ONE evening in September 2012, over dinner in Colombo, the conversation turned to Munneswaram. This Hindu temple, a little way up the coast from the capital, had been in the news because of its old tradition of sacrificing goats and fowl to the goddess annually. That summer, for the second time in two years, a government minister and his followers, backed by the strident right wing of the Buddhist clergy, were attempting to stop the sacrifice, threatening dire consequences if the temple’s priests carried it out.

‘There’s so much violence in the air,’ one of my dinner companions said with a sigh. ‘Even Munneswaram is a violent debate about violence. Violence about violence.’

That reflexive phrase stuck with me. ‘Violence about violence’. It seemed to capture perfectly the climate of Sri Lanka’s psyche at the time, three years after the end of the civil war. The war was violent enough, through the course of its three-decade lifespan: assassinations, guerrilla bombings, torture, open battle, ambushes, abductions. Then it ended in a climactic crest of further violence, the worst the country had seen, when in the early months of 2009 the Sri Lankan Army shelled Tiger separatists and Tamil civilians alike. The assault rubbed out the Tigers – the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, to give them their full name – but it also killed 40,000 Tamil civilians, according to the United Nations. That number might well be higher, because no independent, reliable agency has been allowed to conduct a census of the casualties. The peace that has followed, not surprisingly, has been a curdled, discomfiting affair.

I thought a lot about violence in 2011 and 2012 when I was living in Colombo and researching my book. I thought about the methods in which it is inflicted, the scars that it can leave, and the ways in which it can twist and bend a person’s mind. I thought about how society carries traces of violence, how deeply these traces are buried, and how they are unearthed in unexpected moments. And I thought about the nature of a community in which nearly everybody carries varying burdens of violence, as perpetrator or as victim, to greater degrees or lesser. In Sri Lanka, some perverse law of conservation of violence seemed to be in play. You stamped it down in one area, and it was transplanted to another place, or surging to break through elsewhere still: manifesting itself in new communal frictions, or in the state’s abuse of power, or in the mysterious disappearances of journalists and activists who did uncomfortable work. The fighting had ended, but violence still rippled through the island. Violence borne out of violence; violence about violence.

 

Among the people to suffer most in this postwar regimen of violence have been journalists, members of my own tribe. In April 2014, the Committee to Protect Journalists published its Impunity Index, featuring ‘countries where journalists are slain and the killers go free.’ Sri Lanka ranked fourth in this index, behind Iraq, Somalia and the Philippines. Journalists are murdered, abducted, beaten and threatened by state security forces; many of them flee into exile overseas, an outcome that is perfectly acceptable to the government. Those reporters who aren’t targeted outright are frequently – and understandably – too cowed to publish or air stories that are damaging to the government. These include stories about its abuses of civil and political rights, and about its brutal treatment of Tamils during the final phase of the war and after. This too is reflexive: violence to cover up news about violence.

The methods used in such intimidation are direct and artless. A journalist will receive phone calls, in which anonymous voices will promise harm if he continues to publish work that is critical of the government. Men who can only be linked to the state’s security apparatus are stationed outside the residences of reporters and editors – not to do anything right away, necessarily, but to lurk in a menacing, meaningful manner. With more senior journalists – such as Lasantha Wickrematunge, the Sinhalese editor of the Sunday Leader, who was killed in January 2009 – the president or his closest colleagues have had no compunction in personally telephoning them to yell threats and abuse. Other, more anonymous threats reached Wickrematunge as well, breathtaking in their lack of subtlety: arson at the shed that housed the paper’s printing press; a funeral wreath delivered to his house; a page of the Sunday Leader ripped out and sent to him, with ‘If you write you will be killed’, smeared in red paint across the newsprint.

