IDPs in Muttur , photo By Nuwan Jayatilleke from Muttur. 
Armed confrontations between the security forces of Sri Lanka and the LTTE for which the riverine tract of Mavil Aru and the township of Muttur provided the venue in late July and early August 2006 appear in retrospect to mark a major turning point in the history of the ‘Eelam Wars’. The area has remained one of the most turbulent parts of the country throughout the past twenty years. It also ranked among the few localities of the ‘north-east’ in which the LTTE made significant advances over several years after the commencement of the ceasefire on December 2001.
The most pronounced demographic feature of this area – it is roughly coterminous with the Administrative Division of Muttur – is its highly intricate spatial mosaic of ethnicity. Forming a part of Trincomalee District in which the main ethnic groups of Sri Lanka are represented in the total population in roughly equal proportions, Muttur Division had, in 2004, a population of 45,298 of which 62% were Muslim and almost 38% were Tamil. There is here a fairly distinctive sectoral contrast in the ethnic composition of the population. In the urban sector, consisting mainly of the township of Muttur, Muslims account for 90% of the population. In rural Muttur 56% of the population is accounted for by Tamils. Superimposed upon this sectoral contrast is a distinct spatial segregation of population on ethnic lines. In Muttur town, for instance, there are residential ‘neighbourhoods’ exclusively of one or the other ethnic group. More or less the same pattern is replicated in rural areas, with the majority of Muslim villages located in proximity to Muttur town, and the Tamil villages located in the eastern parts in the direction of Sampur, a predominantly Tamil township. The irrigated areas to the south of Muttur town are featured by a fairly dense scatter of Tamil and Muslim villages which extends westwards towards the Division of Seruwila in which the Sinhalese account for about 90% of the population.
The bustling township of Muttur covers an area of approximately two square kilometres. Since a regular ferry service is available between Muttur and Trincomalee town, and since overland travel between the latter and the areas south of Trincomalee Bay involves a circuitous route, Muttur town forms, in fact, the principal gateway for the entire area covered by the Administrative Divisions of Muttur, Seruvila and Ichchalampattu. Its location overlooking the Trincomalee Bay also makes its control vitally important from military perspectives.The rural population of Muttur is served by a channel network fed by an up-stream anicuit along Mavil Aru that regulates the flow of water to a large segment of the command area (approximately 30,000 acres of paddy land) of the Allai tank. It was well within ‘government controlled territory’ (the so-called “cleared areas”) as demarcated (albeit somewhat imprecisely) under the Ceasefire Agreement. However, since early 2002, the LTTE had, in defiance of the terms of the agreement, established a series of bases and encampments in the southern and eastern parts of the Division. Some of these were believed to have been equipped with heavy artillery that could bombard the government naval base at Trincomalee. This had been ignored by the government of that time in accordance with its policy of “confidence building”. Up to the outbreak of military confrontations in late July 2006, there were three camps of the Sri Lanka army sited at Kattaparichchan and Gandhinagar in proximity to Muttur town, and Palathoppur about 10 miles further south.
Mavil Aru-Muttur Battle
On 20 July 2006 the LTTE closed the Mavil Aru anicuit, thus depriving irrigation water to downstream paddy land. This was, indeed, a classic ‘riparian gambit’ – a challenge for a showdown for control over the entire Mahaveli delta, based on the belief of the LTTE leadership that the recovery from the ‘Karuna’ and ‘Tsunami’ setbacks was adequate by this time for its fighting cadres to achieve the twin objectives of evicting not only the security forces of the government but also the Muslim inhabitants from this area. Further, its capture would mean a vast enrichment of the LTTE granary and would also provide the Tiger forces supremacy over the entire coastal area south of the Trincomalee Bay and over a corridor of access with only minor obstacles between their principal domain in Vanni and the localities they hold in Batticaloa and Ampara districts.
The day after the closure of the sluice-gates armed LTTE cadres prevented officers of the Irrigation Department from reaching the anicuit, while ignoring a plea by the SLMM and a group of peasants from the affected villages for restoration of the flow of water along the channel. On 25 July, ‘Elian’ (LTTE political wing leader in Trincomalee District) conveyed a demand to the SLMM that the government should take immediate steps to construct a water storage tank at Paddalipuram (in a LTTE-controlled locality) for use by Tamil residents of that area. Though this was intended to appear as a precondition to the re-opening of the anicuit, government’s prompt agreement to grant the demand evoked no response from the LTTE leadership. Instead, two days later, there was a “community appeal” engineered by the LTTE containing a series of fresh demands, some of which infringed on conditions laid down in the ceasefire agreement.
The LTTE challenge had thus to be met with a decisive response, the ceasefire agreement notwithstanding, if not for holding on to an area the loss of which could have far-reaching repercussions from strategic perspectives, at least for performing the government obligation of defending an innocent farm population. Thus, a military counteroffensive, codenamed ‘Operation Watershed’, was launched by the security forces on 26 July with the objective of reopening the anicuit and flushing out the LTTE cadres from that locality.
