WAR (What Is It Good For?)

Indeed, war: what is it good for? Rather than sit around and ponder the question I decided it was time to hop into Sri Lanka's recovering post-war areas and find out.

It being a mere year and a half since Sri Lanka's 26-year civil war came to an end, with the formidable rebel army known as the Liberation Tigers Of Tamil Eelam [a.k.a the Tamil Tigers] utterly crushed at last, access to some of the areas in which the war raged is still carefully controlled. For foreigners, some parts are completely off limits, but fortunately it was possible for me to fly over the devastated region known as the Vanni (which I had earlier been denied entry to) and land upon the Jaffna Peninsula, the extreme northern part of the island and the heart of Tamil Sri Lanka.

The flight was certainly memorable in its own way, since I had no choice but to travel on a plane operated by the Sri Lankan air force. It was a rather strange affair. Though I have been to many airports, Colombo's domestic airport at Rathmalana was the first one I've visited where the tarmac was surrounded by manned pillboxes. After much to-do about security in the pre-dawn hours, me and the few other passengers were loaded onto a small and silly old twin-propeller aircraft with the colorful roundel of the Sri Lankan Air Face painted on its side. Clearly, they had pulled this plane out of God knows what depot and refurbished it on the inside for taking civilian passengers, with a hilarious attempt at making it comfortable by adding quite good cushions while utterly neglecting the total absence of legroom that owed to the plane's tiny dimensions. It was a surprisingly slow and tedious flight as the plane got whisked about in every gust of wind and we proceeded painfully slowly over the sparsely-populated scrub of northwestern Sri Lanka. Finally I saw what I was looking for as the unmistakable form of the Jaffna Lagoon crept into view and the plane began to descend in a dramatic swoop over the Jaffna Peninsula. I could see a flat and densely-settled swathe of countryside, washed here and there with the strange glistening forms of the many inlets of the lagoon. Getting lower, we could inspect individual buildings and began to notice the signs of war: roofless farmhouses getting swallowed by scrub, country temples with tin sheets hastily tacked over gaping holes in the tile roofs, entire village streets abandoned to silent obscurity.

We landed on the north coast of the peninsula, at Sri Lanka Air Force Base Palali. On our final approach we could see that the entire area around the airbase was devastated and militarized for miles in each direction, with successive layers of bunkers, earthworks, and and other defensive emplacements engulfing a wide perimeter inside which whole villages had been swallowed by the contingencies of war. We touched down and waited for the Air Force to do whatever it was they needed to do, and while my fellow-passengers (a trio of menopausal German ladies) made a big fuss being strangely impressed by the soldiers, I sat around and waited for the Air Force to provide the promised bus escort to Jaffna. It came, and not only did we get an Air Force bus driver, but also a baggage handler, a liaison officer, and a beret-wearing soldier who hung out the door pointing an assault rifle at everything we passed. For quite a while we drove through the airbase's perimeter, one of the "high security zones" imposed by the military upon the people. Within the perimeter we passed through a village, every house devastated by bombs and artillery, and many of them bearing facades pocked with bullet holes from nasty close-up fighting. Outside the village, a trio of Sri Lankan soldiers in full blast gear were clustered around a spot in the fields, near a vehicle marked "De-Mining Team". As we drove further from the airbase and closer to the city, the devastation became less total and the familiar bustle of life in South Asian towns resumed, though through the thickets and at intervals along the road there was still almost always the shell of a ruined household visible.

My first task after arriving in Jaffna city was, of course, finding a hotel. These were not altogether easy to come by. I slung on my pack and began the long march through the heat to an area where accommodation was rumored to be found. Along the way I began to get a feel for the Jaffna environment. It is a town wholly unlike anywhere else in Sri Lanka, and as anyone could tell you it resembles more a small city of far southern India than it does any community on the island of Ceylon. Where the average Sinhalese town consists of a single, traffic-choked highway and an unrelenting string of buses and rickshaws passing through the one, ugly, cramped modern bazaar Jaffna was instead a proper grid of mostly quiet city streets, used mostly by maniacal throngs of bicyclists wearing silent expressions of serene calm interrupted by the jingling of bells. What motorized traffic there was could be detected from some distance since the drivers of Jaffna conform to the Indian courtesy of honking at anything and everything that comes within 20 feet of suffering a collision. I trudged up the main artery out of town, noticing mostly that it was reassuringly boring, save for the occasional miniature jungle growing on the plots of ruined homes. Approximately ever other intersection had a detachment of soldiers watching it from small guardhouses or bunkers, their ever-vigilant eyes and assault rifles guaranteeing the security of strategically vital grocery stalls. Near more important facilities, heavy fortifications could be seen down unlikely alleyways and canals, with gun-laden watchtowers keeping vigil on foul, barely-used waterways, and numerous layers of barbed wire covered in signs warning of landmines within the perimeter.

