Api Wenuwen Api:

Soldiers help civilians

Crossing from Pudumatalan to Vellamullivaikal:

The purpose of the Api Wenuwen Api column is to highlight some of the work that members of the Armed Forces and Police do to help civilians - whether it is in helping them cross a lagoon, giving first aid, distributing food packets, building roads, organising shramadanas to clean hospitals and schools, and a hundred other things.

There is also another purpose which is not easy to put into words, but can only be properly conveyed in pictures.

Certain foreigners (and indeed Sri Lankans) have tried to insinuate that the recently concluded military campaign against the LTTE was an attack on the entire Tamil community. The best rebuttal against this is the conduct of the soldiers themselves towards the civilians arriving in Government-controlled areas.

What these pictures (and hundreds of others) reveal is that the soldiers see absolutely no difference between themselves and the civilians whom they are rescuing - be they Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, or anyone else.

To find an equivalent to this type of situation, we would have to envision scenes where, say, a Hutu militant is seen helping a Tutsi woman across a battlefield, or an Israeli soldier carries a Palestinian child to safety during the recent Gaza siege or, to go back to the American Civil Rights campaign years, a white policeman helps a black child cross the Birmingham Bridge. Do such instances even exist, let alone in such profusion as in Sri Lanka?