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Instrument of Peace

The Church struggles to promote peace in an island nation crippled by civil war

By Anto Akkara

Christians enjoy a unique status in Sri Lanka. The country faces a civil war because of the seemingly intractable ethnic problem that is at the root of a bloody conflict between Tamil rebels and the Sri Lankan army. The Christian community of Sri Lanka— a group that is 1.3 million strong, comprising 7 percent of overall population of 18 million—is the only group that has been able to overcome the deep ethnic divide that plagues this island nation in the Indian Ocean.

Since 1983, the rebel army known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, or LTTE, has been battling to end the political domination of the country’s Buddhist majority. More than 100,000 people have been killed in the conflict, which shows no signs of abating. Today nearly one fifth of Sri Lanka’s territory—consisting of the northern and eastern regions where ethnic Tamils form the majority of the population— is under the effective control of the LTTE rebels.

About 70 percent of Sri Lanka’s people are Buddhists. They are concentrated heavily in the south of the country, and speak the Sinhala language exclusively. The Tamil minority, which accounts for about 20 percent of the population, is predominantly Hindu. To the people of Sri Lanka it is all but inconceivable that a Tamil would be Buddhist, or a Hindu speak Sinhala. Yet Christianity maintains a strong presence among both the Sinhala and Tamil peoples.

So the Christian minority, whose loyalties transcend the ethnic divisions that have nurtured years of conflict, are now in the forefront of the campaign for a peaceful settlement of the country’s civil war.

The Jaffna campaign

The commitment of the Christian community to the peace process was particularly evident late in March, when the Catholic Church (which accounts for 85 percent of the Christian community) organized a historic peace rally on the war-ravaged Jaffna peninsula.

Jaffna, located in the north of the country, has been the scene of some particularly intense fighting in recent months. In 1995 the Sri Lankan army took the peninsula away from the Tamil rebels; as the army moved into the city, much of the population of Jaffna moved out, leaving behind a virtual ghost town. Now the LTTE has launched a fierce offensive to take back its old stronghold, and the government is looking desperately for international armed support.

The idea for a peace rally originated with Father Bernard Alphonsus, the chairman of the peace and development committee of the Jaffna diocese. The rally was designed to build support for peace talks between the Sri Lanka government and the Tamil rebel leadership, which have begun under the aegis of the government of Norway. Some militant Sinhala groups, especially around the capital city of Colombo, have called for a boycott of the peace talks. Father Alphonsus argued that the Jaffna rally would counterbalance what he described as these “stray voices of protest” against the Norwegian peace initiative. “There have been protests in the south against the ongoing peace process. We wanted to give peace a chance. The people are fed up with war,” he said.

On March 25, more than 10,000 people turned out to demand an immediate, negotiated end to the civil war. On behalf of the civilian population of Jaffna, which witnessed the most intense human suffering and destruction in the 17-year-old ethnic conflict, the marchers issued a clarion call “to join hands to stop the war and establish peace.” The rally, Father Alphonsus pointed out, was the largest public demonstration in the recent history of Jaffna. “This spontaneous reaction shows the yearning of the people for peace,” he said.

Although the idea came from the Catholic diocese, the Jaffna rally involved other religious groups as well. Some 60 organizations joined the diocese as sponsors of the peace rally. Prominent local Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim religious leaders addressed the audience. The peace march began from the Nallur Kandasamy temple, the site held most sacred by the Hindus of Jaffna. But it was the Catholic leader of Jaffna, Bishop Thomas Savandaranayagam, who closed the proceedings by asking the participants to join in the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, asking God to “make me an instrument of thy peace.”

Other peace efforts

Meanwhile, many Christians elsewhere in Sri Lanka joined in similar peace demonstrations, including one in Colombo, expressing their solidarity with the Jaffna initiative. Close on the heels of the Jaffna march, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Sri Lanka (CBCSL) met during the final days of March, and endorsed the peace negotiations being held under the mediation of Norway. “It is with great satisfaction that we welcome the initiative of the present government and the LTTE to enter into a political negotiation aided by a third party,” said the Catholic bishops in a statement after their March 28-31 conference, which was held in Kandy, about 70 miles east of Colombo.

The CBCSL statement declared that “political dialogue [is] the only way to solve the festering ethnic problem, which is fundamentally political.” Hence, the Catholic bishops’ conference made a fervent appeal “to all parties concerned to be courageous and magnanimous in making compromises, respecting the right of all people and citizens of this country, which is multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious.” Enlarging on that theme, the bishops also stressed their support for “a dignified sharing of political power” in the north and east of the country, “based on the rights of the Tamil people to govern and develop themselves within one country.”