One of the odd things about Jaffna is that though it is the heart of Sri Lanka's Hindu area, there is an enormous Christian presence in town. I don't presume to comment on the percentage of people following the Christian faith, because I don't know, but I can tell you that Jaffna is chock-full of enormous colonial churches and seminaries. I walked into the city's main cathedral, a massive structure on the edge of town, and was greeted by the local Catholic bishop, who had much to say about the history of the nearby seminary, and then by the guests arriving early to a wedding. A young man in a blazer and a bright purple shirt and flawlessly gel-spiked hair with blingy earrings in each ear approached me. "Damn," I thought, "this fellow looks something straight out of a British television miniseries...". He reached me and shook my hand. "Hello, I'm David. I'm from East London." CALLED IT. Everyone in Jaffna has relatives all over the world, thanks to the Tamil diaspora that was provoked by such things as the bombings and that one time when the Tamil Tigers forced everybody in Jaffna to abandon their homes... Talk to anyone and odds are good they'll say "Oh, my auntie lives in Toronto... I worked in Iraq before the war (their one I mean, ha ha!)... We're actually from Bristol... I am doing maintenance in Abu Dhabi..." David's relatives came up to tell him he was needed for some aspect of the wedding preparations, so he excused himself, telling me that I "seemed like a good bloke, best of luck!"

Closer in to town I found myself in the old colonial-era streets of Jaffna. It is a charming area, sort of like the neighborhood within Galle's fort, a throwback of modest new buildings mixed in with a lot of charmingly crumbling Dutch-period manors and merchant firms, without the sickly preservative feel layered on by Galle's tourism industry. Where in Galle there would be an old villa touched up and aesthetically sanitized into a high-class cafe, in Jaffna there is an old villa in authentic (if slightly dilapidated) residential condition, albeit possibly with an artillery hole in the kitchen ceiling. I went past yet more grand churches and an increasing number of ever-more devastated homes as I drew closer to the city center, and almost by accident plunged myself into Jaffna's grim but bustling public market. This is the sort of place where despite the fact that the upper floors are blasted open to the sky and the crumbling stairways up are blocked by crude barriers of rusting shopping carts, the dark and dirty ground floor is a thriving place of business where the locals happily stroll about buying vegetables and perfuming themselves in the poorly-ventilated garage-like area where dozens of stallholders display their impressive variety of stinking fish, squids, crabs, and chunks of shark. Wholesalers pack into the dark corners with great heaps of dead aquatic creatures on the floor, crying their offers to the stallholders with the bizarre squawks and screams that only an Indian-cultured man with unlikely merchandise can produce; "cuttlefishcuttlefishCUTTLEFISH CUTTLEFiiiiiaasshhhh!!! C-C-C-CUTTLEFEEEESSHHHH CUUARRRQQQQKKK ZIIYEAACKKKKKACUTTLEFISH HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY CUTTLEMOTHERFUCKINGFISH!!!!!"

Speaking of horrible smells, perhaps the single most Indian thing about Jaffna is the overpowering stench of stagnant water in litter-strewn, perpetually blocked drains. I will say this, however: unlike most cities in India, Jaffna has an excuse for a bit of poor sewage here and there, seeing that it has spent a notable portion of the past few decades under siege. The Sri Lankan Army, the Tamil Tigers, and the Indian Army (now there was an episode -don't even ask) all had their turns blasting the municipal infrastructure to hell. On the other hand cities in India just fucking smell.

