Sri Lanka

In the river that runs beneath Kallady Bridge, Batticaloa, on the eastern coast of Sri Lanka, there are singing fish. They are known as Oorie Coolooroo Cradoo, which is Tamil for ‘crying shells’. Their song is said to have stopped during the civil war between the Tamils and the Sinhalese that broke out in 1983 and endured for 26 long years. Now, it is diminished by the effects of overfishing, pollution and climate breakdown. But for centuries, this underwater song caught the attention of fishermen and passersby who listened. Minoli Salgado's collection of stories, Twelve Cries from Home: In Search of Sri Lanka's Disappeared, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, is shocking, powerful and courageous. It is work that follows a war. The first record of civilian testimonies on the civil war from across this beautiful island, it documents extraordinary violence from the perspective of ordinary people who are both victims and survivors. They have seen torture, bombing, shelling and extrajudicial killings. Colonialism has long dictated the lives of Sri Lankans, with its aftermath still brutally felt. Tens of thousands of young people were killed, lost or ‘disappeared’. Gendered violence was part of the war, and women were brutally raped. Bearing witness to atrocity, it is not possible for Salgado to give answers. As the survivors seek to tell their stories, to piece together what parts of the past they can, their agency is restored. Dahanayake (she gives her family name only) lost her youngest brother, Bandula, to abductors while waiting at Matara bus station. She searched for him for 10 years. He was ‘the beating heart’ of the family, ‘a scamp’, ‘a mentor’, who was, most movingly, ‘above difference’. Salgado provides a record of what happens when political divisions become entrenched, differences intensified, and the possibilities of peace eroded. For some of the survivors, justice is a need to strike at those who have harmed them, but forms of forgiveness are emerging. For many, it is a time to move and to heal. Sujatha keeps focused on her husband's love and a courtship that began with a bicycle bell. In some cases, through a deep humanism, time builds bonds between a perpetrator and a survivor's family. Asking Dahanayake if she has a message for those outside Sri Lanka, Salgado realises her story is about the most basic of human rights, the right to security, the right to life. Following the preferential treatment of Tamils under colonial rule, the Sinhala Only Act of 1956 marginalised the Tamil community in all areas of civic life from employment to higher education. Universal adult franchise had been extended, in theory, to all Sri Lankans in 1931 under the Donoughmore Constitution. While this was an unprecedented development under colonial rule in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, with the commissioners appointed by the socialist Sidney Webb, Secretary of State for the Colonies in the Lib-Lab coalition government of 1927, there was no stipulated guarantee of minority rights. This led to the disenfranchisement of a significant number of Tamils, close to a million, including the descendants of those who had been brought to Sri Lanka to work in tea and coffee plantations, and ensured Sinhalese dominance by giving them a two-thirds majority in parliament. Matters came to a head in July 1979 when four policemen were killed, allegedly by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). A week later, parliament passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act. It included the authority to imprison individuals accused of involvement with terror for up to 18 months without a trial and gave security forces virtual immunity from prosecution. Civilian deaths during the civil war were the result of state terrorism no less than insurgents. Made a permanent law in 1982, the act remains in place and has not been reformed in line with international law. In her preface, the human rights advocate Radhika Coomaraswamy, formerly United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Special Representative of Children and Armed Conflict, sees in this shared history of human suffering the hope of acknowledgement, recognition and healing. Buddhist priest Father Paul Satkunayagam, who has a doctorate in psychology, urges the restoring of a person to dignity. He is interested in the traumatised person, the universal person. He is a co-founder, alongside artist Paul Hogan and doctor Robbie Chase, of Sri Lanka's Butterfly Peace Garden, a sanctuary in Batticaloa set up in 1996 to support children affected by civil conflict. In 2004, it also became a centre for helping victims of the tsunami. Sri Lanka's National Peace Council upholds the values of non-violence, respect for human rights and the free expression of ideas. It began with a campaign against election violence in July 1994, launched by an inter-religious group of individuals and organizations, and was established in 1995. Working with the council, Salgado met war victims still searching for loved ones. The Office on Missing Persons set up by Sri Lanka's coalition government in 2017 has been woefully inadequate for the thousands who have filed cases. In August and September 2018, during the fragile period of peace that began in 2015 between the terror of the LTTE and rule of the Rajapakse clan, which returned in 2020, Salgado travelled 1700 km through Sri Lanka to hear the stories of those whose husbands, sons and brothers have been disappeared. Widowed Tamils were issued with ‘certificates of absence’. ‘Disappear’ has become a transitive