Soon after the commencement of ‘Operation Watershed’ the LTTE captured the army encampments located in the vicinity of Muttur town thus opening a second front of the battle. The Tigers launched their occupation of Muttur town in a pre-dawn attack on 2 August. By the following morning a large number of well armed Tiger combatants appeared to be in control of the town, having forced most of its Muslim inhabitants to either flee or seek refuge at public venues such as schools and mosques. In the course of this ‘conquest’, the Muslims were evidently subject to the entire range of harassment including killing, looting, extortion, assault and intimidation, thus adding to the already embittered Tamil-Muslim relations in the town.
To elaborate this latter phenomenon, the history of serious clashes between the Muslims and Tamils of Muttur could be traced back to 1987 when a communal conflagration was ignited by the killing of a Muslim civil servant and the abduction of several Muslims, allegedly by LTTE cadres making their presence felt in the area. Thereafter, in the early 1990s, when the LTTE put into operation its programme of ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the ‘north-east’ (this was the era of the large-scale ‘Mosque massacres’ in Batticaloa District and of mass eviction of Muslims from Mannar), there were several spells of violence in the Muttur-Sampur-Toppur area which, however, did not cause ‘internal displacement’ on the same massive scale witnessed in Batticaloa and Mannar. There was, in response, the formation of militias bearing names such as “Jihad” and “Al Fatah” reported from some of the main Muslim areas of the east at that time. Far more serious than these in destructive impact was the violence that erupted in the first year of the ceasefire to last with fluctuation intensity over several months. On 29 May 2006 the LTTE issued an ultimatum ordering the Muslims to leave Muttur within seventy-two hours. It had no immediate effect other than that of inculcating fear.
Soon after their arrival in Muttur on 2 August 2006 the Tiger cadres began a forced eviction of people from the town. According to an eye-witness account of a person in one of the groups so evicted, they were herded out of the town in the direction of the LTTE-held areas, and, while on their way, the women and children were ordered to proceed, having separated them from the men. When the women refused to obey this order, some of the men were allowed to re-join the group while the others had their hands tied and were led away. The whereabouts of these captives are still not known.
The counterattack by the security forces on Muttur began soon thereafter. By about 6 August the SLArmy had re-taken the town evicting the LTTE, killing a large number of its cadres. This had involved both artillery bombardment as well as close-encounter gun battles. It is possible that the workers attached to the French aid agency Action Contre la Faim or ‘ACF’ (16 Tamils and 1 Muslim; 13 men and 4 women) were killed in the course of these clashes. There are, of course, several other speculative explanations, equally plausible. For instance, one cannot rule out the Tiger high-command deciding that the sacrifice of 17 lives – had those of the aid team been genuinely engaged relief operations among the Muslims, they could also have been seen as “traitors” to the Eelam cause – is worth the gains that will accrue from the likelihood that the SLArmy would be held responsible for the killing, and thus ordering its cadres to kill the ACF workers prior to withdrawal from the town. (This possibility has been considered and discarded by a Reuter correspondent on the grounds of information conveyed by the grieving father of one of the victims according to whom the LTTE does not kill other Tamils!)
Inquisition and Propaganda Onslaught
Soon after reports of the killing of ACF workers reached Colombo President Rajapakse initiated an investigation – one that would use the expertise offered by several foreign governments. On the basis of preliminary discussions at which officers of the ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs, local experts in the field of forensic medicine, and representatives of several diplomatic and aid missions participated, an investigation strategy was decided upon, and the information on the killings as available at that time was disclosed to the media at a press conference. Indicating the prevailing mood, the ACF Executive Director Benoit Miribel, when asked by the press for an opinion on who was responsible for the killings, said: “I do not know who is responsible. We will take all steps to get to the bottom if this tragedy”.
In order to make that ideal descent to the bottom, it was vital for the inquiry to be far more thorough and objective than, say, the investigation conducted by the famous Allen Rock in November 2006 who, in a tour of a few places in the east of Sri Lanka that lasted no more than a few hours (he had no pervious experience in the country, no communication skill in a language used by its inhabitants, no access to its more turbulent areas, and much of his time in Sri Lanka was spent in Colombo) discovered, among other things, photographs of young Tamils residing in that part of the country being supplied by the Sri Lanka Army to the rebel group led by Karuna so as to facilitate their abduction for conscription as fighters!