I finally wandered through the old town to the edge of the lagoon, and found that I could not see the lagoon. Almost the entire coastline hereabouts has been fenced off in layers of barbed wire and all-concealing traditional palm leaf fences, presumably to thwart amphibious Tiger raids from their bases on the southern side of the lagoon. Even the local fishing jetty is a closely-monitored area, with its own little detachment of soldiers encamped in their diminutive fortress to keep this access point sealed. Not far from here I saw a wide empty field of some acres, and was puzzled why there should be unused land so close to the city center. Then when I drew closer I saw that the field was pockmarked with low ruins, and the rest of it covered in small chunks of rubble. I realized I was looking at the part of town on the approach to the fort that got the worst of it, being utterly and completely flattened by Air Force bombings and the raging battles that surrounded the fort itself. On one end of the field were the 'remains' of the Jaffna Town Hall, a single statue alone in the field, with bullet holes here and there and its entire head blown right off, leaving a gruesome steel spine jutting up to highlight the decapitation. Just beyond was the large but now almost hidden Jaffna Fort, a large and powerful Dutch "star fort", which finally got put to use in combat, suffering repeated dogged defenses and exchanges of control. Its centuries-old brick bulwarks seem to have done surprisingly well in the face of modern weapons, but the toll of many battles shows where artillery has blasted away pieces of the ramparts and the defenders of the fort have allowed a wild tangle of vegetation to grow around, making their layered defenses of wire, mines, and machine gun nests all the more unapproachable.

After having stumbled across so much, I almost forgot I hadn't yet visited any of the attractions which my vaunted Ministry of Defense travel clearance said I had ostensibly come to see. There are a number of medium-sized Hindu temples in town, and -surprise!- they were mostly like any other medium-sized Hindu temple from the south of India, but I saw that coming. There is at least a distinctively north Sri Lankan variation on the old temple design, which uses picturesque sloped tile roofs over the shrines, and also pleasingly incorporates Portuguese-style bell towers flanking the South Indian gopuram pyramidal gate tower. After a couple of these mildly interesting mediocrities I schlepped out to the suburbs to what was once the sacred village of Nallur to visit the renowned Nallur Kandaswamy temple, the largest and most extravagant place of Hindu worship in Sri Lanka. As with all 'large' Sri Lankan things, this term was revealed to be relative. Jaffna's great temple is nowhere near as impressive as the major shrines of Tamil Nadu just across the strait, though would fit in nicely with the temples there of secondary fame. That being said, it was worth a visit. I has a nice little gopuram-and-bell-towers facade and the hints of tile roof beyond, as well as a considerable red-striped perimeter wall where a huge south-facing gopuram is either being constructed or repaired (all over the Jaffna area, the end of the war is heralding a burst of temple expansion and restoration that was wisely put on hold while there was a good chance of the edifices just being bombed again). Within, the traditional Hindu layout includes an enchantingly decorated passage leading to the shrine of the god, with numerous interesting little shrines surrounding it. Up in the ceiling, the strange colonial influence manifests itself in the forms of chandeliers and hanging red drapery, which contrast oddly with the undulating piles of sand like a miniature desert that surround the dry pit which would be the temple's sacred tank. Following local tradition, men must take off their shirts to enter, which was a blessing in the sweaty heat, though the paleness of my skin beneath (in the Subcontinent it is almost always wildly inappropriate to take your shirt off) contrasting with the much darker skin of my arms and face drew a lot of odd looks from the assembled worshipers and the platoon of soldiers guarding the sandy square outside the gate. Thanks to hyper-exaggerated Indian inhibitions about the exposure of flesh, I now have a farmer's tan par excellence.

I returned to my part of the city via a road known locally as "NGO City." Its sides were lined with the offices and staff houses of numerous UN bodies, Nordic refugee agencies, and other well-wishing groups. Nearly all of these had a sign on its front gate depicting an AK-47 or other assault rifle inside a big red "NO" circle. I must admit, I really wanted to steal one, and I would have if they weren't on the front of heavily-guarded UN enclaves. Anyways, I'm returning home to the Washington DC area soon, and if I put it up in my yard it would just be mistaken for a commentary on gun control laws, and I would wake up one morning to find my sign missing and my lawn covered in tea bags and flyers depicting Barack Obama in a Hitler mustache and a turban.

So I'd seen Jaffna and was soon ready to head off into the surrounding countryside, but something nagged me. I still hadn't discovered what, if anything, is war good for?

Lacking any particular evidence of laudable benefits, I came close to allowing that the only positive thing it produces is iconic, feisty, and melodious songs with direct and unforgettable lyrics about the worthlessness of armed confli... wait. Hold on. No. I'm thinking of that song by Edwin Starr. I just remembered that Sri Lankan protest music takes the form of MIA, so I'm going to have to revise my answer to

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING