the military wrested control of Jaffna from the Tamil Tigers in 1995, according to human rights group Amnesty International estimates.

The Sri Lankan government’s own Human Rights Commission confirmed in 2003 that 248 persons were killed or disappeared after they were arrested by the military on suspicion of being involved with the Tamil Tigers.

After the HRC report was released, MPGA members criticized the group for its inaction regarding this issue, distributing pamphlets at the Universal Human Rights Day events in Jaffna.

MPGA members also protested in Colombo that year outside Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Justice. Mothers carried signs with photographs and information about their missing loved ones, urging the government to offer some closure for their suffering.

The protesters submitted a memorandum which stated the disappearances were part of a “well planned plot” by the Sri Lankan Army “in conjunction” with a paramilitary group.

The peak of disappearances reported in Jaffna was in 1995-96, though Amnesty International reported Tamils missing even in 2003. Arrests were primarily on mere suspicion of involvement with the Tigers.

“Evidence gathered during an Amnesty International visit to Sri Lanka in March 1996 clearly indicates that the security forces have arbitrarily detained thousands of Tamil people and have been responsible for torture as well as dozens of disappearances and extrajudicial executions,” Amnesty said in a 1997 report titled ‘Sri Lanka: Wavering commitment to human rights.’

“It is now feared that nearly all of those who remain ‘disappeared’ after their arrest by the security forces about a year ago died under torture or were deliberately killed in detention,” the report stated.

“Many of the thousands of cases of ‘disappearances’ reported in Sri Lanka since the early 1980s concern detainees alleged to have died under torture in police or army custody whose bodies were subsequently disposed of in secret,” another Amnesty report in 1999 stated.

In 2000, reporting cases of young Tamil boys being detained by the army, Amnesty again urged President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s government to investigate these cases. Kumaratunga ordered an internal inquiry to the disappearances, but little was done and certainly no arrests were made.

The United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances has repeatedly stated that impunity is likely the most significant factor in the continuing practice of “disappearances” by the security forces.

With the Sri Lankan government unmoved by their protests, relatives of the missing have pinned their hopes on international human rights groups.

“Amnesty International, please ask the President of Sri Lanka for our children” read a sign held by relatives of those missing at a meeting in Jaffna with the human rights group in August 1996.

Amnesty has repeatedly called upon Sri Lanka to hold accountable those responsible for these missing Tamils, pointing out in a 1997 report “the government has to take responsibility for failing to protect the lives of civilians under its jurisdiction.”

But no action has been taken, underscoring the limited influence even international organizations have on security related matters in Sri Lanka.

The organization protested that “by the time government authorities in Colombo acknowledged the reality of what was happening in Jaffna, approximately 600 people had been reported ‘disappeared.’”

Amnesty’s findings that many of the missing were murdered in military custody were supported by the confessions of soldiers being tried in 1998 for the rape and murder in 1996 of Krishanthi Kumaraswamy, a Jaffna schoolgirl.

An accused Corporal revealed that the Army had buried murdered detainees amongst the graves at Chemmani, Jaffna. Sri Lankan newspapers claimed that the killings and burials occurred on the instructions of senior commanding officers in Jaffna.

Corporal Somaratne Rajapakse, who was found guilty of abducting, raping and killing Krishanthi, her mother, young brother and neighbor, said there were at least 300 to 400 other bodies buried in Chemmani.

“Almost every evening, dead bodies were brought there [to the Ariyalai SLA camp] and the soldiers were asked to bury them,” Rajapakse told courts – he denied taking part in the killings and claimed he only helped bury the victims.

He later pointed out the sites of ten mass graves in the region, whose excavations and body identification have since been stalled, with little enthusiasm by Sri Lanka’s government to follow through.

And ahead of investigations into the Chemmani graves, residents in areas nearby reported heavy military activity in the area and seeing columns of smoke rising from the location, leading to suspicions the bodies were being destroyed.

DNA evidence collected from the Chemmani graves has been ordered by an investigating court, but Sri Lanka’s Criminal Investigation Department has still not done so. The CID attributed its inaction to the Ministry of Defense’s failure to allocate funds to conduct the investigations properly.

Sri Lanka had the second highest number of disappearances in the world in 1999, according to a study by the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.

