COLOMBO, Oct 24 — For nearly seven decades K. Chathu Kuttan has held open the door at Colombo’s historic Galle Face Hotel for the great and the glorious. And the memories flood in as he gazes out on the Indian Ocean from his perch at the doorway.
Of huge wedding parties in the ballroom and of important visitors coming to check out the promise and pristine beauty of this emerald island.
Singapore’s Devan Nair. The tea party for 1,500 people when Jawaharlal Nehru visited Colombo, the special car for Queen Elizabeth. Emperor Hirohito, Richard Nixon, Sir Laurence Olivier, Bernard Shaw. The list of those he has welcomed runs on and on.
Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was known, was a different country then. That was before a quarter-century of ethnic blood-letting convulsed the land.
For the 89-year-old émigré from Kerala, whose late wife was a Tamil in a Sinhala majority nation, the prospects for a return to those happier days have never looked better.
In May, the Sri Lankan military crushed the separatist Tamil Tigers, wiping out its entire leadership.
“The local people don’t really bear grudges,” he says.
Four months after the end of the war, a week-long trip to Sri Lanka revealed an economy whose exports are rising on the back of strong orders for garments. In the lobbies of the Cinnamon Grand Hotel and at the Hilton, it was evident that the visitors are back.
For Sri Lankans, the first signs of a peace dividend could be seen in the lower prices for fish and vegetables as the newly liberated Tamil north gets reconnected to the populous south.
Trans-shipments through Colombo are rising too as Sri Lanka gains business from the expanding Indian economy, with which it has a successful free trade agreement. Sovereign ratings are improving on lower credit risk and higher foreign exchange flows.
The world is sitting up and taking notice. The American Chamber of Commerce paid a visit to the island last week. Next month, the Singapore Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry will bring a delegation.
Nowhere is the impact greater than in tourism. Last year, the island of coral reefs, lush forests and surf drew no more than 438,000 visitors because of the poor security situation. But tourist arrivals jumped 28 per cent in July and 34 per cent in August, and some hotels are already overbooked for the period starting February.
A recent AirAsia flight from Kuala Lumpur carried Serbians, Australians, Germans, Americans and Japanese — as well as other Asian nationalities.
“We see the next season as a take-off point and by 2011 we should be in overdrive,” said Bernard Goonetilleke, chairman of Sri Lanka Tourism. “President Mahinda Rajapaksa has set us a target of 2.5 million visitors by 2016.”
On Colombo’s Galle Face Green marina, families and dating couples feel no fear of staying out late into the night, even as the military continues to be alert. Passengers reaching the main international airport can now drive up to the entry gates, something they could not do previously.
But the peace Sri Lanka is enjoying came at an immense price.
Thousands of Tamil fighters and innocents died as Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa and army chief General Sarath Fonseka, both targets of assassination attempts, bashed on through Tiger defence lines. Indeed, within the armed forces, officers often joked that they did not know which was the greater danger: “Johnny (mines) in front, or Fonny (Fonseka) at the back if you retreated.”
The Tigers were doughty fighters and their mines, cunningly laid, were lethal. In the last 18 months of the fighting, over 6,000 soldiers died and another 27,000 were wounded.
“During a three-hour burst of fighting at a 300m bund, my unit lost 27 limbs,” said Colonel Vikun Liyenage of the famed Gajaba infantry regiment as we shared a bus ride from the army base in Mannar to see a newly rebuilt bridge to Mannar Island. “But we just didn’t stop.”
With the war ended and the Tigers vanquished, the Tamils, who are mostly Hindus, remain uncertain about their future. Yet, even as they remain sullen — the recent Deepavali festival was greeted with an eerie silence across the island — Tamils are aware that many of the deaths were at the hands of Tigers themselves.
The guerrillas held them as defensive shields, correctly figuring that large-scale civilian deaths would inflame world opinion. That stigma, and that of the continuing detention of more than 200,000 Tamils in barbed wire-fringed refugee camps, continue to hover over the Rajapaksa government.
At Kopay Camp in Jaffna, one of the best-appointed refugee facilities, women separated from their husbands wailed to be reunited with their spouses. Young Tamil children cheered and waved as they clung to barbed wire that prevented them from leaving.
The European Union has threatened to cut off the special trade benefit, called GSP+, if the refugees are not released promptly, endangering the livelihoods of some 300,000 garment workers on the island. Colombo responded that it bears the responsibility to clear minefields and to ensure a decent life for the displaced people. It also has to make sure ‘terrorism’ on the island does not rise again. Meanwhile, it has promised to see 100,000 Tamil people home by year-end.
“Living conditions have improved but there is a deep-seated yearning among the Tamils to be allowed to go home,” said V. Puththirasigamoney, a Tamil deputy minister who is in charge of one of the camps.
Interviews with the United Nations Development Programme and officials of the UN’s International Organisation for Migration (IOM) confirmed that assessment. “There are concerns about freedom of movement but the refugees are held in conditions no better or worse than camps elsewhere in South Asia,” says an IOM official.
To be sure, Sri Lanka can never fully be at peace until the Tamils are back in their homes and once again feel they have a stake in the political process. Many continue to seek ways to flee to countries as distant as Indonesia and Australia, paying huge sums of money to boat owners for the uncomfortable passage.
“There are misgivings at the moment that Tamils are being left out,” said Singapore’s Ambassador-at-large Gopinath Pillai, who accompanied Foreign Minister George Yeo on a trip to Sri Lanka last week. “Mainstreaming them will bring huge benefits to an island that has so much potential.”
The government has been slow to move on a political settlement.
At least, it would need to devolve some powers to the administration in Tamil areas, particularly in matters of land and police. The optimists expect President Rajapaksa, now hobbled by the compulsions of coalition politics, to move swiftly once parliamentary elections are held early next year. By current estimates, his party should secure a two-thirds majority, giving him the mandate to change laws.
For all the ferocity with which he fought the rebels, Rajapaksa is reckoned to be sympathetic to the Tamil minority. “After a long time I am getting the impression that the Sinhalese mean something,” said Singapore gynaecologist C. Anandakumar, an ethnic Tamil who has made five trips to Sri Lanka since the war ended. “They paid a big price and are not prepared to see the same thing again.” — The Straits Times
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There are daily dissapearance of internally displaced people within the camp,and sinhales colonizations in the tamils vacated land.The latest is UNITED STATE DEPT has issued statements that sri lanka should be charged for crimes against humanity,nearly 30,000 non combatants tamilians are massacred during the last stage of war.The UNITED NATION has failed to protect the innocent tamilians during the war,the INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY must stand united and give pressure to the state terrorism govt of sri lanka for the early release of tamilians from the detention camps.