I've been avoiding writing about the Sri Lankan wars similarities to Gaza because I'm a Sri Lankan and an unreliable narrator. I am, in fact, a Sinhala Buddhist, and would be considered wildly unreliable by Tamil Eelamists. But I was there at the end of the war, and I can tell you what I saw and thought, and think now. Let me tell you exactly where, so you can see my perspective, and also the problems with your narrator. I was in jail the night the war ended, and got out the day it did, which tells you something.

Your Narrator 16 Years Ago

Two days before the war ended I was in the north, delivering medical supplies to a government hospital in Padaviya that was treating the wounded. The next day I drove down south, as a ‘fixer’ for an American, a terrible fixer who completely broke things, causing a minor diplomatic incident. The day the war ended we were both in the deep south, under arrest for trespassing.

That was the result of my first and last fixing ‘job’, for Robert Kaplan, as he was writing Monsoon. I declined payment from the beginning because I knew I was an amateur and thought I'd get a story out of it as a writer of my own. Little did I know. Kaplan was researching the Hambantota Port that China was building in Sri Lanka, in Mahinda's home district and he wanted to have a look. I thought why not, not knowing that my usual gonzo journalism would not work in this highly securitized zone, and with a white guy to boot.

In lieu of actual fixing, I just talked a taxi driver. That guy talked to a dump truck driver and we just drove into the port. It was all going swimmingly, we even talked our way out through a guard post, but then we stopped for a Fanta like fools and the motorcycles pulled up. Then we had to spend the night in jail with a revolver on the table, me answering questions in my shitty Sinhalese, and Kaplan shitting bricks next to me. I remember that they treated me the best, the white man second best, and the poor tuk-tuk driver the worst. The cops were patriotic but classist, which I found interesting. Things had changed from the colonial days, but not enough. I also remember is that the OIC kept asking Kaplan what his religion was and just could not understand what ‘Jewish’ was. They'd never heard of this thing. Finally, Kaplan gave up and became Christian.

Anyways, that's where I was when the war ended, which tells you a bit about who I am, as your unreliable narrator. I am Sinhalese (the majority race), and was thus not terrified in jail. I am also upper-class Sinhalese, accustomed to being treated well, which I am, by custom. I am also a relatively connected Sinhalese, enough so that my family could call people and get me out by morning, without charges. This all tells you something about my personal position in Sri Lankan politics, whatever position I take publicly. If you want to know my public position, at the time, I was a bleeding heart liberal. I agreed with the state's political program (one Sri Lanka), but not their way of doing it (military defeat of the LTTE). You could say I was politically neutral in that the sense that I moved in no direction and was basically idle. But things moved on without me, irregardless. This was how.

A Brief, Unreliable History Of The War

When the Sri Lankan Civil War ‘started’ (in 1983, let's say) I was just born in Canada. When it ended in mid 2009, I was a 26-year-old living in Colombo. The day the war ended I was just getting out of jail, blinking in the Hambantota sun, in a hurry to get the hell out of Dodge. Me and this writer drove through the then President's heartland, stopping to watch his speech on screens people had erected in Tangalle. It was the end of an era. In many ways, it was the end of my life as I knew it. The war was something I lived with my entire life and I never thought it would end. But it did end, and that part of my life also.

That, to me, is the vital difference between the Sri Lankan war and the Palestine war. All wars are bad. The best thing a war can do is end, and Sri Lanka ended a war with a political solution, however unpalatable. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's cover the last events first.

The Last Two Months

The events I'm about to list all happened between 29 March and 19 May. This period covered about two months, roughly the New Year period of 2009, between Avurudu and Vesak. This is traditionally a transitional period for both Sinhalese and Tamils, and so it was.

The last military battle was the Battle of Aanandapuram. It was a semi-conventional military battle which raged from 29 March to 5 April 2009. A thousand LTTE cadres—already surrounded by 50,000 Sri Lankan Army—were trapped in a 2² km strip, their backs to a lagoon. They were besieged (deprived of food, water, and medicine) for three days, not that things were great the months before either. Their brave leader Colonel Theepan, though injured, had refused evacuation long ago. He died fighting, along with most of his crew. Only 116 LTTErs surrendered, and 625 became casualties. You can't say they weren't brave. But they brutally sacrificed their own people too.

At this point, the Sri Lankan Army's modus operandi was clear. The LTTE could surrender or die and the army didn't care who they had to go through. As then SLA Commander Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka said, “the firm decision of the political hierarchy not to go for talks with the LTTE terrorists until they lay down arms had contributed significantly to all these war victories.” And they did win the Battle of Aanandapuram. After an offer to surrender was largely rejected, the Sri Lankan Army bombed and shelled the LTTE to shit and then went in with infantry to ‘clean’ up. The LTTE tried but failed to resupply by sea (they had a crude Navy), there was no diplomacy, so they just dug into the land they claimed and died bleeding. I didn't know this at the time because I didn't believe anything I read (besides DBS Jeyaraj), but this was the end. Of the LTTE, of Tamil Eelam, all of it. Aanandapuram was the last battle, but not the last killing. Not by a longshot.