In 1999, the Sri Lanka government itself estimated that 17,000 citizens had disappeared due to military forces, though these figures refer mainly to thousands of Sinhala youths slaughtered in a crackdown against a Marxist insurgency in the south led by the Janatha Vimukthi Perumana (JVP) in the late 80’s.

More than 680 cases of disappearances were reported in Jaffna between 1983 and 1987, according to a 1997 Amnesty report.

After 1990, Amnesty said “the number of those reported to have ‘disappeared’ or deliberately killed at the hands of the Sri Lankan security forces, particularly in the east, reached thousands within months.”

Responding to a rationale occasionally fielded by the government, Amnesty’s 1999 report also “stresses that abuses by opposition groups or rising crime can never provide a justification for governments to disregard their obligations to respect human rights.”

As set out in Article 4 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) - to which Sri Lanka acceded in 1980 - torture is not justified even ‘in time of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation’ Amnesty said.

Moreover Sri Lanka’s notorious Emergency Regulations (ER) and Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) “contributed to the prevalence of human rights violations, including ‘disappearances’ and torture in Sri Lanka,” Amnesty said.

The State of Emergency, lifted after the ceasefire between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan armed forces, was reimposed in August following the assassination of Foreign Minister Laksman Kadirgamar. Parliament voted to extend it again last week.

For almost two decades now, the Sri Lankan state has sought to construct and promote alternatives to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as the Tamil political leadership. Efforts to promote and militarily support a number of groups as countervails to the LTTE’s independence project have failed repeatedly. While the project has not been abandoned, Sri Lanka’s objective has now been scaled back somewhat – to that of undermining the LTTE’s claim to sole representative in negotiations with the state, as opposed to replacing it as the Tamil leadership.

The main actor in this regard today is the Eelam People’s Democratic Party (EPDP). The group’s leader, Douglas Devanada, claims that the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), a coalition of Sri Lanka’s four largest Tamil political parties, is too closely aligned to the LTTE. This, he suggests, positions the EPDP as a political alternative to the LTTE’s hegemonic position in the Tamil polity. The EPDP is a moderate party because it is opposed to separatism, he argues. In an interview published on the group’s website, Mr. Devananda says the party supports a solution within the framework of the of the Indo- Sri Lanka accord. He also denounces the LTTE as a corrupt, fascist organisation which is simply interested in propagating the conflict for its own purposes.

Amid demands for the democratisation of Northeastern politics, the EPDP’s claim that it provides an alternative political representation for the Tamils deserves closer inspection. To begin with, while registered a political party and fielding candidates in elections, the EPDP is essentially an armed actor. It fields hundreds of paramilitary fighters alongside the Sri Lankan armed forces in operations against the LTTE and has done so for almost two decades. At present it is the largest of five paramilitary groups locked in an escalating shadow with the Tigers.

The EPDP was formed in 1987, according to its web site. It states that after Mr. Devananda was ‘betrayed’ by his erstwhile comrades in the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF), he split with cadres loyal to him and joined a splinter group from the People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE) to form the Eelam National Democratic Liberation Front (ENDLF). However, infighting within the ENDLF resulted in Mr. Devananda ending this arrangement and forming the EPDP, the group says.

Following the signing of the Indo-Lanka accord, the EPDP abandoned the armed struggle against the Sri Lankan state and instead opted to side with armed forces against the Tigers - as did the EPRLF, PLOTE, ENDLF and the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO), all of whom were dependent, albeit to varying degrees on India’s patronage. The signing of the Indo-Sri Lanka accord thus sparked an intra-Tamil conflict which the EPDP website characterises as an effort by the LTTE to gain dominance. That the Tigers emerged dominant is not in question, though the LTTE points out that these groups had joined the enemy to exterminate it.

Indeed, observers at the time interpreted these divisions amongst the Tamil groups as a strategic outcome engineered by the Sri Lankan state. “The parallels with South Lebanon are inescapable,” wrote Simon Freeman in the Sunday Times, on 25 October 1987. “There the Israelis hoped that by arming Christians they would, somehow, help defeat the Shi’ites. Here the Sinhalese majority seem to think that fringe Tamil groups can be manipulated in the fight against the Tigers.”

