Into the Maze

The True Adventures of Dick Stivers

Able Team author Dick Stivers has just returned from Colombo, Sri Lanka, and sends us this report:

What a beautiful country. How terrible and shameful this war.

My first week here I played tourist. I took the train from Colombo, a city on the tropical west coast, to Kandy, a city high in the mountains. I held on to the handrails at the steps into the cars and watched the landscape streak past. Waved at the farmers. Looked straight down into the canyons at orchards and rice paddies. Saw young women bathing in their sarongs, standing in mountain pools, pouring water over themselves, their glistening hair like night as it flowed over their shoulders.

I've been here a month now, interviewing people, taking hundreds of photos, listening to the official announcements. Some nights I lie awake and stare at the ceiling fan, thinking over what people have told me, comparing stories, cross-checking details: what streets looted and burned; how many families hacked to death, children burned alive, young men shot by the army or police, women mutilated; how many army trucks loading loot on what streets on what night.

For a week, the cities of Colombo, Kandy and Matale went insane. The Singhalese mobs did not attack the terrorists in the north who had murdered soldiers and policemen and government clerks. The mobs instead attacked decent people in the south whose only crime had been their ethnic background and enterprise and wealth.

In Matale, the Singhalese burned the buildings of the Tamil community: the Hindu temple, the stores, all the homes, the public-health centers. The only thing that stopped the Singhalese was time out to loot the stores. The Tamils escaped into the jungle. No one died there.

But in Colombo the mobs looted and burned entire streets. Police directed the mobs from one area to another. Officials in the government provided the leaders of the mobs with voter-registration lists. With the lists the leaders took their gangs from address to address in City of Colombo buses. The mobs divided the loot with the army and the army loaded their share onto trucks marked with government insignia. The police allowed the mobs to pass their guard posts. When Tamils and Muslims tried to defend their homes from the mobs, police and army units killed them with autoweapons and grenades.

Now the Singhalese pretend nothing happened. The politicians talk and talk and talk. The police and army pledge to stamp out Tamil terrorism. The newspapers denounce the lies of foreign journalists.

No one will ever know how many died. People have told me that the army and police took Tamil boys and no one else has seen them since. I have been informed that the authorities took truckloads of bodies out of the city — which the authorities have denied. I have heard rumors of bodies burned in graveyards.

In fact, I went out to find the body dumps. A Muslim taxi driver who spoke perfect Singhalese drove the car. With his light-colored skin and straight hair, he passes for a Singhalese. He helped me as revenge against the government; he lost relatives when a mob wiped out their shop, and he knows that the Muslims will be hit in the next "disturbances."

We drove the back roads around Colombo all day. Finally we found a Buddhist graveyard marked with tire tracks. Heavy vehicles had cut across the burial mounds. Tomb-stones and remembrance displays had been knocked down. We got out of the taxi and walked across the graveyard.

Near one side of the graveyard, pigs grunted and snorted as they fed on things sticking out of the soft dirt. A pig pushed around what looked like a white bowl. The outside of the bowl had hair on it.

A shattered skull.

The pigs cleaned ribs and scattered bones. As we watched, the pigs found a bone with blackened flesh on it. The pigs fought over the rotting meat.

I saw a pig uncover the remains of a small hand, perhaps a child's hand. I threw a rock at the pig and I took a step toward the hand. The dirt collapsed under my foot and I went in almost to my knee. The smell coming out of the hole drove me back.

Two Singhalese gravediggers walked over and watched us, so I made like a tourist. I picked up a skull and posed against a tombstone as the taxi driver took my picture. The skull had no jaw, and the pigs had broken away the palate and maxilla. The tissue-paper-thin bone of the skull makes me believe it came from someone old. The grave-diggers laughed and joked as we left. The taxi driver told me they think tourists are crazy.

Now the Tamils and Muslims are preparing for the war. Everyone wants to learn karate. Some mornings I teach karate to Tamil and Muslim teenagers. I give them beginner lessons in killing with their hands and bricks and rocks, umbrellas and pipes. I bought rice sickles for one family. I tell people how to defend their street with gasoline and broken glass, how to defend against gasoline bombs.

Enough horror stories. Read the book when I write it.