 

Physical reprisal is always at hand, often delivered via the infamous white vans. A journalist will be walking on the road, perhaps even in broad daylight, when a white van will glide up to him and stop. A number of men will pluck the journalist into the van. If he is lucky, he will be released after a severe beating, interspersed with warnings; the unlucky are never seen again. Not every journalist’s murder is as public and spectacular as the shooting of Wickrematunge, who was sitting in his car when four men on motorcycles blocked its path. But inevitably, as with Wickrematunge and every other slain journalist, no arrests are made; indeed, no arrests are really even expected. ‘Everyone is asking how four motorbikes could get in that high-security zone and carry out that attack,’ a Colombo journalist told the Guardian when Wickrematunge was killed. ‘You can’t go out to buy two aspirins without being stopped at a checkpoint. This kind of attack couldn’t be done by someone without influence.’ Then the journalist said: ‘Please don’t name me. They’ll come for me next.’

 

One journalist, whom I’ll call Kumara, told me the story of how they came for him. In 2005, a few years before the war ended, Kumara saw how rapidly press freedom – tenuous in Sri Lanka – already was starting to erode further. At the time, he was an official in the Sri Lanka Working Journalists Association, whose members numbered nearly 1,200. Reporters were being harassed in the northeast of the island, where the war was being fought. The offices of one Tamil-owned media house, alleged to be sympathetic to the Tigers, were burned down. ‘Almost every week,’ Kumara said, ‘we would be out on the streets, demonstrating and protesting.’

‘I attacked the lack of media freedom,’ Kumara said. ‘What we were telling the government was: Don’t cut media freedoms, don’t shoot, don’t burn. You can take legal action, no problem. If you think a media group supports the Tigers – no problem, you take legal action. But don’t burn, don’t attack.’ For saying this, Kumara was, inevitably, branded as a Tiger sympathizer.

Kumara wrote about touchy subjects: corruption, defence contracts, and finally the shelling of the Tamil civilians towards the end of the war. He had pictures and videos, emailed to him by the reporters who managed to source them from the war zone, and he showed them around, to other journalists and to human rights organizations. In gatherings in Colombo, he spoke openly about the army’s actions. When Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tiger chief, was finally killed in May 2009, signifying the end of the war, Kumara saw the Sinhalese of Colombo parade through the city’s streets, holding the Sri Lankan flag aloft. He understood the jubilation, but he couldn’t forget what had come before it. Then a government controlled newspaper published photos of Kumara and two of his peers. ‘Our names were in big fonts, and they called us Tiger supporters.’

 

On the evening of June 1, Kumara signed out of his office at 4:30 p.m. and took a bus home. He wasn’t living in his own house at this time; the Sri Lanka Press Institute had provided him a safe house, after his residence was visited late one night by two unmarked vehicles, whose occupants tried to force open his locked door. Kumara took the Bus No. 138, as he always did, and then changed to another headed in the direction of his house. He hopped off a couple of kilometres before his stop and went into a sweet shop to buy his 12-year-old daughter some treats. Then he began walking the rest of the way home.

‘The abduction happened in front of the safe house,’ Kumara said. ‘This is important. It means they knew exactly where the safe house was!’ He was pulled into a white van and pressed to the floor, where the middle and back rows of seats would ordinarily have been. He thought there were six of them: two in the front, including the driver; two who pulled him in; and two more who got out and pushed him into the van from behind. They swiftly tied Kumara’s hands and feet, and they blindfolded him. The van drove off.

At this point, Kumara brought out an oblong envelope, filled with X-rays. They were of his left leg, of the ankle and his foot. ‘You can see six bolts and two plates,’ Kumara said, pointing. This was where the men hit him, with a wooden stave – repeatedly, on the same spot, to cause as much pain as possible. ‘They only gave me one warning in the van, when they were hitting me,’ he said. ‘Don’t talk against the government.’ Apart from these pronouncements, there was utter silence in the van. They struck his fingers as well – a symbolic beating, assaulting the very instruments that a writer uses. They snipped off parts of his beard and hair and stuffed them into his mouth.