Apart from the continued destruction of precious human lives, the CBCSL statement pointed out that the “unbearable war expenditure and mass displacements . . . have made our land impoverished and desolate.” The Sri Lankan defense budget has shot up from 2 percent of government expenditures in the early 1980s to 27 percent in 2000, observed Father Oswald B. Firth, OMI, the director of the Center for Society and Religion in Colombo, detailing the economic costs of the civil war. “A developing nation like Sri Lanka had to spend 60 billion rupees [over $ 800 million] last year to fight a war against its own people,” lamented Father Firth.

The civil war has also severely reduced the population of the areas where the fighting has been most intense. In the early 1980s the population of Jaffna was about one million; today only a small fraction of that number remains. Those who had the financial means to do so migrated to Western countries as the fighting erupted around them. Some residents died in the conflict itself, caught in the crossfire as both the army and the rebels were guilty of using civilians as human shields. Some refugees made the risky crossing to India in rickety home-made boats. Those who still remain in the Jaffna region—where most of the houses are deserted, and the once-fertile agricultural land has been poisoned by shells and booby-trapped by mines—are the people who lacked the means, the ability, or the assistance they needed to escape the bloody war.

Still, not all the people of Sri Lanka were convinced by the logic put forward by the country’s 11 Catholic bishops. One group of influential Buddhist monks urged the country’s President Chandrika Kumaratunga to uphold Sinhala pride and to “crush” the LTTE even before entering into the peace negotiations. President Kumaratunga responded by inviting the Buddhist leaders to his office for a discussion in late April, so that he might “clarify the government position.” But the monks, endorsing the Sinhala extremist view, refused to attend such a meeting; they offered the transparent excuse that they could not respond to a presidential invitation on such “short notice.”

Relief work

While working to increase public support for peace efforts, Christians in Sri Lanka are also giving expression to their religious commitment through relief efforts on behalf of the war’s victims, especially the families displaced by the fighting.

For example, in the village of Poorvarsankulam—near Vavunniya, a bit more than 160 miles north of Colombo—rows of huts covered with coconut palm leaves fill the open space around a Protestant church affiliated with the Church of South India (CSI). After being allowed to live inside the church building itself for two months, two dozen Tamil families now live in these makeshift huts on the parish property. These families, numbering about 100 people in total, represent only a small microcosm of the thousands of Tamil refugees who have crowded into the area of Vavunniya, which marks the border between the regions controlled by the Sri Lankan army and the LTTE.

Like so many of their former neighbors, these families fled for their lives last November, when renewed fighting broke out between the army and the Tamil Tigers in the north. “We are lucky to have found shelter here,” said 70-year-old Perumal Velu, a Hindu, of his temporary home on the CSI church grounds. Velu lives with his family on a dry ration of rice and cereals, provided at a cost equivalent to $18 a month in American dollars, under the government formula that fixes subsidies for a family of five in the official relief program for “internally displaced people.” Even at such modest rates, the cost of feeding displaced people is quickly becoming a burden for Sri Lanka’s government. Nearly a million people are estimated to have become “homeless within their homeland” in recent months.

While refugees face a very difficult life in areas such as Vavunniya, where they are under the control of the Sri Lankan military, survival is much more difficult for civilians in the "uncleared areas"—the regions that are effectively controlled by the LTTE—because the army is blockading these regions, shutting off the delivery of most relief supplies. Aside from a few basic food items such as dry cereals, the Sri Lankan military will not allow agencies such as the Red Cross to carry any supplies into the LTTE-controlled areas. Even powdered milk for babies' formula and common medical supplies like cotton swabs and sanitary napkins are barred, because the army has expressed the fear that these items could be used to treat injured LTTE fighters.

Naturally the Sri Lankan government does not provide welfare assistance for refugees in the “uncleared areas,” since the official machinery of the government has been shut down by the LTTE. So in these areas—where the predominantly Tamil population is estimated at one million—Christian church agencies have taken the lead in providing solace and support to the suffering civilians. Caritas Sri Lanka, the social action wing of the Catholic bishops’ conference, and the Relief and Rehabilitation program of the National Council of Churches of Sri Lanka are the key players.

Caritas Sri Lanka spends over 4 million rupees ($60,000) every month in a program designed to provide at least one meal a day for 13,500 school children. “The children come to the temporary schools [many of them run by churches] with just a cup of tea. We cannot teach them on empty stomachs,” said the director of Caritas Sri Lanka, Father J. B. Devarajah. “Perhaps this is the only meal they will have in a day.”

Another concern for Caritas, Father Devarajah continued, is to make medicines available to the displaced people, along with medical personnel to treat their ailments. Even common diseases can become life-threatening, due to the short supplies of basic medicines. As a result the death rate is very high in the rebel-controlled areas, and Caritas has been forced to set aside funds to facilitate burial, including that of many non-Christians.

Tamils at risk

Tamils living in the “uncleared areas” are not the only people adversely affected by the civil war. In several Buddhist villages near the LTTE-controlled areas, the government machinery is virtually defunct. Government-paid teachers refuse to accept assignments to schools in those areas, fearing “lightning raids” by LTTE guerrillas.