From 1987 to 1994, through the Indian military intervention and the second phase of the conflict with the Sri Lankan state, the EPDP and other Tamil paramilitary groups served alongside the armed forces in an atrocity-riddled war against the only remaining independence movement, the LTTE. In 1994, Mr. Devananda registered the EPDP as a political party and joined President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s first government after winning a handful of seats in elections criticised by European monitors.

Whilst its paramilitaries fought alongside the Sri Lankan military, the EPDP party was an integral part of the People’s Alliance (PA) coalition government during President Kumaratunga’s subsequent – and now infamous - ‘war for peace’ strategy. The war had horrific consequences for the Tamil populace. Apart from enormous casualties during the military assaults on LTTE-held population centres, including Jaffna and Kilinochchi, a near-absolute embargo was slapped on large swathes of the Northeast under LTTE control.

Following one offensive, the Asian Human Rights Commission observed in December 1999, “Refugees are on brink of starvation following the government’s denial of food relief for almost a month to this areas.” It added: “Tamil political parties and the Catholic church have called on the government to take urgent steps to rush food and medical supplies to the area where some 350,000 civilians are undergoing severe hardships.” The EPDP, however, was not one of these parties clamouring for relief.

In fact the group was being accused of abductions and torture of Tamil civilians as part of the counter-insurgency, even in the early nineties. A US State Department report observed on January 31, 1994: “in the latter part of 1993, Government security forces and alleged Tamil militias began operating what many human rights monitors called ‘a parallel system of secret detention’ in Colombo. … A fundamental rights application was filed in the Supreme Court against the leader of one such militia, the EPDP, alleging illegal abduction and torture.”

The impunity enjoyed by EPDP paramilitary cadres extended to immunity from prosecution for abuses beyond the conflict itself. EPDP cadres were, for example, accused of sexual abuse of Tamil women and girls – as indeed were members of the regular security forces also. In one notable case in Jaffna, the father of a twelve-year old girl complained to the Kayts Police that his daughter had been sexually assaulted by an EPDP cadre. There has been no prosecution of these or other crimes to date.

Mr. Devananda won a seat in Jaffna during the elections in 1999 and was subsequently appointed Minister for the Development of the North by President Kumaratunga. His democratic mandate was however less than indisputable, with a European Union monitoring mission led by John Cushnahan refusing to declare the polls ‘free and fair’. Accusations of wide spread vote-rigging continued to dog the EPDP and, more widely, the PA through subsequent elections.

Amid disquiet over the increasing hardships being inflicted on the Tamils by the conflict, meanwhile, the EPDP was compelled to take strict and sometimes lethal measures against dissenting members. The U.S. Department of State in its Sri Lanka report in 2000 observed that “The EPDP also detained [some] members for short periods in Jaffna as punishment for breaking party discipline.”

Some members who began to articulate support for the Tigers were murdered, with some reportedly fleeing the country. One notable killing was that of Atputharajah Nadarajah, who edited the EPDP’s newspaper, the Thinamurusu. Despite his party position, Nadarajah took an increasingly pro-LTTE line, to such an the extent that as the conflict escalated, the Thinamurusu emerged as one of the most vocal critics of the PA, Kumaratunga and the ‘war for peace.’ Nadarajah was of course careful not to attack the EPDP itself, though he laid into the other Tamil groups in Parliament supporting the PA’s represessive legislations and emergency measures.

Nadarajah was shot dead in November 1999. The British Refugee Council said in January 2000: “the killing of EPDP MP Atputharajah Nadarajah in November and [separately] All Ceylon Tamil Congress leader Kumar Ponnambalam in January have heightened fears. The police have stated that they would not investigate the murder of Mr Nadarajah whose writings in the Tamil journal Thinamurasu led to accusations that he supported the LTTE despite being a member of government ally, the EPDP. … Two other EPDP MPs who voted in Parliament against the extension of Emergency have fled the country and sought asylum in Britain.”

