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IT WAS nearly two years after my last visit to Jaffna. On that occasion, in December 2007, the war was over in the east, and the Sri Lankan military was battling it out in the north. Late in the night we could still hear the thunder of artillery firing in the distance. There were hardly any visitors to Jaffna. The tension in the air was palpable and the people melted from the streets by 5:00pm. On this occasion when I visited Jaffna the war had been over more than four months. The streets had people on them well past 9:00pm and the tension was much less with the sound of thunder being only caused by lightning.
   However, some important things remained unchanged. The road connecting Jaffna to the rest of the country, the A9 Highway, remained closed to people who wished to travel to Jaffna from outside, unless a special permit was obtained from the Ministry of Defence. There is still only a limited bus transportation service. But that is only open to passengers from Jaffna. If they purchase a two-way ticket from Jaffna, they can also return by bus from Colombo. Strangely enough is not possible to purchase a bus ticket from Colombo to go to Jaffna.
   It seems that no one, except for those who drew up this scheme of travel, will know the rationale for the restriction on the flow of passenger traffic by road to Jaffna. There was some speculation that the restriction on bus travel from Colombo to Jaffna is to help the airline companies make ends meet, and make the necessary payments. The freedom of movement throughout the country is a basic right of the citizen. But the residents of Jaffna, and those in the welfare camps for the internally displaced, remain as a large and conspicuous exception. They feel and they are marginalised and excluded, cut off from the mainstream of economic, social and political life of Sri Lanka.
   For many years Jaffna residents have described themselves as being confined to an open air prison. They are free to move about within Jaffna, subject to checkpoints that dot the peninsula. But they are not free to travel out of the peninsula. Any resident of Jaffna who wishes to leave the peninsula for whatever reason, be it to visit relatives, see tourist sites in other parts of the country or for medical emergencies, has to obtain an exit permit from the military authorities. Obtaining this permit requires certification from the Grama Niladari, the local military commander and so on, until it goes higher up the chain of military command. Needless to say the power to give exit permits is a source of patronage that anyone who wields such authority would be loath to give up.
   
   International comparison
   ONE of my purposes in traveling to Jaffna was to find out how life there had changed with the end of the war. The first encounters, however, were not favourable ones. I had to travel by air, as travel by road was not possible without a special permit from the Ministry of Defence. I hoped that travel by air to Jaffna would be an improvement over what it had been two years ago during the time of war. To my disappointment and discomfort there was no difference, the hardships were just the same. There are some readers who may misunderstand my lament as due to the personal inconvenience to me. But my point is that unless there is change, it will be very difficult to win the hearts and minds of the people of Jaffna.
   Along with all other passengers, I was asked to report at 3:30am at the airline office in Wellawatte to be taken from there by special bus to the airport at Ratmalana to catch the 7:00am flight. It appears that no exceptions are made, so that passengers who come from beyond Ratmalana also have to come to Wellawatte to catch the bus. At those wee hours of the morning in the airline office, a single clerk painstakingly took down by hand, the identity card and ticket details of all passengers and also took away their mobile phones and cameras which he sealed in individual plastic bags.
   It was close to 5:00am when the bus finally left the airline office with its plastic chairs. The environment was closer to that of a welfare camp for displaced persons than to a multi million rupee business enterprise. Before reaching the airport, the passengers had to disembark at a shed-like place and show their tickets and identity cards to military personnel. They too painstakingly took down all these details by hand. This was done again at the airport itself after we had boarded a second bus. It was told to us that we had to go through this procedure twice at the airport because both the army and air force shared responsibilities for the security of the airport, and we had to give our details to both.
   These procedures were no different from what I had experienced two years ago. The fact that the war had ended seemed to have made no difference to the security precautions being taken, if this could be called that. The only improvement that could be observed was the X-Ray screening of baggage rather than the hand search that took place in the past. Going from one phase of the process of boarding the airplane to another took a long time each step of the way. The waste of time seemed to be not of consequence. When the flight took off it was past 7:30am.
   This was almost like a flight to an international destination, though in much less comfortable circumstances. Usually internal flights require just one hour or less for the check in. Here it was at least three hours. The cost of the flight was around Rs 20,000 for a return ticket, which is more than some of the return tickets to Indian destinations. The comparison to an international flight was also made more real by what happened on disembarkation at the Jaffna airport.
   
