Sri Lanka: An Eyeful of Green
by Bina Srinivasan[April 1, 2004]
Undulating strips of green. Shades as varied as each paddy stem, waving innocently in the wind. Fields riddled with blood and gore. With the agony of a people besieged.
Gravelkanda is a makeshift camp for the 127 families that fled from Monarawewa and Gajabapura in Vavuniya district in the North Central Province of Sri Lanka. They ran because their life and property were threatened in December 1999 when the LTTE attacked the army. The people escaped with the clothes they had on. So they said when we met them in Gravelkanda. Women clustered around us in a tight circle as soon as they spotted us. Their voices erupted, bursting across the opulent green of this beautiful land.
A story replayed before in countless different avatars. I am reminded sharply of women of the Narmada Valley in India, of the women whose houses and lands were drowned by the Bargi dam in Madhya Pradesh, Central India. The same weather-beaten faces, the same loss etched into the folds of their skin. With the same work calloused hands they have wrought hard lives for themselves and their families. In the face of intense disaster they work, nurture stray dogs and feed their children.
They resist.
An un-beautiful story. Dis-placement. Or dis-ruption. Or dis-location. So many words. Each incomplete, unable to give expression to the experience.
In the voices of the Gravelkanda women, in their words I seek the knowledge of loss. I seek the full meaning of dis-placement in their hands flung out in despair and anger.
As you would be. If you had been rudely jolted into flight from all that made up your life: your fields, your cattle, your wells. The colours and sounds that moulded your landscape. Your home.
That is what they left behind. Colours and sounds that created a life. A collective life that was now scattered over the dense vegetation in Gravelkanda, 100 kms from Anuradhapura in the North Central Province. Countless kilometers away from home.
Some were more fortunate than the others. For some are more equal than others. Those who could afford to moved to greener (!) pastures. The others remained where they were, helplessly immobile, waiting for government assistance, some assurance that they would be given some land, a piece of earth they could call their own. Government assistance they did get. Dry rations the value of Rs.1260 for a family of five. They lived like that for four years. 104 families pushed to the periphery of existence. Quite literally.
It is quite simple really. All they had to do was to get a letter from the Vavuniya district authorities ëreleasingí them from the lands they had lived on for years as they were registered there. So said a letter from the Rehabilitation Ministry of the Eastern Province.
Easy? No.
The Vavuniya district authorities professed helplessness. They could not ëreleaseí the people. So here they are trapped in a maze definitely not of their making.
We are mere symbols on ballot paper, say the women. The politicians of come to us for votes. The women know well what is going on. If they were to be registered as residents of Anuradhapura, which is what would happen if they were to be given land here, Vavuniya would have no Sinhala presence. If Vavuniya were to be overwhelmed by a Tamil presence there would be no Sinhala member of parliament from the area.
Devious political calculation: it forms the core of their continuing state of dispossession.
Thus in Anuradhapura the 104 families are non-existent. Government administrations have an uncanny mastery over the art of consigning people to oblivion. Ask the people of the Narmada Valley and they will corroborate this story.
Left high and dry. This is the flesh and blood of that phrase. This is the texture, the skin that sheaths the words.
In Gravelkanda we met Seriavati. Grit and hope tightly coiled in a dark, wiry body. A body wounded by an artillery shell, a body that will now wear the insignia of ethnic conflict forever. Limping her way across a land thick with trees and weeds growing seamlessly into each other she came across two orphaned animals. A baby deer and a sambar. Their lives as threatened as hers. Animals are dispensable. After all, jungles have to be cleared for army operations ostensibly to aid visibility. The vision however remains myopic.
But for Seriavati the animals would have died. She rescued them, brought them back with her to her non-existent house. She nurtured them like children. Five years later they are fully grown and the Forest Department wants them ëbackí because they are endangered species. Irony? Its meaning is lost on the Forest Department.
Battered as she may be Seriavati creates her own reasons to fasten onto life. Hers as well as others. See the cats and dogs that surround her house, flapping about in the heat, curling around the dark, cool corners of her small house.
Seriavati claimed a piece of land across the camp. She, her husband, son and grandchildren worked to clear the vegetation, to make a little plot of land that would free them from dependence on the dry rations the government doles out.
One plot of land filled with defiance against the grain of a fate that would have willed otherwise. Small compensation for the void of dis-placement.
Today 40 odd families live across the road off the camp. The others have chosen to remain in the camp, afraid to leave, afraid of greater loss. They cling to a tenuous hope that one day they will be given land that is rightfully theirs.
A black tar road. The dividing line between resistance and passivity.
We return to Anuradhapura. Our van speeds past an army camp. A tall wrought iron sculpture places itself resolutely in our line of vision. (Armies of the world unite? You have nothing to lose but your people?) An ensemble of deadly weapons is frozen against the heartbreaking green of the land. Growing sky high the sculpture declares its proud intentions to every passer-by.
Seriavati. Proud and humble all at one go. Mocking at the violence of the iron rifles suspended between earth and sky.
Peace: taunted beyond endurance it gallops across bloodied green fields to find succor in the aspirations of women like Seriavati. Who count each day as it goes by without the sound of gunfire. Whose bodies shudder with relief that the number of funerals have gone down since the peace process began. Whose voices quiver with desperate hope that their lands will be free of the high-pitched terror of war.
It is here that we need to look for peace. In the hearts of the people who have suffered war, in the cries of children who hurt so much that even the sound of crackers sets in enormous panic, in the broken hearts of those who have lost their relatives to the war, in the eyes of mothers waiting for sons who have disappeared without a trace.
It is there that peace lies in waiting, hoping to unfurl itself and stamp its presence on each palm frond. Hoping to find its way into stoves that light up every evening in anticipation of a family that will sit down to the last meal of the day.
Peace is no abstraction, it is not a mere idea. It is the difference between ignominy and dignity, between justice and injustice. The difference between life and death.
A simple truth. Why then does it evade solution?
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