Tsunami flattens rebel base
2005-01-01 13:57
Mullaitivu, Sri Lanka - This town is no stranger to carnage, always bouncing back from the damages suffered during its periodic turns on the front lines of Sri Lanka's two-decade civil war.
A government assault drove out ethnic Tamil rebels in 1990. After six years of siege, the guerrillas took it back in a ferocious, one-day battle that wiped out the army garrison of 1 200 and killed 800 rebels. The Tamils rebuilt, and the rebels' secretive chief, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, even made the town his home.
But Mullaitivu met its match in Asia's tsunami catastrophe.
Sitting on Sri Lanka's northeast coast, the town took the full force of Sunday's mammoth waves - devastation in full evidence on Friday when journalists got one of the first glimpses by outsiders of the damage inside the rebel-controlled part of this island nation off the southern tip of India.
Row upon row of houses were flattened, walls ripped from their foundations. At the Roman Catholic Church, only one wall with its icons and the bell tower still stand.
Worrying about the spread of disease, Tamil soldiers shot dogs scrabbling through the debris and around rotting bodies.
Search teams wearing surgical masks threw logs on top of corpses wherever they found them - under piles of concrete or mounds of garbage and toppled palm trees - and cremated them without ceremony.
The operation's commander, a Tamil fighter who gave his name only as Mohan, said about 2 000 bodies had been recovered, but predicted the toll would be double that by the end of the search. About 18 000 people once lived in the town and the stretch of villages up the coast.
Most survivors, now crowded into makeshift refugee camps, were too dazed to think about the future.
"I can't go near the sea anymore," said Seller Kanthaswami, a fisherman from the nearby village of Kallappadu who lost his wife and teenage daughter. "I don't want to see the sea or hear the sea ever again."
Kallappadu, just a few hundred metres up the shore from Mullaitivu, was levelled. Its mayor, Sathinathan Serthin, estimated half the village's 2 282 people are dead.
Under a cease-fire in effect for nearly three years, the Tamil Tiger rebel movement is in charge of most areas where ethnic Tamils are predominant - including Mullaitivu - running it as a virtual independent state with its own administration, police and courts. The national government, controlled by majority Sinhalese, holds sway on most of the island.
But peace talks broke down a year ago, leading to worsening tensions and fears of renewed fighting, and even a natural disaster hasn't brought the two sides closer. On Tuesday, the rebels conducted separate relief operations in their areas and are even making a separate appeal for aid from donor countries and UN agencies.
- AP