   Colombo paradigm
   UPON disembarking in Jaffna, all passengers had to go through a screening process that was no less time consuming than the one in Colombo. Passengers had to be registered again, on two separate occasions which included the taking of a photograph, before being issued an entry permit that was valid for a month. Passengers also had to board two different buses within the airport, to get us through the different checkpoints, before finally boarding a third bus that took us to Jaffna city. When we finally arrived in Jaffna city it was past 10:30am, a full seven hours after reporting time for a flight that took less than one hour of flying time.
   In a manner that was similar to the physical travails of travel to Jaffna, the outer appearances in Jaffna were also unfavourable. There was the appearance of a rundown town with ramshackle roads and the fearful scars of past battles in the form of massive physical destruction of buildings. There were also welfare camps for those who had been displaced by the war, with new camps and old camps, some 64 in all, on the side of the roads and in the interior. There was also a strong military presence, with soldiers present at almost every main junction.
   On the positive side, conditions also have improved. There has been a reduction in the level of tension, and people feel more secure about their safety. The last time I went to Jaffna people showed me where someone had been shot and another had been abducted. That was a time of great tension when half a dozen or more such incidents could occur in a day. This had all stopped. With the opening of the A9 Highway to the transport of goods, the prices had fallen and Jaffna farmers and fishers had more opportunity to sell their produce. But this is still not normalcy. The opening of the A9 Highway to passenger traffic and the removal of the exit and entry permit system to Jaffna is a necessary first step to the restoration of normalcy, and to truly re-uniting the north with the south.
   Granting people the freedom of movement after the restrictions of war may seem too great a risk. But societies that are open and democratic always have to take risks that some terrorist or demented person somewhere will explode a bomb. The vast numbers of people who thronged the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall in Colombo during the recently concluded International Book Fair was a clear and convincing demonstration of normalcy and an end to war. There was scarcely any security to be seen or felt, and yet there was no incident. The large number of bookshops and book publishers showed that Sri Lanka has a literate and well read population whom the government can take into its confidence in taking the risks that need to be taken to re-link the north and south again.
   Jehan Perera is media director of the National Peace Council in Colombo, Sri Lanka. jehanpc@sltnet.lk