verb. It is something that happens to people who fall victim to killings that are not documented in official histories. Understanding the transformative power of narrative, Salgado conducted long interviews, allowing testimonial histories to emerge in the language of the tellers. She is unobtrusive, a listener and a writer, respectful of the speakers' need for privacy, and resistant to taking sides. She encounters a masculine world of officially missing persons and of state detention camps where cells are empty. Twelve Cries from Home gives voice to people who know ‘it is no use going to the police’ because the upholders of the law are the ones who break the law. Anyone can turn informer under duress or torture. Salgado travelled alone and with others, with memories, maps and notes, names and numbers, and academic papers written in a language of distance. Stories proliferated, becoming more and more. Distances in rural Sri Lanka used to be measured by the time it took for a call—or hoowa–to be heard. Salgado sees the island differently now. It is mapped not by cartography but by stories that course across the land, ordering and reordering the past. There are people who do wrong and people who do right, and people who have power who do not seem to care. She has found those that are missing, or aspects of them, in memories, prayers, pictures, in calls for revenge, in yearnings for peace. The memories return in chaotic telling. She has found the missing also in silence. The stories she presents, with deep integrity, are outside of the language of rights and law. They are fragmented and dislocated, urgent and immediate testimonies not only to the need to be heard and understood but also to the need to get through the day. The witnesses focus on emotions and contingencies, on chance in a world of well-laid plans. Justice is delayed and denied. Official facts encounter unofficial truths. The aroma of leaves from a distant kitchen is carried in the air. Stories matter more than the distortions of official histories. Anger and forgiveness intermingle. Not everything can be said, but each yearns to be heard. Rifaideen still feels ‘bits of bomb inside’. He is a watchmaker, a Tamil-speaking Muslim, a minority among minorities that slips between the defining categories of the war. He knows who the perpetrator is. Rifaideen's right arm was torn up by shrapnel and a surgeon's scalpel. Every one Salgado meets carries bits of the war inside. Piyasena, the drum beater, lost an arm. Srikanthi, who has lost the nephew that she raised like a son, wants her story to stand for others that may not have been heard. Mohanampikai has lost her father, brother and sister. She thinks this may have been instigated by the police. She wants those outside Sri Lanka who hear her story to empathise and sympathise: ‘This should not happen to another family in this world.’ Chitradevi is a single mother with six daughters. Her husband is missing. He risked his life to get schoolbooks and clothes for the girls when they were displaced. Amid chaos, Chitradevi speaks of clothes, books, schools and saris. In these things, there is some order. One of her daughters is a teacher, a government servant. This means they are not eligible for government support. Chandrika is a singer. Her brother stopped his studies to support her at university. She recalls her childhood: ‘there was no money but we were happy. My happiest memories were the walks with my brothers and sisters to Kandy town.’ Her mother, in a country with one of the highest literacy rates in Asia, was in a small minority, unable to read and write. When her father died, Chandrika's mother supported her and her five siblings singlehandedly. Chandrika's husband, Nissanka, shared her love of music. They met studying music at university. Both Sinhala, they sheltered Tamils during the 1983 conflict: ‘My husband's father was a good man and said “These people are suffering. We need to help.” He brought sacks of rice and coconuts to feed them.’ 1989 was the most violent year of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrection, when the Sri Lankan Army declared it would take 12 lives for every one taken by the JVP. In December that year, Nissanka was abducted in Kandy by the Special Task Force and taken for inquisition by the Criminal Investigation Department in Colombo. Chandrika, holding their five-month-old baby, watched him disappear into the darkness. His crime was his compassion: ‘he hated injustice and loved people, that was all.’ Vadivel, the fourth child of six, supported his wife, the main breadwinner, in handlooming. Trained as a carpenter, sawdust gives him asthma. His parents lost their land and livelihoods to Sinhalese families in a landgrab. Vadivel went to school for 2 years, until he was seven, before beginning work on his parents' paddy farm. In 1983, his eldest son, Sanjeevan, was tortured by the police. Sanjeevan had taken O levels a year early. He was an outstanding student who excelled at Tamil and maths. His exam results arrived after he died. For those who have lived through the civil war, the political issues that western journalists give their attention to are, in Salgado's words, ‘too large, obvious and impersonal’. For the Western press, it is a war between Tamils and Sinhalese but for those who live out the day-to-day realities of conflict, it speaks instead of brothers, mothers, fathers, children, friends and neighbours. Each needs dignity and a place to call home. It is the deep humanism of shared humanity that is at the heart of Salgado's collection. Sri Lanka is Salgado's ancestral home, and it