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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

In hard-hit Sri Lanka, wartime politics complicate relief efforts

Casey Johnson Special to The Spokesman-Review

TIRRUKKOVIL, Sri Lanka – The members of the sports club are a day behind schedule. But after a tsunami, the recent torrential rains are nothing.

So this group of teachers and cola distributors turned humanitarians decides to push south down the flooded eastern coast of Sri Lanka with a convoy of relief aid.

It is Sunday, and we are heading to the district of Ampara and the coastal town of Tirrukkovil, more than 60 miles from the starting point of Batticaloa. Raman Muralirajan, an auto parts dealer and the reluctant captain of this team of sports club members, recently spent four days removing corpses from the beaches of Batticaloa. When asked about the situation in Ampara, Muralirajan shakes his head, saying only, “Ampara is bad.”

The Sri Lankan death toll has now passed 30,000. Of those, 10,436 have died in Ampara alone. Here, not just families but entire family trees have been cut down. But the flooding, poor infrastructure and politics mean that 183,000 refugees in the country’s hardest-hit region are receiving the least attention.

We load a truck with rice, milk powder and Kotex and head south from Batticaloa through the swamped towns of Thetativvu, Cheddipalayam and Kottankudil.

Cemeteries with newly dug graves and small white flags for headstones line the road. In this part of Sri Lanka, the white flag has become an emblem not of surrender, but loss. These torn patches of plastic and cloth hang from porches and store fronts and flap from the antennae of automobiles.

Before the worst tragedy in Sri Lanka’s history, the trip to Tirrukkovil would have taken three hours. But a series of washed-out bridges along the coast forces us inland along a fractured tarmac lined by flooded rice paddies, making the trip much longer.

At one point the road dives into a recently formed lake. At the “shore” of the lake, a tractor waits to fish out relief vehicles. Refugees wade through the chest-high water with babies held aloft, heading for higher ground.

More than by floodwaters, however, the landscape of Ampara has been separated by war. An armed pair of 12-year-old boys guarding a bridge informs our convoy that we have entered the territory of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a separatist group that has been fighting a civil war with the government since 1983.

Marked by suicide bombings and the use of child soldiers, the LTTE’s two-decade struggle for a separate Tamil state in the North and East has divided the region and exhausted its inhabitants. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, a fragile two-year cease-fire appeared ready to crumble.

Now the fight is over control of relief aid. In Tirrukkovil, we are asked to turn our load of supplies over to the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization, an LTTE-sponsored organization with government backing that has taken control of relief work in the area. But locals and one government official allege that TRO aid is being funneled only to selected camps.

A tense standoff with the young guards ensues. I climb down from the back of the truck, flash a press pass and snap a few photos. We proceed.

At noon we reach Mandanai camp. Here I meet Jeyapalan, a second-year college student who, along with five fellow undergrads on holiday break, is responsible for 2,500 refugees sleeping in the mud. As he cleans the wound of a 3-year-old girl with rainwater, he explains that the doctor hasn’t come in three days. Asked if he has any antibiotics, he hands me two tubes of toothpaste.

We unload the rice, milk powder and Kotex. For the first time in 36 hours the rain stops, and the sports club heads back to Batticaloa.

This time for medicine.