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Refugees Magazine Issue 130: (Sri Lanka) – Humanitarians: Life in the war zone
A grim new reality for humanitarians working at the centre of Sri Lanka's conflict
Gregory Mariathas may not have been quite able to see the whites of the pilot's eyes, but the terrifying sight of the diving warplane was still close enough for him to read the lettering on its fuselage.
"I was lying on my side, looking up and was clearly able to read out the aircraft's identification marks in English," he said recently. "Then the plane released its bombs, right above my head it seemed at the time. I was sprayed with sand and debris. My hair and arms were burned. But luckily the jungle was so thick there I escaped further injury from the bombing."
Mariathas had been riding in a truck to a timber depot in Tamil-controlled territory in northern Sri Lanka when a marauding warplane zeroed in on an apparent target-of-opportunity and swooped to attack.
The incident highlighted a grim new reality for the small number of international and local humanitarian officials such as Mariathas involved in Sri Lanka's bitter civil conflict.
Until recent years, UNHCR officials had normally worked on the fringes of war, helping refugees stabilize and rebuild their lives once they had escaped from dangerous situations. Indeed, the refugee agency began operations in Sri Lanka in 1987 specifically to assist refugees to return from India during one early interlude in the war. But when the conflict re-ignited through the 1990s and into the new millennium, field staff from UNHCR and a few other agencies such as the International Red Cross, were sucked inexorably into the eye of the inferno.
The refugee organization expanded its operations to assist not only refugees but also hundreds of thousands of civilians internally displaced on both sides of the front lines, in government and LTTE-held territory. In the swirl of battle, it provided a tenuous physical, legal and moral protection regime for terrified families. The agency became a mediator with the army and the LTTE high command, its field staff constantly walking the delicate tightrope between being trusted intermediaries or branded as suspected spies.
Staff and civilians became caught in the deadly crossfire of major firefights, frantic calls being exchanged between field offices, Colombo, Jaffna and rebel headquarters to arrange a hasty cease-fire allowing trapped people to escape. Convoys ferried desperately needed emergency supplies across the front lines and through no man's land into the beleaguered rebel enclave. Vehicular movement was subject to sporadic surprise helicopter or warplane attack.
Field personnel were isolated for weeks or months in rebel-held territory or on the Jaffna Peninsula where often their only physical link with the outside world was a perilous night time boat ride between the peninsula and the east coast port of Trincomalee.
LOCAL BURDEN
The heaviest burden in this little reported and little known conflict inevitably fell on local staff who endured two long decades of conflict and whose own families were sometimes among the very civilians UNHCR was trying to help.
Amidst some of the worst fighting of the war in 1995, driver S. Koneswaran remembers "the most horrible moments of my life" as he tried to flee Jaffna town and find a place of safety for his still trapped family. "Everyone was trying to leave. There was a monstrous traffic jam," he remembers. "We were just moving along inch by inch. There was shelling and firing everywhere. So many people being killed and wounded. It took me two days to get out" and find a relatively safe area on the fringes of the battle.
Then he had to get back into Jaffna to bring his parents out. "The LTTE wouldn't let me through their lines. I had to work my way between the two armies, cutting through the rice paddies. I felt I was going to be shot by either side any moment."
At this time, government warplanes had improvised what to Koneswaran seemed like homemade bombs, effectively large oil barrels filled with explosives which were rolled out of slow flying Russian built transport planes. "They spiralled down very slowly," he said. "We could track them as they fell. During the day we could see them coming and run away. It was not so bad. But at night it was far worse, because we couldn't see where they would land."
One evening, as he stood outside his house in Jaffna, he heard the ominous rumble of ‘bombs' falling. "I tried to jump a gate and head for an air raid shelter" which everyone had dug in their gardens, he said. He was lucky. He didn't reach the bunker but the bomb exploded on the opposite side of the house, peppering the building but leaving him unscathed.
Another UNHCR worker, T. Kandasamy was not so lucky. He was also standing near his home during other fighting when he was hit in the stomach by shrapnel but he recovered.
UNHCR had established a series of so-called open relief centres for civilians – physically unprotected ‘safe' sanctuaries which both sides had agreed to respect. Madhu in Sri Lanka's northern Vanni region was the largest, at times housing many thousands of people, and driver S. Siebagnamam was helping to ferry supplies to the trapped civilians there.
"At this time the army was retreating and there was very heavy fighting," he said. "It was raining heavily and it was very late at night when a shell struck the Catholic church. I was some yards away. Even above the rain and the gunfire I heard the crying and screaming. Everything was very confusing, but when I reached the building there was blood everywhere. The walls were splattered and elsewhere blood was flowing like a river. The people were milling around terrified, but they couldn't go anywhere because there was fighting in all directions."
It was one of the worst tragedies of its kind in the war and nearly 50 people died.
UNDER SIEGE
And then there were the ‘routine' incidents of life in a war zone – the lack of communications with the outside world, the lack of information, of transport, petrol, food or medicine.
"Malaria was very bad at the time," Gregory Mariathas remembers. "We all got it repeatedly, sometimes when we were driving in convoy. My colleagues would strap me into a seat with a belt and we would carry on, with me shivering away."
As one recent visitor was being driven to Mannar Island, the local UNHCR driver remarked almost matter-of-factly: "That used to be my home" pointing to a semi-destroyed building now in the middle of a small military compound. "We had to get out during the fighting. We have found somewhere else."
Nimal Peiris had already fled the chaos to India during the early part of the war and then returned home where he eventually became an interpreter and protection clerk for UNHCR on Mannar Island – a major exit point on Sri Lanka's west coast for civilians fleeing to India and the scene of major fighting. Even today some stretches of the island remain devastated.
He remembers the "motorcycle incident" vividly. He was riding with a colleague on a UNHCR motorcycle when two armed LTTE fighters stopped them and one demanded the bike. "I refused and told them ‘If you want this bike then shoot me,'" he said. "For 45 minutes he held a pistol to my head, arguing. Eventually the second man freed us."
The cycle was donated to a local organization, but the persistent guerrilla eventually commandeered it. Three months later Peiris again saw the man and the motorcycle.
After a formal complaint, the machine was returned and the man arrested by his own high command for the robbery and other crimes.
Even minor successes like that were welcome in the chaos of war.
Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 130: "Sri Lanka – Emerging from the ruins" (April 2003). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (880Kb) here or high-resolution (1.5Mb) here.
