International

Sri Lanka hopes for reconciliation

By V.S. Sambandan

POINT PEDRO (SRI LANKA), DEC. 29. ``There was a deafening roar and we fell flat on the floor, thinking the war had started. We thought bombers were on the way. Then a soldier rushed to us and said: `run, run, it's the wave,'" Vijayakumar, one of the survivors in Manalkadu, a fishing village near Point Pedro in the Jaffna peninsula, told The Hindu this morning, summing up the ordeal of northern Sri Lanka's Tamil residents when Sunday's tsunami lashed the island.

Mr. Vijayakumar was taking a break under a tamarind tree from recovering dead bodies. A bloated and rapidly decomposing body of an infant had just been brought ashore. "We can't even identify our own villagers," Mr. Vijayakumar lamented, sitting on the edge of an empty coffin. According to official figures, at least 2,000 persons are feared dead or missing and 48,729 persons displaced in Jaffna district.

Differences buried

For the island, which was bracing for a possible outbreak of violence, Sunday's tsunami has momentarily buried ethnic differences, but only at the surface. "War, which was imminent, can now be ruled out for some time," a Catholic parish priest said. "Soldiers and LTTE cadres are working together to provide succour," Fr. Roy Ferdinand, the parish priest, added. "The police also helped in speeding up the burial procedure, which was delayed by a (Tamil) District Magistrate."

Barely four days ago, before the tsunami tragedy, ethnic relations between Tamils and Sinhalas would have been vastly different from what it is today. In just three waves, there is a whiff of a new thinking emerging at the grassroots. "Solidarity is very high," another priest, Fr. David, said.

Echoing the sentiments expressed by the President, Chandrika Kumaratunga, in an address to the nation last night, another local priest, Fr. David, said: "there has been no distinction in the disaster. We have all been affected."

'Should bring solution'

The leaders of the church in the predominantly Catholic fishing villages said the current ground-level solidarity "should help in bringing in a political solution" to the decades-long separatist conflict.

Sri Lanka's Minister for Constitutional Reform and National Integration, D.E.W. Gunasekara, who was on a visit to the affected areas in the Jaffna Peninsula, is emphatic in his confidence that there will be a change in the political thinking. "That is why I am here in Jaffna on the instructions of the President," Mr. Gunasekara, himself a survivor of Sunday's tsunami, told The Hindu .

Scepticism persists

The optimism, however, is yet to percolate among those who were untouched by the tsunami. There is scepticism if solutions would be found to the political issues of the bloody conflict, which had claimed some 65,000 lives in 20 years. There is mutual help and commiseration over the destruction wreaked by the few minutes of tsunami, which according to varying estimates, killed over 20,000 persons.

"But this won't last long," a private van operator in the north said. "They will all be together for a few months, and then it will be back to the bad old days. Nothing will change," he said.Despite the enormity of the catastrophe, there is popular doubt, not entirely unfounded, if there will be true reconciliation between the main Sri Lankan players in the conflict resolution process — the Government, the Opposition and the LTTE.

© Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu