They don’t know it, but they also are getting a glimpse of what the war has really done to Sri Lanka. More than 15,000 children, some as young as 8 years old, now sell sex on the southern beaches. Any one of them likely will have been shipped from the northern war zone–only about 100 miles away–by agents of a child-procuring mafia that preys on shattered homes. A family whose father has been killed in battle or whose mother has emigrated in search of work is an easy mark. Survivors will often accept a $100 “recruitment” fee from procurers posing as charitable workers looking for children to educate. The children themselves become everyday commodities in the war economy that now dominates what can only be called a war society. Plenty of other conflicts get more space on the world’s front pages, but nowhere has war embedded itself more malignantly into the normal workings of a nation. Sri Lanka “hasn’t been torn by war,” says women’s rights advocate Radhika Coomaraswamy, “it’s been shredded.”
It has now been 19 years since the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam launched their war for an independent Tamil homeland in northern Sri Lanka. If war is hell, a war stalemated for so long deserves its own special ring of fire. In a country of 18 million people, 50,000 have died so far, an additional 30,000 have “disappeared” and more than 1 million have lost their homes. The social stresses are not as easy to quantify, but violent crime, especially rape, is rising rapidly. Sri Lanka also has the world’s highest suicide rate; more Sri Lankans kill themselves each year–about 7,000–than are killed in the war. The depression and alcoholism that lead to most suicides must go largely untreated, as the nation’s psychiatrists have joined the tens of thousands of other professionals who have fled abroad. More Sri Lankan psychiatrists now practice in London than in the whole of Sri Lanka, where only 18 remain.
The war’s billion-dollar-a-year cost has stunted the economy and kept foreign investors away. Sri Lanka should have the greatest promise of any South Asian nation. It has the highest literacy rate in the region, no deep-rooted poverty, spectacular natural and archeological attractions for tourists, great deep-water ports lying along major shipping routes and lucrative natural resources of tea, gems and minerals. But the war has relentlessly ground down the nation’s aspirations. People now accept 5 percent annual economic growth rather than reaching for twice that rate, says Saman Kelegama of the Institute of Policy Studies. “We’re like someone with a gangrenous foot who leaves it to rot because it won’t kill him tomorrow,” he says. “The war is our gangrene and we live with it, rather than embarking on the radical surgery of ending it.”
Numbers alone can’t capture the social costs of the war of attrition. As in Vietnam 30 years ago, the government clings grimly to its fortified positions while the Tiger guerrillas stage hit-and-run raids from the jungle. Few prisoners are taken, and casualties can be horrific; in just two actions last year, the Tigers overran government-held towns and killed 3,000 soldiers. Nobody knows how many Tigers die, as many of their bodies are left to rot in the jungle after government bombing and shelling attacks. What’s clear is that Sri Lanka is losing huge numbers of young men in the carnage. These include the guerrillas and troops who have died, as well as men who have fled the country to escape the war.
As a consequence, young unmarried women–tens of thousands of war widows among them–now outnumber available men by as many as 5 to 1 in northern war areas, according to one reasonable estimate. The imbalance is so great that a provincial government minister has suggested that polygamy be legalized. The idea is a nonstarter in a country where most people are strictly monogamist Buddhists, but the problem remains. Lacking husbands as well as jobs, almost 1 million Sri Lankan women have had to leave their country to find menial jobs as maids abroad, mainly in the Arab gulf countries.
The war continues to absorb Sri Lanka’s men as they come of age. The Tigers take their recruits young and often forcibly. The government Army, though it is a volunteer force, can be just as difficult to resist. In a society wasted by war, only the Army offers a future to many impoverished young men. “It’s a regular income and a rise in status you couldn’t get any other way,” says Tyrol Ferdinands, head of an antiwar group. A foot soldier’s $57 monthly pay–$145 in the combat zone–is a huge incentive. Even death benefits are important to poor families who send their sons to war. A widow receives a lump sum of $2,173 if her husband comes back dead, plus his monthly pay to what would have been his retirement age of 55.
Living with this social rot has indeed become normal. While the war chews up poor, young Sri Lankans in the north, the southern elite in and around the capital, Colombo, have had to put up with no more than the occasional terrorist bomb. Ferdinands, general secretary of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka, has been pressing for negotiations between the warring sides for years. His group has even sent envoys to Northern Ireland and South Africa to search for peacemaking ideas. But so far, the occasional talks between the Tigers and government negotiators have come to nothing. Only half-joking, Ferdinands suggests that the country subject all men of fighting age to a military draft. “Bring in conscription tomorrow and the war will end a few days later,” he says, “when the first doctors, businessmen and stockbrokers lose their sons.”
Army veteran Upali Ekanayake, 29, belongs to none of these categories. The son of a rural farming family, Ekanayake lives with other disabled veterans in Ranavirugama, “The Village of the War Heroes,” secluded in a forest outside Colombo. Growing up near the war zone, Ekanayake says, he never wanted to be anything but a soldier. That career ended when a Tiger sniper shot him in the spine, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.
Ekanayake still has his pride, as well as a young wife, Pushpa, who married him after his wound despite great parental opposition. Now he wants nothing more than peace. The Tamils should be refused full independence, he argues, but given autonomy in the north. “We have to end this war, and we have to go to any lengths to stop the fighting,” Ekanayake says. “Otherwise this country will be filled with people in wheelchairs like me.” That would make the wheelchair one more tool of everyday life in a war society.
