Sri Lanka's killing fields are now tourist attractions

Five years ago, in Karaimullivaikal, Sri Lanka, along the Bay of Bengal,on a narrow piece of land , Sri Lanka’s military carried some of the most disputable but determinant attacks on its Tamil antagonists.

Traces of the intense battle are still felt on the field. The images of bomb craters lie closely-packed, amid shallow, hand-dug refuges. Pieces of rusty metal splash the sand like creepy confetti where shells marked direct hits on the few armed bunkers.

The questionable battlefield was a piece of a no-fire zone declared, in the last few months of its civil war from 2009, by the government of Sri Lanka, delimiting the area as secure for civilians to go to, although they were attacked anyway after getting there, tens of thousands being trapped there in last months of the war.

After this, Sri Lanka's government took advantage of the view and made it a tourist attraction. People visiting the place, because of its actual look, have no idea that in the past a war crime scene was there.

After the war, the government wiped the monuments and cemeteries reminding the incidents, the militants were sent into "rehabilitation" programs and many thousands civilians were obligated to go live into camps for internally displaced persons. The winners expressed little indulgence for dissent. Towering victory monuments where built and captured sites where opened to the public.

Ananthi Sasitharan, a politician, declared: "The government is building victory monuments, but the people are unable even to cry for the dead, their relatives." 

“The root causes of the war are still there. There is still a huge amount of mistrust of the government, there is still amount of anger and capacity for violence. The relative lack of violence” at this time is only an outcome of “the abject defeat of the Tamil Tigers and the rather large political vacuum they left in their wake.” stated Fred Carver.

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