Mullivaikkal was the last battle, if you could call it that. Eelam Tamils call it the Mullivaikkal Massacre. Mullivaikkal was an even more isolated bit of land, between the ocean and lagoon. The surviving LTTEers retreated into it with 30,000 civilians. They built a huge bund to keep the army out, but also to keep the civilians in. Many people followed the LTTE willingly, but the LTTE also shot people for trying to leave, this was not unknown or even unusual for them.

The LTTE both had popular support (I know many supporters) and also killed and kidnapped its own people (I know many people killed, many Tamils). This was the LTTE. They rose to Eelam Tamil leadership by being the most willing to get their hands dirty, and the most homicidally and suicidally goal-oriented. Eelam or bust, which many people wanted. The LTTE never gave up on Tamil Eelam and they fought by any means necessary, and some unnecessary. My Tamil teacher was there at the end, at Mullivaikkal, and she barely survived. One day we were learning the word war, யுத்தம், which is roughly the same in Sinhalese, and she casually showed me a bullet wound in her arm. I didn't know what to say to that and still don't.

Just as in the Battle of Aanandapuram, whatever happened in Mullivaikkal started with an offer to surrender (which the LTTE refused on behalf of everybody) to shelling everything asunder. The LTTE was embedded with the people on purpose, there was no disentangling them except violently, and the Sri Lankan government was doing this on purpose, and obliged accordingly. Sri Lanka declared a ‘No-Fire Zone’ but there was no such thing, this was the pre-drone, pre-precision era, it was just artillery and bombs all around. My Tamil teacher said she somehow escaped on a boat, I don't understand how this was possible and don't ask questions. The LTTE leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran tried escaping in an ambulance and was killed on May 18th. Mullivaikkal had gone on for about a month, and then it was all over.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa declared victory on May 19, 2009 around 9 AM. I got out of jail that morning and we drove up the southern coast, getting the hell out of Dodge. The South was Mahinda's heartland, and people were on the streets waving flags. I honestly can't say I felt the same way. I was relieved the war was over but who were we fighting? Each other. More so, I mourned.

Bad Examples

Today, I support armed resistance in Palestine and many Tamils online ask me why I didn't support the same in Sri Lanka. To me, the answer is in the question. Hamas et al are fighting for a one, multiethnic state, under majority (Arab Muslim) control. As was Sri Lanka. 'Israel' is fighting for a monoethnic state, violently carved out of the region, as was the LTTE.

To me (and again, account for my perspective), Tamil separatism (and Sinhala chauvinism) was a colonial divide-and-conquer snapback. In my grandparents generation, colonial administrators, police, and military were largely Tamil and—like everything the British left—that purposeful imbalance unwound violently.

Partitioning Sri Lanka wasn't a solution to this, because the populations are deeply mixed. Something like half the Tamil population lives in the south, the Indian Tamils trafficked here by the Brits are disavowed by everyone, and Tamil speaking Muslims were ethnically cleansed by the LTTE. My wife is Tamil, I speak more Tamil than Sinhalese (as does most of Colombo), and my children are raised more Tamil than anything. The LTTE never had a political solution for people like them, besides bloody partition. But at the same time, the bloody politicians were useless. I can understand why Eelam Tamils didn't want to live under them, and why they had to take up arms after every political accommodation was rejected.

I often look at the map of Tamil Eelam and it makes no sense to me, a jagged scar carved out of a perfect island. But then I heard (of) Kittu of the LTTE explaining it, and I could see. He said, “Take a map of the island. Take a paint brush and paint all the areas where Sri Lanka has bombed and launched artillery attacks during these past several years. When you have finished, the painted area that you see—that is Tamil Eelam.”

Sri Lanka was like 'Israel' in that they had a state and used 'Israeli' Kfir jets to bomb their own people. What almost nobody internationally knows is that Sri Lanka also crushed a communist rebellion in the south, killing nearly as many people, but the state never bombed them. They rounded up boys in the south, tortured them, burnt them in the street, but never sent jets to Matara. I think about that sometimes. There was a difference. The north of Sri Lanka is still militarily occupied in a way the south never was, despite being unruly also.

But were we 'Israel,' genociding people? Was the LTTE Hamas, a liberation army? I don't think it's the same situation at all, for three reasons. Timing, ending, and intention.

