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December the month of advent transformed month of Death

Isn’t she aware of the sigh of relief that we experienced when the occupying military was driven away by our children, the freedom fighters and the jubilation we had when we came back to wet our feet in the waters our Mother sea splashed on seeing us again, offering her sea bed for us to eke out an existence. Hasn’t our Mother Sea seen the lovely union of my family and several others with the kids kicking around in the silvery sand that laces her blue overall, while we elders mend our nets that serve as the bonding umbilical cord between her and us the fisher folk?

How on earth can our Mother take away my lovely kids and their father and leave me alone to lead this life of misery?”

This is the lamentation of a mother in Mullaittivu who lost her husband and three kids, leaving two more kids to take care of. Her plight is manifold like hundreds of others who have lost their breadwinners and children in the tidal upsurge that hit the northeast shore. Highly traumatised on the one hand due to the sudden demise of beloved ones and to face the stark reality of life with the dependents, having no shelter to call it their own and forced to live in temporary shelters and on the other hand, waiting for as long as an year now with the hope that the much spoken rehabilitation, reconstruction and resettlement would bring them back to their feet, this is a people that need immediate redemption.

The plight of these people speaks volumes about man’s inhumanity to man. Ironically though, Mother Nature did provide an opportunity for those in the helm of administration in this island to weave into the splintered political fabric fine threads of mutual understanding in adversity, but the much needed attitudinal change did not occur. The government of Sri Lanka fell prey to the inhuman machinations of extremist coalition partners and imprisoned the internationally acclaimed proposal for a Joint Mechanism for post tsunami management into a rigid constitutional paradigm through a Supreme Court injunction.

Those who have survived say that had the immediate response from the LTTE fighters mobilised to do rescue and relief operations and the timely assistance rendered by the TRO in providing food, temporary shelters and medical care coupled with the overwhelming international response been allowed to continue backed by the proposed P-TOMS, the victims would have by now permanently resettled. Are these people expected to wait for a political resolution preceded by institutionalising an interim administration to bring about recovery without any further delay? The question that looms large in the Tamil psyche today is what type of naivety it is to expect justice and fair play in resolving the decade old political crisis from a government that adamantly refuses to accommodate totally humanitarian situations, exiting itself out of the yoke of communal majoritarianism.

26 December 2005

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