IT WAS extraordinarily questionable why US President Barak Obama chose not to credit the war on Afghanistan with a separate paragraph in his speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations on September 23, to ‘note’ the war on Iraq with only a four-line paragraph, and instead to escalate his war of words on Iran, as if the expansion of the war on Afghanistan into Pakistan was not enough over-depletion of an already exhausted US human, financial and military resources, and as if a threat of a third war in the Middle East would serve in any way the US vital interests in the region or contribute to US elusive victory in either one of both wars. Downplaying the most pressing items on the US agenda and leaping forward to the nuclear issue and Iran was only a thinly-veiled attempt to divert attention away from the fact that Obama was stuck between the worse and the worst in both countries.
   On the second anniversary of Blackwater’s massacre of Iraqis in Baghdad’s Al-Nusur Square, CBS on this September 17 asked in a detailed report: ‘Why Is Obama Still Using Blackwater?’ The answer could obviously be found in exhausting the US ‘volunteer’ military manpower stretched out to the maximum to sustain the two US-led wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.
   This military manpower debacle leaves Obama with either one of three options: more privatisation of both wars and consequently more ‘blackwaters’, ‘nationalisation’ of both wars through ‘Iraqisation’ and ‘Afghanisation’, which nonetheless could not disengage the US neither militarily nor financially from both theatres neither in the short term nor in the foreseeable future, or resorting to conscription to sustain a war that has so far proved un-winnable both on Iraq and on Afghanistan after nine years and seven years respectively.
   However all three options seem unfeasible. Conscription as the last resort is absolutely an option that would immediately be dismissed because unless it is dictated by a clear-cut threat to national security it will not be accepted as an indispensable measure of self-defence, let alone conscribing Americans for a war on Iraq that has been unpopular with them since the US-led invasion in 2003, or for the war on Afghanistan that is increasingly becoming unpopular among them, according to the latest CNN Poll of Polls (58% against), and is gradually eroding Obama’s popularity, which dropped to 50 per cent from 57 per cent in July (Wall Street Journal and NBC News poll on September 23).
   The other two options, namely privatisation or nationalisation of both wars, are evidently contradictory. While Iraqis or Afghanis may swallow a delayed withdrawal of foreign military troops until they can develop their own defence forces, they will in no way accept a mercenary alternative to such troops in the meantime, nor would they perceive collaborators who were brought into both countries by the invading armies themselves as turned ‘nationalists’ overnight.
   Obama’s strategy as was announced on the inauguration of his administration was to exit US combatants from Iraq and move these same combating resources to Afghanistan to solve his military manpower problem, but exit from Iraq is proving untenable and the war on Afghanistan is proving unsustainable without immediate commitment of substantially more troops.
   Obama has now to choose between two failures, either a failure in Iraq or a failure in Afghanistan, because a ‘successful outcome’ in the latter theatre ‘is going to require a major US reinforcement’, but ‘fast redeployment in Afghanistan hurts us in Iraq. It comes at a price ... at the cost of the risk of failure in another theatre (i.e. Iraq),’ according to Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow with the US Council on Foreign Relations for defence policy on March 2.
   Obama is now obviously stuck between what he described as the U.S ‘war of choice’ on Iraq and the US ‘war of necessity’ on Afghanistan, which practically has become his ‘war of hard choice’, according to Richard Haas, the CFR president, in a recent article. Both wars, however, are still insistently sustained by Obama whose exit strategy from both is still blurred in Iraqi and Afghani eyes as much as in US eyes.
   Viewed from the battlegrounds of the US global wars on terrorism or otherwise, which ironically are only fought in the Middle East, Obama’s strategies seem indecisive and confused. On Iraq, he pledged in his UN speech to ‘ending the war’ and ‘to remove all American troops by the end of 2011,’ but ‘responsibly’ until the Iraqis ‘transition to full responsibility for their future,’ which practically translates to a long-term strategic commitment.
   Meanwhile on Afghanistan he is still wavering and meandering not to rush to a sizeable reinforcement to avoid what General Stanley McChrystal, the top US and NATO commander in country, warned against in a confidential report, recently leaked: ‘Resources will not win this war, but under-resourcing could lose it... The overall effort is deteriorating. We run the risk of strategic defeat.’ But Obama will not yet surge troops there until he has ‘the right strategy’ and will not send ‘young men and women into battle, without having absolute clarity about what the strategy is going to be.’
   Nine months in office, Obama is still wondering: ‘Are we doing the right thing?’ ‘Are we pursuing the right strategy?’ If Obama has yet to decide on a strategy on Afghanistan, in hindsight, one might ask: why did he send there seventeen thousand additional troops earlier this year!
   For too long now the Middle East has been paying in blood for US experimental and contradictory foreign policies, which ostensibly seek peace where war is the only option to make the Israeli occupying power, for instance, succumb to a just and lasting peace in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and launch war where peace is only attainable through an end to US-led wars as the cases are in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, Obama at the UN on Wednesday seemed poised to promise the Middle East more of the same when he pledged he ‘will never apologise’ for defending the interests ‘of my nation’, and yet lamented ‘anti-Americanism’, which is exacerbated by sustaining such counterproductive policies.
   ZNet, September 27. Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli - occupied Palestinian territories.

Jalil assaulted after
Hasina criticism

It is heartening that a politician like Abdul Jalil has become reckless in dealing political matters. As he is deprived of getting any post in the incumbent cabinet or any post in the central committee, he is now speaking ill of others. This mentality on the part of Jalil was unexpected. On the other hand, it is not tenable the fact that he should be humiliated in a foreign country.
   Abdur Rahman
   Dhaka

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