To digress briefly from the main subject of this essay, there is reason to speculate that the Allen Rock “mission” was intended by its sponsors to harmonise with their ongoing efforts to rescue the LTTE from the impending debacle in the Eastern Province. At least one pro-LTTE journal gleefully proclaimed that Allen Rock was sent to Sri Lanka by Radhika Coomaraswamy, ‘UN Rapporteur for Children in Armed Conflict’ as her ‘Special Advisor’. The discovery by Rock referred to above is one of many mentioned in his report which provided the basis for his indictment of the armed forces of Sri Lanka for alleged collaboration with Karuna in the forced conscription of children. To those of us with some familiarity with how some of these visiting consultants conduct their investigations in the country, there could hardly be any doubt that most of the Rock “findings” would have been picked up from the “cocktail circuit” in Colombo. Further, a highly receptive atmosphere for the submission of the Rock report to the UN was created by Philip Alston, another of UN’s innumerable Special Rapporteurs whose repertoire included a report intended to persuade the Security Council that a UN-sponsored “international human rights monitoring mission is indispensable” to Sri Lanka. Had that effort succeeded, the advances being made by the armed forces against the Tigers in the Eastern Province would have been effectively halted.
Getting back to Muttur, since the killing had taken place at a time when the SLArmy and the Tiger cadres were locked in fierce combat for control of the town (i.e. on 4 August), there appeared to be no means of ascertaining the veracity of the mutually conflicting charges which the various accounts of the atrocity contained until the completion of the investigations to the satisfaction of all parties concerned.
With the exception of the propaganda organs of the LTTE, most publications that contained references to the Muttur tragedy were cautious enough to place the blame in general terms on both the government as well as the LTTE for the rising tide of violence in the country, but refrained from making specific accusations. There were, however, the exceptions. The earliest Reuter report on the incident, dated 6 February 2007, quoted Jeevan Thiagarajah, the Head of the Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies (AHC) as stating: ”They (AHC relief team) found them (ACF workers) in the office on the ground, lying face down, executed, (and) the military, which says it now controls most of the town, said it knew nothing about the bodies and denied involvement”. A further report by Reuter correspondent Peter Apps datelined 8 August reported two persons he had interviewed – (a) Sinathambi Navaratnarajah according to whom on 2 August fighting raged throughout Muttur with the Tigers taking positions in key buildings in the centre, and that by 4 August most of the town’s people had fled, and (b) Richard Arulraja (father of one of the victims) who had said “… we heard the military personnel came and shot them.”
Far more significantly, the same report quoted Ulf Henricsson, the Head of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission, as saying: “When you (‘you’ refers to the monitors) are not let in, it is a sign that they (army) have something to hide” – a curious conclusion, given the fact that even by 8 August, Muttur town was still vulnerable to artillery attack by the retreating Tigers, and the army was still engaged in operations south of the town. Thereafter, in several published reports on the Muttur tragedy, Henricsson was cited as the principal authority for the conclusion that the ACF workers had been killed by the SLArmy. It was also probably on the basis of information from Henricsson that the ‘Resolution’ adopted by the European Union Parliament in on 7 September 2006 stated: “(T)he SLMM has found that seventeen aid workers employed by the French humanitarian agency ‘Action Against Hunger’ had been shot dead by government forces in Muttur” (EU Parliament Resolution of September 7, 2006, Paragraph D of the ‘Preamble’).
The reference in the EU Resolution to the SLMM “finding” that the ACF workers were killed by the Sri Lanka army evokes special interest for several reasons – first, by early September 2006, the in-depth investigations into the Muttur killings were still in their early stages; second, the Monitoring Mission’s own investigations at Muttur (if any) could not have been systematic and comprehensive because the process of resettlement of the displaced was far from being complete; and third, such a “finding” with the related evidence had not been formally conveyed by the SLMM to the government of Sri Lanka. This curious feature of the EU Resolution provides reason to speculate whether its references of Muttur represented an input of the Norwegians who, by this time, were not even attempting to conceal their pro-LTTE bias (It is well known that the government of Norway ardently opposed the passing of sanctions against the LTTE earlier that year).
A report in The International Herald Tribune of 30 August 2006 authored by Shimali Senanayake and Somini Sengupta, though not adding significantly to the facts on the Muttur tragedy, sheds light on how Henricsson arrived at his conclusion regarding the culpability of the SLArmy. Three reasons evidently formed the basis of the conclusion.
“First, security forces had been present in Muttur at the time of the killings. Second, the government had prevented the truce monitors from going to the crime scene to investigate immediately after the discovery of the bodies. Third, confidential conversations with "highly reliable sources" had pointed to the culpability of security forces. No other group, the peace monitors concluded, could have carried out the killings.”
This type of reasoning does cause surprise, especially in the context of the vital importance of Henricsson’s position as the Head of the Monitoring Mission and the absurdly extreme circumspection he had always shown in pinning any crime on the LTTE. To comment briefly on these “reasons”: (a) It is true that on 4 August, the SLArmy was present in Muttur, but so were LTTE cadres; (b) The army is very likely to have prevented the truce monitors from proceeding to Muttur, but its consideration could well have been the safety of the monitors. As for Henricsson’s reliance on “confidential conversations with highly reliable sources”, the question which he should have asked himself is whether it is reasonable to “convict” the SLArmy on the basis of evidence from undisclosed sources, given the fact that, contextually, the source of the information is vital to a determination of the credibility of the information.
To Be Continued…..
(G H Peiris, Professor Emeritus, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka )
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