The van drove for 10 or 15 kilometres, Kumara thinks, while his lesson was being administered. He was finally dropped off, with one last warning: ‘Don’t speak against the government. Don’t organize demonstrations. Don’t write. If you write any more, you’ll be shot dead.’ The van door opened, and Kumara was shoved out, his hands still tied behind his back, his leg bleeding and shattered. When he managed to look around, he noticed that he was near the Sri Lankan Parliament. ‘That was a high security zone,’ he said. ‘After 5:30 in the evening, nearly every vehicle was checked at police barriers, and many passengers had to get off for body checks. But this van went all the way. My question is: How did the van make it through that entire zone without being checked?’ The only way, he implied, was if the van itself was known to belong to some shadowy arm of the government.

Kumara slipped his X-rays back into their sleeve. I noticed his left leg again, a welter of angry scars and surgical marks. He still limped heavily. He no longer lived in Sri Lanka; I met him in a western country where he had sought asylum. His days as a journalist seemed to be behind him; he now worked as a member of a cleaning crew. His life had fallen entirely apart.

 

Kumara’s story exemplifies the lack of trust in Sri Lanka’s polity today. Conversations take place outdoors, not over the phone. People look over their shoulders before they talk about the government or about Mahinda Rajapaksa. The media, for the large part, tiptoes with caution around political or religious news. Phones are tapped; journalists are watched. In the north and the northeast, the army cannot stop viewing the Tamil community with suspicion. A few months ago – and in anticipation of the presidential elections in January – a new government directive went into effect, requiring foreigners to be cleared in advance before travelling to the Tamil dominated north. The intention, clearly, is to keep journalists, activists and human rights workers from learning about the state’s treatment of its largest minority. Such wariness would be noticeable anywhere, but in Sri Lanka, otherwise so gregarious and warm, it sticks out like a particularly sore thumb.

 

I am not alone, I think, in feeling that Rajapaksa missed a trick in 2009. Ideally, of course, the army would have won the war without resorting to shelling civilians. But even after stories of this shelling emerged – and they emerged even as it was going on – there was a window in which Rajapaksa might have played the role of benevolent peacemaker. The war had run a bloody course for nearly three decades, and the island was fatigued with the stress of fighting itself. From my interactions with Tamils in the north, I sensed widespread – although by no means unanimous – opinion that they were eager to get on with just the simple business of living their lives, even under Rajapaksa’s rule. There was undoubted relief that the fighting had ended, and that a reconstruction of the war-torn areas – and of the country’s soul, even – could now begin. Rajapaksa could even have used his considerable control over parliament to encourage the sort of devolution of powers to provinces that Tamils had long sought, and that he himself had once championed.

But perhaps these expectations could never truly have been fulfilled. For starters, to effect any sort of true reconciliation, Rajapaksa would have had to promise an inquiry into the army’s conduct during the war – a process that may well have implicated his brother and even himself. Then too, Rajapaksa’s political reliance upon, and partnership with, the right wing of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism would have made it difficult for him to display any benevolence towards the Tamils. In these two key ways, the president had painted himself into a corner, and it was from that corner that he had to map out his postwar strategy.

It is this tension thus set up at the highest levels of the Sri Lankan government that has manifested itself in the violence and wariness seen in the country today. Rajapaksa will now go into his presidential election not just as the president who ended the war but also as the president who emboldened the Buddhist right. In the last three years, outfits such as the Boddu Bala Sena and the Sinhala Rawaya have spewed vitriol about the island’s minorities – its Muslims, in particular – and have resorted on a number of occasions to outright thuggery. The more extreme members of the Buddhist clergy are outlining theories of how Sri Lanka ought to be a ‘pure’ Buddhist nation – a haven for the faith, as was allegedly ordained by the Buddha himself in his final days. The state has made no serious attempt to check these trends, which has only exacerbated the problem. Nearly six years after the end of its civil war, therefore, Sri Lanka finds its communities yet again aligning themselves in opposition to each other, feeling injured and beleaguered or dominating and contemptuous. Only a rash prophet would forecast another war. But even without open fighting, Sri Lanka now has plenty of strife on its hands.

 

* Samanth Subramanian is the author of This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War, Penguin Books India, 2014.