M.R. NARAYAN SWAMY reviews a new book that explores Sri Lanka's continuing turmoil

0utrighr war may have ended i n Sri Lanka bur an unbroken arc of violence stretching from the confUcr has enveloped the is land nation.

President Mabinda Rajapaksa and his brothers preside, "over the peace in much the same way they had presided over the war, with arrogance and power", says journalist ru:id author of This Divided Island: Sto1ies fro111 the S,i Lankan War, Samanth Subramanian, in what is undoubtedly one of the ii.nest books ro come our in post-LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) Sri Lanka.

Samam:h spent months in Sri Lanka after the Tamil Tigers were wiped out in 2009. He travelled extensively and met innumerable people affected one way or the other by the war, including Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims He encountered those who waged the war and t hose who were its victims.

"Anger still ripped through the island. The state sri.lJ pummeled its society to submit before its powers Sri Lanka had forgotten any other way to live".

This i s a powerful book Ir is a strong indictment against those who preside over S ri Lanka today, seemingly willing to li,7e in harmony with the Tamils bm unable or Lmwilling to control the militarise Sinhalese nationalism that cares nothing for Tan1ils or even l',,[uslim s.

lt doesn't matter that these two communities were themselves the greatest victims of the LTIE's multiple acts of terror. The fact that d1ey are not Sinhalese is what matters. This does not mean d1at all Sinhalese are happy with the Rajapaksas; indeed, many Sinhalese journalists and rights activists have fled abroad or ' disappeared' after voicing dissent.

Sarnanth v isited an army-built war museum in the fo rm er Tiger zone, the heart of Tamil coun try, that had s ignboa rds only in English and Sinhalese!

"Even as the government gloried in winning a war chat bro ught Tamils back imo its fold, it held chem ar arm's length H ow cou ld any Tamil - even a Tamil who believed full y ia the no tion of a whole Sri La.nlrn - not chafe at being doub ly excluded from dus muse um, first by physical barriers and then b y the barriers of lan guage?" ln the new Sri Lanka, says Samanth, demolition i s a v ital too l of narioo. building. Everything nor to the liking of the victorious Sinhalese is clone away wim including constitutional reforms,

LTIE cemeteries, its leader V. Prabhakaran's family home in Jaffna, a Hindu 11111ft attached to a :Murugao temple in Batticaloa, even graves of Sufi saints who preached peace.

At the same rime, everything is being re- engineered to fit the new mindset.

"The image of d1e president; road signs and road shrines; the past itself. The very landscape o f the c o untry was being altered , as if Sri Lanka could be tra n sfor med into its intended future".

Samanth speaks about new Buddhist st11pas coming up in warshattered towns: "Their splendid milky finish in sore contrast to the ruin around them".

Some Buddha statues sit just outside the wall s of sprawling arm y camps in Sri Lanka's north and east, the former war theatre making " it difficult to tell who was watching over whom".

Like most Sri Lanka watchers, Samanth has no sympathy for d1e n ow vanquis hed Tigers. As he weaves in and weaves out of the LITE story along the gripping narrative , the author is clear that the same Tamils who o nce believed in the Tigers later developed fear and revul s ion for the rebel s

"The hisrory of the Tigers struggle for Eelam is less a succession of political manoeuvres than a parade of slaughter".

He documents the cruelty Prabhakaran and bis men heaped o n their own commU1uty: the way they abducted young Tamil boys and girls without merc y to fight a war d1ey waged , how Tiger leaders chose to surrender to secLtricy forces after making others bite d1e cyanide capsule, and h ow Tamils were killed simply because they did not agree w holly with the LTTE.

The book is a cold-blooded surgery of a Sri Lanka that was expected to reconcile with itself afte r a quarter century of etlu_uc strife, but bas n ot

"Sri Lanka was a country pretending that it had been su ddenly scrubbed clean of vio lence. But it wasn't, o f cot1rse B y so me fundamental law governing the conservation of violence, it was now erupting outs.ide the battlefield, in strange and unpredictable ways".

Anyone inte rested in Sri Lanka, its past, present and future, must read this book.