is also mine.1 My father Johnny Richardson grew up in Colombo, playing with friends that were Buddhist, Christian, Hindu and Muslim. They rode their bicycles along the city streets in the 1930s, swam in the sea and went to the picture houses with imperial and regal names that were starting to appear in Colombo. When the Second World War came to Sri Lanka, and air battles were fought between the Japanese and British over Colombo and Trincomalee, my father's family left for Matale. Almost a century earlier, in 1848, it had been the site of the Matale Rebellion, as Kandyan labourers rose against their British oppressors. Gongalegoda Banda, who instigated the uprising, was charged with high treason both for fighting the British and claiming to be king of Kandy. The rebellion not an isolated act of civil unrest but part of the struggle for independence. Having lost his father during the Second World War, my father moved away from the family home later in the 1940s, working for an American company on the Inginiyagala Gal Oya irrigation project, aimed at providing hydro power and irrigation for paddy fields and villages along the east coast. But his dream was to go to London. Attempting several times to stow away, in 1953, aged 22, he responded to Britain's call for migrant workers to help rebuild after the war, and boarded R.M.S Orion, decommissioned from wartime service. The ship sailed through the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, docking at Aden, Port Said, Naples, Gibraltar, Marseilles and Tilbury. In London, declarations of ‘no coloureds, no Irish, no dogs’ accompanied accommodation ads in railway stations and shop windows,2 but he soon found a home with fellow Sri Lankan and Irish migrants in West London. In the words of the novelist Ambalavaner Sivanandan, who left Sri Lanka in 1958 and in 1972 became director of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) in London, ‘We are here because you were there.’3 Some years later, for my brother, then for me, growing up west of London with an English mother and Sri Lankan father, boys at school would lie in wait for us stupefied by racism, unchecked, even endorsed, by their families and teachers. Sometimes girls stood by with fair-haired dolls. But the ones you remember are the ones that spoke up for you in whatever way they could. In Britain today, the fastest growing demographic is mixed race, overthrowing categories of race, which have no basis in biology, and throwing binaries and the polarities they underpin into a rightful disarray. But in the Britain I grew up in, if you were black, Asian or mixed race, or appeared to be out of place in some other way,8 if you looked—or your name sounded—different, you were fair game. In Sri Lanka, since the mid-twentieth century, ethnic and religious differences have ebbed and flowed but they have intensified too into extremism. Nadarajah lost several members of his family in a military attack in Jaffna in 1995 by the Sri Lankan Air Force. Among them was his son Ganatheeban, named after Ganesh, deity of wisdom, patron of arts and science. Bombs killed his son. ‘What to do?’ he asks. These words are familiar to me from my Sri Lankan relations in face of adversity. Nadarajah speaks of the Buddhist recognition of the surpassing importance of relationships: ‘Nadarajah's last words to me […] spring from the wealth of convictions that have helped him to survive. They also register how the country seems to have abandoned the core tenet of its state-sanctioned religion: Buddhist compassion.’ Sri Lanka registers medieval regicide and parricide ceded to colonization by, in turn, the Portuguese, Dutch and British. Now, it is besieged by hypercapitalism and new Western technologies, embedded in mobile phones held together by minerals extracted from low-income countries. It is also experiencing the worst of the climate breakdown, effects that will have devastating consequences for the island and its security if the world does not act.4 An estimated 7.6 million people, in a national population estimated at 21.9 million in 2023, have an inadequate diet, exposing them to the risk of malnutrition, according to the World Food Programme of the United Nations. According to UNICEF, some 2.3 million children in Sri Lanka do not have enough to eat, with up to 70% of families in Sri Lanka facing dangerous food shortages.5 The World Food Programme warns that 6.3 million people in Sri Lanka face acute food insecurity and 70% are reducing meal sizes.6 Salgado reminds us that ‘Badagini’, meaning fire in the belly, is the Sinhala word for hunger. In September of this year, Sri Lankans elected for the first time a candidate who does not belong to the conservative United National Party (UNP) or the democratic socialist Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). Anura Kumara Dissanayake leads the left-leaning National People’s Power alliance (NPP) and is prioritising housing, food, and education and planning to provide income and VAT relief.7 If the conflict has gone away, the hunger has not. And on an island that is now one of the places most vulnerable to climate breakdown—while the most affluent countries are responsible for 92% of excess carbon emissions8—poverty, malnutrition and hunger are set to increase. If Salgado's brave book can provoke new understanding, it will do invaluable work for an island that must brace itself for the next Richardson is a of English at the of where she leads the Her and and in the and the Stories by and Women, and She on the history of and to or of that which is She would like to the Leverhulme for her through a