The Tamil Tigers invented the suicide belt. They are accused of being complicit in the May 1991 assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi at a campaign rally in India. In a harrowing attack for travelers, Tamil Tiger rebels armed with mortars stormed Sri Lanka's only international airport in July, 2001. Since 1976 the Tamils have vexed successive Sri Lankan governments - until now.
As the last days of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam as a regular fighting force may be upon us, we thought we'd revisit a bit of our stay in Sri Lanka's tea country during a national election campaign ten years ago:
- Over the front seat, Tyrone was explaining how buffalo milk mixed with honey is the local equivalent of yogurt, when up came two signs, one explaining we’d achieved 6187 feet, the next, over the road, read “Welcome to the Salubrious Climes of Nuwara Eliya.”
Straight through the scramble to the far side of town stood the old British Grand Hotel. You wonder what it was doing here. Nuwara Eliya (pronounced “Noo-relia”) is an old British hill station, full of well-tended proper English gardens and lingering British built structures like the Grand Hotel – dark, wooden, rambling, musty and old.
The story goes that the Sinhalese preceded the Tamils to Ceylon and when the British arrived, the Sinhalese were unwilling to work for the slave wages the Brits wanted to pay. So the Brits recruited the Tamils and brought them up here to pick tea.
The good Tamils, as Tyrone called them, (not the trouble-causing ones agitating for independence in the north) got housing, a stipend, a garden and a quota. After that they got a premium for the tea they picked, per kilo.
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A little after six o’clock on election day morning, two loudspeakers chanted the call to Allah just beside a glass-enclosed Buddha statue just by the traffic circle. The sun hadn’t cleared the hills but it was set to be a glorious morning, birds and dew run riot.
At this hour, the town served mostly as a staging area for the bus station. People queued and a few stores lumbered open. At a milk bar (that’s a name for convenience store used from here to New Zealand) I bought toothpaste and remarked how it would be a nice day.
Dazzling smile: “It is election day, sir!”