By Somini Sengupta – The New York Times – MONDAY, MAY 15, 2006
TRINCOMALEE, Sri Lanka The bad blood, you could say, began with the Buddha. Last May, in the dead of night, someone erected a giant white Buddha statue on a cement platform behind the main market here. What followed in this multiethnic, multifaith, perennially self-destructive city on the northeastern coast of Sri Lanka was a chain of anger and savagery.
The ethnic Tamils of Trincomalee, who are mostly Hindu and Christian, saw the clandestine raising of the Buddha statue as an act of provocation by Sinhalese Buddhists. The Tamils protested. The man who led the protests, Vanniasingam Vigneswaran, was shot and killed as he went to the bank one morning. Another morning, the bodies of five Tamil youths were found on the beach. The largely Sinhalese security forces came under steady attack by people suspected of being ethnic Tamil guerrillas.
The tit for tat went on for a year and then shifted into overdrive on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-April, when an explosion at the entrance of the market killed 16 people. A Sinhalese mob then torched Tamil-owned shops and hunted down Tamil civilians.
In the reprisals that followed, Sinhalese villagers were slaughtered, Tamil homes were burned, and schools and churches were turned into squalid camps of frightened, wounded villagers. At the end of April, a suicide bombing in Colombo, said to have been carried out by Tamil rebels, prompted government airstrikes on the rebel-held countryside just south of here. More than a dozen died and hundreds more villagers fled.
After four years of livable peace since the 2002 cease-fire between the government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Trincomalee has once again sunk into the muck of fear, uncertainty and distrust that marked the worst years of the ethnic Sri Lankan conflict of the past two decades.
With the truce having unraveled, the latest violence raises the specter of the 1983 anti-Tamil campaign that plunged the country into all-out war. Bad memories compound the ill will.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in Trincomalee, 255 kilometers, or 160 miles, from Colombo. The city is a demographic microcosm of the country, with Tamils, Sinhalese and Muslims living together in roughly equal numbers. It is here that the repercussions of the war are felt most intensely.
“There is right now a lot of suspicion by the communities of each other,” said the Reverend George Dissanayake, a Roman Catholic priest and the secretary of the Inter-Religious Peace Foundation here. “We have gone back 20 years. It is very difficult to repair the damage.”
Today, Sinhalese villagers living around Trincomalee say the police have offered them shotguns to protect themselves. In their territory, the Tamil Tigers, too, are raising village defense committees.
The city and the surrounding countryside are increasingly divided along ethnic lines. The market has turned into a Sinhalese enclave, and the traders, bereft of Tamil and Muslim customers, while away the day playing cards.
Nearby, a Tamil laundry, spared by the mob, waits for its Sinhalese customers to bring in their wash. Across the street, a Sinhalese grocer waits for Tamil shoppers who no longer come. Offices close by early afternoon. By nightfall, the streets are bare except for the edgy soldiers who man checkpoints at every corner.
The events moved R. Rajarammohan, one of the most successful businessmen in the city, to do what he had strenuously resisted for years: cloister himself with his fellow Tamils.
Within minutes of the April 12 market blast, a gang of young men came up Central Road with kerosene cans and fishing knives, and set upon Rajarammohan’s household-products wholesale company. They broke into his office, but seemed not to know who he was or his ethnicity. It signaled to him that they were not from the area.
The mob set his shop on fire. In the course of an hour, Rajarammohan lost $400,000 in goods, computers, four trucks and a new car, and even the insurance papers. Today, he is setting up shop in a Tamil enclave, far from the buzz of Central Road and the main market.
“We’d love to go back; we’d love to work with them,” he said of his Sinhalese neighbors on Central Road. “But they can’t protect us, can they? We’ve learned the bitter way.” It was the fourth time since 1983 that his business had been hit in anti-Tamil riots.
One measure of the distrust between the communities is the swirl of conspiracy theories about what happened when the market got bombed. Among Sinhalese, one theory is that the bomb killed mainly Sinhalese and that the riots erupted spontaneously. Among Tamils, a theory is that the bomb was the handiwork of security forces or their allies and that the majority of the dead were Tamils in what they call organized reprisal attacks.
The truth is harder to categorize. According to the main hospital, the explosion killed 16 people, representing the local demographic mix: eight Tamils, five Sinhalese, two Muslims and a person who could not be identified. The reprisal attacks claimed another five: four Tamils and one Sinhalese, who were burned, stabbed and shot to death.
Whether the riots were spontaneous or planned is impossible to know, although one thing seems certain: The police and the army, deployed in full force around the market, did not manage to stop them.
Rohan Abeywardana, the deputy inspector general of police in charge of Trincomalee, said his forces were overpowered. And anyway, those arrested were released the next morning.
Behind the market, the Buddha, encircled by concertina wire, gazes silently on the once-busy Trincomalee market. The dozens of soldiers barricaded around the statue light oil lamps before him every day.
They are the only ones who can touch its feet today, along with the crows still free to roam.