Peace in Paradise

Aditha DISSANAYAKE

Ever wondered how it feels like to have your heart shredded into pieces by a sharp edged knife? Ever felt engulfed in a sense of deep sorrow from which recovery seems impossible? You already know if you have heard the wail of a trumpet piercing the quiet night in an army camp in Jaffna. The Sound of the Last Post.

Standing to attention, at the end of the day, the officers and soldiers pay respect to their comrades who had left them on the battlefield never to return. Three years ago the list of those who succumbed to battle wounds kept growing. Today, thankfully the list has come to a halt. Peace has descended at last in paradise. Not only for the military but for us civilians as well.

Doubtless at the beginning, coming to terms with this sudden dawn of peace was not easy.

Frantic situation

It was hard to comprehend the days of terror, of the never ending check points on the roads, the sudden interruption to regular programmes on television with a special announcement saying a bomb has exploded in Pettah, Nugegoda, at the Central Bank, in a train in Dehiwala,etc, followed by the appearance of Dr. Hector Weerasinghe assuring the public that the staff at the Central Hospital is doing their best to treat the causalities, are now over. So too the jamming of the telephone lines, the frantic questions "Where are you? Are you safe? The sighs of relief..till next time...till the next special announcement...

Yet, the terrors, the real terrors of war were known to those of us whose homeland was in the North and the East, who still hear gun shots in our dreams and wake up with sighs of immense relief realizing the sounds occurred in the land of sleep, realizing that the days when those very sounds had been real, had caused indescribable sorrow are no more.

I remember how Avish, my colleague in Kilinochchi used to recall some of the sights he had seen during the war ravaged days of the early years of this century - memories that will remain with him for the rest of his life.

One of the first encounters with war which now comes to him in nightmares is seeing a suicide killer throwing himself at a bus carrying police personnel near the police station in Kilinochchi bringing instantaneous death to all the passengers in the bus.

Avish was eighteen at the time and the gruesome sight of the bomb blast had made an indelible stain on his mind. "But" he adds "There was more to come. I was only 5 km away when the bus at Kabbethigollewa exploded".

To this day he recalls the agony on the faces of two fathers one, who was trying to identify his baby's body and the other who had found his wife and children were no more, that he now had no cause to live.

Avish wishes, naturally, to change the subject. Let's discuss the present. "Aaah..." a long sigh of relief. "Life has never been so good as in the past two years." Avish's observant eyes have seen the transition in the lives of the villagers from the terrors of the past to the calm and quiet of the present. "Financially the villagers in Kilinochchi are better off now because they no longer have to pay a commission of 50% to the LTTE from their income.

They get on well with the armed forces and cooperate in the rebuilding process." One memorable moment in his life is seeing the wonder-struck faces of the younger generation born and bred in Kilinochchi during the war, when they first set eyes on a train. Till the war ended they had not seen a train in all their young lives.

Undoubtedly not even the hardcore pessimists would disagree that a world without violence, without bloodshed, in other words a world of peace is now upon us. The task ahead for all Sri Lankans is clear. To borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill, we must get together and work together at the common task as friends and partners, of building a "temple of peace."

Into sunshine

Let us share our tools and thus increase each other's working powers for else the temple may not be built, or, being built, it may collapse, and we shall all be proved again unteachable and have to go and try to learn again for a second time in a school of war, incomparably more rigorous than that from which we have just been released.

"The dark ages may return, the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of science, and what might now shower immeasurable material blessings upon (us), may even bring about our total destruction. Beware ... time may be short." From darkness into light. From sorrow to joy. Never have the days been as bright as the days in this recent past. The sunshine seems gentler, the breeze cooler, the songs of the sparrows more melodious, the splendor of the Asala trees more eye catching than never before. The war is over. All is (surely) well with the world.

As John Fitzgerald Kennedy said "Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures." Now that we are on the threshold of a brave new world, let us give peace a chance.

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