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Military Alert
My very first morning in Sri Lanka this summer, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Sri Lankan army, Parami Kulatunga, was assassinated by a suicide bomber just a few miles from where I was having breakfast. Eleven days earlier, 64 passengers on a bus, many of them civilians, died when someone exploded a mine underneath their vehicle. Six local sightseers had been killed (apparently by separatist guerrillas) in a national park, and security-forces personnel were under investigation after the shooting of five students in Trincomalee. My first weekend in Sri Lanka, a journalist was gunned down 5 km from where I was watching the World Cup.
The whole central area of Colombo, known as Fort, might better be known as Fortified, or even Fortress. Soldiers check cars every few meters, and HIGH SECURITY ZONE signs ring the major hotels. Along Galle Face Green, the idyllic seaside promenade where children ride ponies and lovers canoodle under parasols, men sell fake beards and families enjoy picnics, there are nine kites in the air one quiet evening—and 21 armed soldiers in the space of a block. Helicopters swoop and circle overhead.
Sri Lanka today is a whole nation all but holding its breath, poised for the next calamity. And each tightening of security only brings, inevitably, a heightening of insecurity. The day after the killing of Kulatunga, apparently by the secessionist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, someone makes a phone call to say that a school will be the next target. Instantly parents across the island race to classrooms, sometimes bearing sticks and swords, to bring their children back to safety. A medical-sales representative leaves a bag of supplies on the floor, and police rush in to "defuse" it.
To read Marco Polo today on Sri Lanka is, therefore, an exercise in dark ironies. "The people of this island are no soldiers," he wrote, "but on the contrary are abject and timid creatures. When they need soldiers they bring in Mahometans from other countries." In 1956, eight years after independence from Britain, a hard-line government declared that Sinhala would be the national language. Then, in 1972, leafy Ceylon was turned into the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. Ever since, the largely Hindu Tamils who constitute almost 20% of the population, mostly in the north and east, have felt excluded. In the 23 years since the Tigers began violently agitating for an independent homeland, more than 60,000 people have lost their lives in the war and 750,000 have been displaced. An official cease-fire was achieved in 2002, but as soon as the more nationalistic Mahinda Rajapakse became President last November, the Tigers stepped up their attacks again and more than 700 have been killed this year in what is war in all but name.
For Polo, Seilan was "for its size, better circumstanced than any island in the world." Yet Sri Lanka today could hardly be more ill-starred, its places of worship more full of armed fighters than of monks. Anuradhapura, home to a bo tree said to have come from the tree under which the Buddha found enlightenment—and the oldest historically documented tree on the planet—is home now to army encampments, prostitutes, war profiteers and Artillery Regiment parades. When I went to see the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, home to Singhalese Buddhism's most sacred relic (the Buddha's tooth, it's said), alarms began sounding and I was hustled out into the street where anxious uniformed men with walkie-talkies were using local buses to block off the main road.
It's only right, perhaps, that Polo described the Buddha as having died on Adam's Peak, and Adam as being buried there.
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