At the same time, human-rights activists report that the civil war in Sri Lanka has led to severe restrictions on the free movement of the country’s people, and harassment of innocent civilians. Ethnic Tamils run special risks, particularly in the regions where Buddhists form a majority.

For Tamil families seeking safety from the fighting around their homes in the north, the prospect of moving to the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, is more dangerous than the possibility of emigrating abroad, according to Father Oswald Firth. The Center for Society and Religion (CSR), which he heads, provides temporary hostel facilities for the needy in Colombo. As he points out, refugees heading for the capital face daunting obstacles. “Those in the north need to get several passes and verifications done, even to visit Colombo for a medical checkup,” he notes.

Once they reach Colombo, the refugees may face new difficulties. Even those staying in the CSR hostel have been arbitrarily arrested by the police after bomb explosions in the city, he reports. “It is sad that every Tamil is treated like a terrorist,” said the CSR director, who is himself an ethnic Sinhala. He adds that he made trips to the local police station several times in order to obtain the release of Tamils who were arrested while staying at his center.

Ilanka Rodrigues, who handles human-rights issues for Caritas Sri Lanka, reports that she receives 20 complaints a month about the arbitrary detention of young Tamils. Some of these complaints come from people who are currently in detention, who hear about Caritas from their fellow prisoners; others come from the families of those detained. Church agencies in the north and east—the regions from which the Tamil refugees come into Colombo—forward complaints to Caritas from families whose children have been taken into custody. Rodrigues insists that many of the young people who are arrested “on mere suspicion” are completely innocent of any involvement in the civil war. But the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act allows security agencies to keep an individual in detention for two years without presenting a charge against him in court, she points out.

Father J. Yogeshwaran, SJ, a lawyer by training, reports that in at least 95 percent of the cases he has brought in the last three years on behalf of people held in detention, he has been able to win their freedom. The Jesuit Refugee Service, for which he works, receives 15 to 20 fresh cases each month; most of them involve Tamils who have been detained by the Sri Lankan army simply because they have failed to give “satisfactory explanation” for their presence in Colombo or elsewhere.

Furthermore, Father Yogeshwaran believes that the complaints reaching his office represent only a fraction of the cases involving detention of Tamils. “There are many many more who are kept in illegal custody,” he asserts. In many cases, he adds, the detainees are tortured—often being hanged upside down for hours at a time—until they sign the “confessions” prepared for them by the security agencies.

The charge that many Tamils have simply disappeared from the scene in Sri Lanka can be supported with statistics furnished by the UN’s Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. Tamil human-rights groups point out that the UN group lists 11,513 people who are classified as having “disappeared” in Sri Lanka. Only Yugoslavia and Iraq appear higher on the UN listing of countries where “disappearances” are unresolved.

A lawyer who practices in Colombo —and who insists on anonymity—says that the ethnic Sinhala bias against Tamils is reinforced by the political pressure on security officials to “show results” in their campaign against the LTTE. The net effect, he says, is an increase in human-rights violations, even in areas far removed from the actual fighting. Occasional acts of sabotage and terrorism by rebel guerrillas only add to the existing bias against Tamils; as bombings have become increasingly frequent in Colombo, members of the judiciary have become increasingly liberal in their willingness to tolerate human-rights abuses by the local police.

The futility of war

While Tamil civilians suffer, the long civil war is also taking a toll on the population and government of the Sri Lankan majority. The country’s army is now 20,000 men short of its enlistment target. Hundreds of soldiers are deserting the armed forces, demoralized by the defeats the army has suffered at the hands of the Tamil Tigers, who appear better motivated and frustrate their more organized opponents with their guerrilla tactics. A highly publicized recruitment drive in February, aimed to fill the gaps in the army by attracting 20,000 new members, fell short by 7,000. Outside of the country’s poor villages, where very few other attractive options are available, few young men are willing to join the armed forces. And on the other side of the equation, the army is losing both men and equipment, on a fairly regular basis, to the Tamil rebels.

Because of the destruction caused by the war, and perhaps also because of the decline in the government’s military strength, the majority of Sri Lanka’s people are now “convinced that peace is an urgent imperative for the nation,” according to Bishop Oswald Gomes of Anuradhapura, the president of the country’s episcopal conference. Even many of the people who once supported efforts to bring about a “military solution” to the Tamil uprising are now convinced that the war is futile, he says. Bishop Gomes, who is of Sinhala origin, believes that the trend in public opinion is favorable toward the efforts of the Catholic Church. The leadership of the Church, he observes, has “always stood for a peaceful solution, not a military solution.”

Anto Akkara, a regular contributor to Catholic World Report, recently traveled to Sri Lanka from his base in New Delhi, India.

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