Suppressive violence was not confined to the group’s own members. There were frequent complaints of murder and intimidation of media people opposed to the group or the PA. Another prominent killing was that of BBC journalist Mylvaganam Nimalarajan who was shot dead in his Jaffna residence on October 19, 2000. Nimalrajan had been writting critically about the EPDP’s illegal trading activities and electoral malpractices, despite being warned off. The president of the North Sri Lanka Journalists Association told RSF: “a week before his death, Nimalarajan came to see me and told me he had received a death threat. He had just revealed that a ballot box in a polling station in the town of Palay had been stuffed with EPDP ballots. This report was carried by the BBC and many newspapers.”

The EPDP has also been accused of being engaged in other election violence including the murder of supporters and sympathisers of the pro-LTTE TNA. During campaigning for the bitterly fought 2001 election which toppled the PA and brought a pro-peace coalition to power, the EPDP’s killing or wounding of several TNA candidates and supporters in Jaffna triggered widespread protests and, on occasion, total shutdowns of the northern peninsula.

The question though is, rigging aside, how does the EPDP secure Tamil votes and retain its cadre base? A closer examination of Mr. Devananda’s ministerial performance reveals a possible answer.

In late 2001 the World Bank conducted a study of the impact of donor funding via Mr. Devananda’s Ministry of Northern Development. The Bank’s Country Representative, Dr. Mariana Todorova visited Jaffna and subsequently observed: “...About 1,500 youths have been recruited as development assistants by the Ministry of Northern Development at a monthly allowance of Rs 3,000 per person. They are said to have been given skills training, but their roles and responsibilities were not clear… It is not clear what they are doing. Really no focused development work.”

Speaking to reporters a month after the World Bank’s first visit to the northern town since 1990, Dr. Todorova, a Bulgarian economist, expressed concern about the state of the hospitals and schools in the peninsula. In fact, there had been almost no developmental activity at all: “It is really sad. No people, no houses, only big potholes.”

The point, already apparent to many in Jaffna, was inescapable: Mr. Devananda was using the ministry to recruit and pay for his political cadres by putting them on the ministry’s payroll, and going on to recruit fresh cadres for his party by offering well-paid jobs in his ministry.

In a pattern many analysts of economic incentives in conflict will recognise, Mr. Devananda’s organisation had also expanded into commercial activities in the war zones, including prohibited ones. For example, with the assistance of the military, the EPDP was at one stage illegally removing sand from the Vadamaradchi east coast for use in construction. At a time of a ban on taking sand off beaches, the EPDP was said to be profiteering with the collusion of the military as there was a shortage of sand for construction in Jaffna. The EPDP was even involved in the lobster business in Neduntheevu, one of the island’s off Jaffna, but that reportedly proved unprofitable. Some social activists in Jaffna have also linked EPDP members to prostitution rings close to Army bases and to narcotics and pornography.

Between its trading activities and government funding, the EPDP has been able to establish an extensive patron client network and retain a sizeable paramilitary cadre base. It has also been able to ensure sufficient leverage, particularly with the support of the armed forces, to ensure an elected presence, albeit a small one, in Parliament - which in turn has ensured Mr. Devananda a ministerial post.

Whilst the EPDP does publish policy documents, its primary role in Sri Lankan politics is that of one the military’s most effective paramilitary groups. Mr. Devananda insists that the armed cadres are solely for his protection. Having survived numerous assassination attempts, he undoubtedly needs the security. But EPDP cadres have been deployed across the Northeast in a bloody shadow war with the LTTE. The spiralling violence has alarmed Sri Lanka’s donors who have demanded Colombo disarm the Army-backed paramilitaries as stipulated in the February 2002 truce.

From a counter-insurgency perspective, the EPDP provides multiple benefits for the Sri Lankan state. Apart from its paramilitary cadres which provide a Tamil-speaking pathfinder and informant network, the group is being promoted internationally as a ‘moderate’ and ‘democratic’ challenge to the LTTE’s claim of sole representatives of the Tamils.

That the group has secured some votes cannot be disputed, though the extent of its claimed support must be questioned in the light of election monitors’ manifest misgivings. Moreover, it must also be questioned whether the ‘genuine’ votes it garners stem from its political position or, as many argue, its patron-client networks in the Jaffna peninsula. While there have been numerous public protests over the EPDP’s activities, abuses and cooperation with the Sri Lankan military, the group dismisses these as orchestrated by the LTTE or its sympathisers.