Timing

As you can tell from my brief history, the last, most brutal phase of the Eelam Wars lasted for less than two months. Compare that to 'Israel' which has been killing for nearly three years now, with much heavier precision weaponry used to target civilians. Sri Lanka also stopped killing after killing Prabhakaran, whereas 'Israel' has kept going long after the martyrdom of Sinwar. You can see that these are different situations, just from the timing difference.

Ending

As I've said, the best thing a war can do is end, and end quickly, and the government at the time did end the war once and for all. And then itself, unwittingly, just four elections later. As Clausewitz said, war is, “a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means” and must thus have a political resolution. Which the Sri Lankan war did.

The Sri Lankan government destroyed the LTTE as a threat to its monopoly on violence and then put the civilians travelling with it into camps. I visited those camps (really one big camp, Menik Farm) many times, delivering medical supplies with volunteers. The people were captives there, people did disappear, that much is true. The political project was de-LTTEfying the population and then releasing them, which they did do.

There was a plan for ending the war and never restarting it (for a while, who knows). The plan was to eliminate the LTTE politically, screen and ‘reeducate’ the population to keep it from re-forming, and then incorporate them as full Sri Lankans, albeit under continuing military occupation. Ostensibly to prevent re-conflagration, but also because the military was squatting on the best land and liked it. You can disagree with this plan, but it was successful in the way that mattered to most Sri Lankans. The war ended.

Intention

As mentioned, the war ended after killing Prabhakaran and the fighting forces of the LTTE. That was clearly the intention, and civilians were killed incidentally, not intentionally. After the LTTE was militarily and politically eliminated, the killing stopped immediately.

There was clearly no intention to exterminate the Tamil people in Sri Lanka (though their population has dropped as many fled, something many Sinhalese shed no tears about, and which many politicians certainly encouraged). The policy—executed by war—was to eliminate the political control of the LTTE and to assimilate the people as Sri Lankans. This was, in fact, a pyrrhic victory for the political elites of the time, because those same Tamils helped vote them out shortly!

Today

Indeed, because Sri Lanka assimilated the northern Tamil population, the chauvinist government that won the war lost elections just two cycles later. Minority votes were decisive in tossing out a majoritarian government (and getting diet majoritarian, but that's another story).

In another two cycles, almost all of the politicians involved in anything were tossed out completely. Today, Sri Lanka has a nominally communist government, almost entirely newbies (this is less cool than it sounds, we're still under IMF administration by foreign capitalists). During the Aragalaya (street protests that overthrew the penultimate government), young protestors figured out that they all hated neoliberal governance, ie class consciousness began to permeate the race consciousness mindfucked into us by the colonizers. We got an even more neoliberal caretaker as imperial punishment, but as soon as we had elections, we threw all the bums out, unceremoniously. And something happened at those protests which surprised many people, including me.

As Geethika Dharmasinghe wrote in an academic article on the Aragalaya,

Undoubtedly, one of the most significant possibilities that constitute the contingent efficacy of the political space of Aragalaya was the Mullivaikkal Remembrance Day commemoration on 18 May, the day on which the civil war ended in 2009. It is observed by the Sri Lankan Tamil people to commemorate those who died in the final stages of the Sri Lankan Civil War. For many in Southern Sri Lanka, such commemoration was an impossibility in the normal social relations within the country. It was even impossible for the Tamils in the North to commemorate their lost ones. State mechanisms of arrests, attacks, and threats were used to stop commemorating those dear to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. It is in this context that the Mullivaikkal Commemoration at the Galle Face Aragalaya area should be located and understood. In other words, the movement enabled the condition for this impossibility to become possible.

It was a simple thing, the sharing of watery kanji, the rice gruel that people had to survive on in Mullivaikkal, but this happened in Colombo, in the South, among Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims. This was but a thin sustenance to solidarity, yes, but it wasn't nothing. And it did happen, in a political space that couldn't have existed if the war hadn't ended. This space only opened up because the violence ended, the violence that had propped up extremists in the south as well as the north, to the distraction of all unifying issues, like the fact that they were robbing all of us. That space wouldn't have existed, to the chagrin of the chauvinists who actually ended the war.

In these ways, I think the Sri Lankan case is qualitatively different to the Palestinian one. The Sri Lankan government was certainly no like Hamas, they were never that noble, but they did represent a one-state, multiethnic solution under democratic (ie, majority) control, like Palestine does. And the LTTE was certainly not 'Israel', they're not that evil, but they did represent a monoethnic idea like Zionism, which cannot be sustained except by maniacal violence, and ultimately cannot be sustained at all. But that's just my perspective, as a Sri Lankan Sinhala Buddhist, an unreliable narrator as disclosed. Please take this post with chili and salt and let's move on to something less controversial. This is honestly too close to home.