“As if by unspoken agreement, the rebels never attacked the holidaymakers. Europeans sipped coconut juice and stared out at the horizon of the ocean, unaware that just an hour’s flight to the north people were dying in First World War-style trench warfare.”

These lines are not from a classic novel, but the reality that was Sri Lanka in 2009. A paradise for tourists, this tropical island nation to the South of India became a hell for its Tamil minority population as decades of civil war between the government and guerillas of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) reached its bloody climax.
How many lives were lost nobody knows, as neither the Sri Lankan government nor the Army seem to have the exact figure of casualty. Not to forget the missing civilians. Estimates suggest anywhere from 26,000 to 146,679 people have been presumed dead, and at the end of the war between 282,380 and 289,915 Tamil survivors were counted. Three years after the war, Sri Lanka is, perhaps, still counting its dead.
Which is why internationally acclaimed journalist Frances Harrison’s new book, Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Hidden War, assumes relevance. While the world looked, or “chose” to look, the other way, Sri Lanka’s Tamils — civilians and rebels alike — were attacked for five months by their own government.
The author was recently in the capital to promote her book. Excerpts from an interview with Moushumi Sharma:

Q: You mention in your book that Tamil survivors trusted you with their most vulnerable. Having said that, how difficult was it to make them relive their trauma? For example, you mention the “skeletal lady” who physically shook in her chair while recounting how her 16-year-old nephew was forcibly recruited by the Tigers. Was it worth making these survivors recount their moments of pain?
A: Most survivors feel guilty to be alive. They rationalise it by deducing they were saved in order to tell the world what happened. There is this huge internal struggle between the urge to bear witness and personal fear for themselves and their extended families back in Sri Lanka. I am not sure if it will help them personally — rather it puts them at risk — but it’s a risk they are willing to take for the sake of those who didn’t make it.

Q: You first visited the Tigers in 2002 as a BBC correspondent. Tell us a little about your experience.
A: It was like another country just six hours drive from the capital Colombo — with its own police, courts, border controls and administration. The poverty was shocking compared to government-controlled areas such as Vavuniya just down the road. Based in Colombo I reported on the LTTE but for the first year I didn’t have any direct contact with the Tigers. I first went to see them in January 2002. The contact was a learning curve for us and them. They hadn’t been exposed to the international media much and sometimes they got upset with the stories I did on suicide bombing and refused to engage with me for months on end.

Q: You say in your book that thousands of Tamils took up arms to fight for a Tamil homeland because they no longer “felt safe” living with the majority Sinhalese community. They suffered physical torture and discrimination. To that end, was the fight of the Tamil rebels justified?
A: Having been brought up in a safe and comfortable environment I find it hard to make the imaginative leap to understand the impulse to take up arms and fight back. I haven’t been pushed to that level of desperation so I am not sure I can judge it. However, it’s clear now that Tamils have tried both the democratic process and armed struggle and neither has delivered the results they wanted. They need to rethink their approach.

Q: Has the situation improved three years after the war?
A: The guns are silent, of course, but there is prevailing fear and humiliation, physical insecurity, lack of rule of law, militarisation and Sinhalisation in the north and absolutely no devolution of power to minorities. Many Tamils say that with the LTTE there was at least a counterbalance to the Sri Lankan Army. Now one side has all the power. The government of Sri Lanka is not any more willing to give Tamils their rights even without the LTTE being in the equation.

Q: The international community sided with the Sri Lankan government. You call this a “conscious” decision. Why?
A: Obviously doing nothing is also taking a side in a war like this. In the post-9/11 world the LTTE was proscribed widely around the world as a terrorist group — I think that swayed the argument completely. The global war on terror influenced the way senior UN diplomats looked at the ground situation — they assumed the “terrorists” must be responsible for all the war crimes and struggled to assimilate the information they received from their own staff, which actually pointed to the Sri Lankan Army as being responsible for the bulk of killings in the safe zones set up for civilians.

Q: You see the Tigers’ dream of a Tamil homeland as now impractical because concentrations of Tamil populations are being diluted. Should the government be prepared for the possibility of the emergence of another LTTE-like outfit fighting for the Tamil cause?
A: If it is not careful the Sri Lankan government will end up once again being the best recruiting agent for the LTTE or its successors. Continuing to deny people the right to mourn or to preserve their culture or their political rights is only aggravating already powerful feelings. Sooner or later that could fuel the cycle of revenge.