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In Jaffna, violence lingers just below the surface

The assassination of Jaffna's new mayor and its military and police commanders in a bombing last week shows that even two years after recapturing the 1,000-square-km Jaffna peninsula, the army's hold on the city is far from secure.

Jaffna, once a thriving port colonised by the Portuguese and the Dutch across the narrow straits from southern India, bears the signs of military occupation -- barbed wire and sandbagged checkpoints. Nearly 45,000 Sinhalese soldiers are maintaining order in a city of nearly 500,000 Tamils.

The Tamil Tigers seized the city in 1990 and proclaimed a government for the more than one million people who live in northern Sri Lanka, where Tamils predominate. Sri Lanka's army retook the city in 1995 after a bitter 50-day offensive.

Major General Lionel Balagalle, the area army commander, said recently that only 100 rebels are active in the peninsula, carrying out occasional attacks. The main force fighting for an ethnic Tamil homeland has been driven across a broad lagoon into the jungles of the Sri Lankan mainland.

But on Friday, suspected rebels bombed Jaffna City Hall, where Mayor Ponnuthurai Sivapalan was meeting with the city's garrison commander, Brigadier Susantha Mendis the police chief, superintendent Chandra Perera and others. In all, 20 people died.

Just a few months earlier, the previous mayor, Sarojini Yogeswaran, was shot and killed while she met with residents. Both attacks were blamed on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

During a meeting with a group of visiting foreign journalists in his office in August, Sivapalan was quite conscious of the security risk he faced, saying, "Anything can happen here any time.''

Sivapalan said the solution to the ethnic conflict lay in finding a political solution.

Determined to win the trust of Tamils and to overcome their deep-rooted suspicion of Sri Lanka's majority Sinhalese, President Chandrika Kumaratunga has offered a constitutional restructuring to give Tamil areas more autonomy. But the proposal is stalled by the refusal of opposition parties to support the plan, and the rebels reject it outright.

Kumaratunga also ordered the army to restore civilian services in Jaffna as quickly as possible.

People saw signs of recovery when the authorities opened a movie theatre two months ago in the war-ruined city, deprived of power, gasoline and other elements of normalcy for five grim years. Even a war film from India drew crowds, although battle scenes were the last thing many people wanted to see.

During the control of Jaffna by the Tigers, few medicines or other goods penetrated the blockade imposed by the Sri Lankan military.

J M Padmanathan's pharmacy was virtually empty then. Today he is back in business, his shop stacked with drugs and crowded with customers.

"Life is 75 per cent normal here,'' he says.

Schools and colleges have reopened. So have banks and hospitals.

A private airline operates five flights daily between Jaffna and Colombo, the national capital 300 km to the south. Thousands of residents travel to Colombo in cargo ships for business and to meet relatives.

Jaffna used to be an elegant city, the centre of Tamil culture with a renowned university and Tamil-language library. It became a bombed-out victim of the 15-year-old war between the Tamils and the island's majority Sinhalese, a war that so far has killed 54,000 people.

So far, one of the city's seven cinemas has reopened -- a novelty in a town that did not have enough electricity to run a movie projector.

Streets are clogged with bicycles, three-wheel taxis and some vintage Morris Minor cars, but a fleet of 90 buses is providing badly needed transportation. During the years of blockade, the only fuel available was an unstable home-made brew of kerosene and vegetable oil.

Hardships remain. Only five per cent of Jaffna's residents have electricity as the government installs generators to serve 80 per cent of homes. Telephone lines, which were non-existent until recently, reach just 505 houses.

"It is an artificial situation. People are surrounded by the army and there is night curfew daily,'' says M Thangarajah, a textile trader.

Checkpoints are positioned every few hundred yards. Wary of attacks by suicide bombers, soldiers ask bicycle riders to dismount and walk their bikes through.

The city remains cut off by land from southern Sri Lanka. A fierce battle has been raging for 15 months for control of the highway heading south.

It is not clear how deeply support for the rebels still runs among Jaffna's war-weary Tamils. Many say discrimination by the Sinhalese remains pervasive and that they still want independence.

UNI

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