Today is Heroes Day.
Today is the Tamil Tigers' annual celebration of their fallen comrades; and the birthday of their leader Prabhakaran. Today Prabhakaran will make his usual live video address from his bunker somewhere in the Tiger-run territory in the North of Sri Lanka.
Bloomberg: Sri Lankan Rebel Chief to Rally Tamil Support in Annual Speech
Velupillai Prabhakaran will use his speech as a "clarion call to supporters both in Sri Lanka and overseas," said Amantha Perera, a defense columnist for the Colombo-based Sunday Leader newspaper. "He’s likely to talk of strategic moves by the Tigers, and to promise battlefield successes."
Today is also the day that the Sri Lankan military will most likely choose to launch their final assault and take the Tiger capital of Kilinochchi.
The Guardian: Sri Lankan troops 'to capture' Tamil Tiger headquarters
"There is fierce fighting going on but the fall of Kilinochchi is imminent," the government's defence spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella told reporters in Colombo.
The "imminent" fall of the rebel base comes after a series of strategic reverses for the LTTE, who have been fighting for a separate homeland for island's 3 million Tamils for 25 years. In the last two weeks, the army seized the entire western coast from the rebels for the first time since 1993.
No-one expects the Tigers to let this go unpunished. Today the streets of Colombo are lined with even more military than usual, fingers resting on trigger guards, watchful.
Today may well pass without any kind of incident. People have learned from bitter experience that attacks usually come when you least expect them. I guess this is the point of terrorism, to keep you looking over your shoulder all of the time. And in Sri Lanka it has worked. The fear has been internalized here to the point where people don't really remember that they may have felt differently once; that they may have smiled more, or been kinder to their neighbors.
In the majority ethnic Sinhalese community, fear of the LTTE has been nurtured and manipulated to the point where all Tamils are considered suspects on the basis of their ethnicity. In the North, civilians fleeing the fighting have been held in refugee camps with strict curfews and restrictions on their movement. Outside the capital, Tamils have to obtain police permits to travel.
It's no better in Colombo: if you're a Tamil who has moved to the capital from the North within the last five years, you are now forced to register with the authorities. Cordon-and-search operations have been carried out in Tamil areas, and anyone found to be without the correct paperwork arrested. In June 2007, before the Supreme Court intervened on their behalf, hundreds of Tamils were rounded up and evicted from the capital. Tamils will not travel on the streets after dark in case they get tangled up with police or security forces who have had a bad day. They will joke darkly about the police station in the Tamil suburb of Wellawatta being a "magic building" because you can go into it and never come out.
In September the Sri Lankan Government kicked out the UN and all of the aid agencies from the North, leaving more than 300,000 Tamil civilians displaced by the conflict relying on Government convoys for food, and possibly without shelter. No journalists or agencies have been allowed in to the area to verify the situation. The restrictions on aid are reportedly worse than in Darfur.
The major irony of all this however is that through murder, abduction, intercenine warfare, extortion and the forced recruitment of children, the Tamils themselves have suffered much more at the hands of the LTTE than have the Sinhalese.
If Kilinochchi falls and the Tigers are defeated, there is no certainty over what will happen next. The Eastern province also used to be controlled by the Tigers, until they formed a breakaway faction called the TMVP and joined forces with the Government. Some hasty elections were rigged, the TMVP were never asked to disarm and now they run the East both as a political party and as an armed paramilitary group with a terrorist grip on the population. Human Rights Watch noted on Tuesday that the
Sri Lankan government says that the ‘liberated’ East is an example of democracy in action and a model for areas recaptured from the LTTE. But killings and abductions are rife, and there is total impunity for horrific abuses.
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So today might be the day that Kilinochchi falls. It might be the day the LTTE bring back terrorism to Colombo.
Or else when today is over it may well be that nothing happened at all, except that the fear rose up again, lowering heads and hunching spines, and that alone will have been enough. And then it will be tomorrow, and who's to say that the day after Heroes Day won't be the day the LTTE decide to strike?
Today from my apartment I watch curtains of rain sweeping in from the sea, smudges of blue-grey that arrive as fields of white, momentarily obliterating the sky and masking the city like translucent paper. It's been raining for nearly a week. Sri Lanka can't seem to shake this depression.