Inside the whirlwind: in the wake of the tsunami, progressive Sri Lankans question the politics of aid.

The men and women of Sri Lanka's Eastern coast still walk the beaches. They say "it's like walking in a graveyard." But the 5% of the population that survived the tsunami continue walking there, says Suevndrini Lena, a doctor who helped found a Toronto-based relief committee. The men and women look out on the sea where most of them made their living, the sea that now holds the bodies of the children, grandmothers, sisters, lovers, fathers; their houses, boats and family photos.

The tsunami that struck on December 26, 2004 was so fierce in Sri Lanka that it sucked wells out of the earth and people out of their graves, says Lena. The human toll was devastating. News reports on Sri Lanka and the rest of the region say that more than 300,000 lost their lives and another million are now homeless. Images of the devastation were headline news for weeks on media outlets around the world, and, in response, donations flooded well-known, mainstream relief agencies like the Red Cross.

Yet in the days following the tsunami, another kind of disaster relief began. Sites like http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com were set up by South Asians questioning the ability of big relief agencies to navigate politically complex countries, and small networks of progressive Sri Lankans in the diaspora began mobilizing to raise money for grassroots social justice organizations back home. The relief effort, they realized, was complicated by the ethnic strife and warfare that had driven many to emigrate from the island in the first place. As Lena says, "You can't separate the devastation caused by the tsunami from the destruction caused by 20 years of civil war."

From One Grassroots to Another

A month after the tsunami hit South Asia, two Sri Lankan artists in Minneapolis began doing what they do best: putting on performance shows featuring Sri Lankans from across the United States. Using donated space at the University of Minnesota, Pradeepa Jeeva and Chamindika Wanduragala, who in 2001 founded the arts organization Diaspora Flow, invited artists like queer Tamil performer D'Lo and included auctions of paintings by Wanduragala and her mother. They raised about $3,000 for the Sri Lanka Relief Fund, the organization's new program. But they didn't just turn that cash over to the Red Cross.

Instead, the two women turned to friends and families who were going back and forth to Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami. Through phone conversations, Jeeva says, "we knew which areas were not getting help." They sent money with a woman in Minneapolis who was traveling to Sri Lanka to do vaccinations, giving her $300 to buy supplies. Because they were determined to make sure that their money reached grassroots organizations, Diaspora Flow was soon in contact with such groups in Sri Lanka.

In a country torn apart by ethnic warfare, Jeeva says, they had to find organizations working across lines of ethnicity and religion. So far, she says, monies have gone to the Jeeva Jothi orphanage, which has long worked with war orphans and ex-child soliders and is one of the few secular organizations in the area. Diaspora Flow has also sent funds to Initiative Sunrise Lanka, which is offering rebuilding services without regard to ethnicity in the badly hit Ampara area of the Eastern Province.

Some Words in the Mother Tongue 

Sri Lanka's decades of political instability are rooted in a colonial history that spanned 500 years. The size of West Virginia, the country is home for six major ethnic groups. The Sinhalese and Tamils are in the majority, and there are also Muslims, aboriginal Veddahs, Malaysians and Burghers (people of mixed European and Sri Lankan heritage). The groups lived relatively peacefully until colonization by the Portuguese, Dutch and British. Generations of colonial divide-and-rule left the island's peoples with one hell of a colonial inheritance to clean up when they won independence in 1948. Disagreements brewed over who should rule, with many Sinhalese leaders insisting that at roughly 75 percent of the island's population (and with many Sinhalese claming Sri Lanka as a "sacred homeland" for their branch of Buddhism), it should be them. The passage of the Sinhala Only Act in 1956 made Sinhalese the official state language and contributed to growing anti-Tamil discrimination in jobs and education.

Violent attacks against Tamils increased over the next decades. In 1981, the centuries-old Jaffna Public Library was burned to the ground by Sinhalese thugs and members of the Sri Lankan police; in 1983, Sinhalese rioted, destroying Tamil homes and storms and killing Tamils throughout the island. These massacres drove a generation of Sri Lankans into exile and led to the formation of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a paramilitary group that advocates a separate Tamil state in the North. The Tamil Tigers, as they are known, officially declared war against the Sri Lankan government and two decades of civil war followed, filling Sri Lanka with constant army checkpoints, land mines and routine governmental use of torture and extrajudicial executions. After years of failed attempts, a peace treaty brokered by Norwegian negotiators in 2002 has resulted in a fragile truce and an area in the North and East that is controlled by the Tamil Tigers.

Although all coastal areas in Sri Lanka were overwhelmed by the tsunami, the predominantly Tamil Northern and Eastern provinces--already devastated by the civil war--were some of the worst hit. The areas most affected by the tsunami were the "uncleared" areas where landmines from the war are still active, she says. "The tsunami sucked the mines onto the surface. You see the warning signs for these areas everywhere--in rice paddies where people work, along roads people walk on. And so much of the infrastructure had been destroyed already by the war that the little that had been rebuilt in the past two years just got destroyed again."

Rumors have also abounded that the Sri Lankan government has blocked access to aid reaching the North and East. Other areas are so-called "no man's lands," stateless areas that don't belong to either the Tamil Tigers or the Sri Lankan government. In both areas, getting any aid in means going through dozens of checkpoints, where if you don't know the people guarding them you don't get through.

Given these fears and many people's mistrust of the Sri Lankan government, Sri Lankans in the diaspora have chosen to raise money for the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization (TRO), the social service branch of the Tamil Tigers. It is the group many Tamils in the diaspora trust to get their money to the villages they left behind. However, while many have supported the Tamil Tigers as their best chance to move back to a Sri Lanka without ethnic discrimination, many Tamils are questioning some of the group's policies.

The Tamil Tigers have claimed responsibility for assassinating members of other Tamil radical groups and Tamil politicians. When they forced out all Muslims from the North in 1980, giving people 48 hours to leave homes they had held for generations, the action was decried by many Sri Lankans from all ethnicities. Last November, Human Rights Watch released a report entitled, "Living in Fear: Child Soldiers and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka," documenting a Tamil Tigers policy of demanding "one child for the cause per household." Many children join due to harassment and fears of retaliation against their families.

So Sri Lankans looking to donate have been in a bind. The big organizations may not be reaching the North and East, and the TRO is linked to the Tamil Tigers and its questionable policies. Into this gap, grassroots organizations across the United States have begun stepping forward.

The Impact of Aid

In New York City, the 12-26 Coalition, a spectrum of progressive South Asian, queer of color and progressive Sri Lankan groups, has come together. "We wanted to connect grassroots to grassroots," says Marian Yalini Thambynayagam, a Tamil poet and actor and also a member of the coalition. "After the tsunami, everyone at work was asking me where to donate, and just like everyplace else, the only organizations I knew of were the Red Cross and other big charities. But we were also hearing reports that so many Tamil areas weren't getting aid. We wanted to get money to efforts led by women, LGBT people and sex workers, who were hard hit and have been frozen out of many relief efforts." Like Diaspora Flow, 12-26 members talked to friends and family in Sri Lanka to get information about grassroots organizations doing important work. (A detailed list is at http://www.lines-magazine.org.)

The Coalition has thrown a benefit and also protested against Hot 97, New York City's most popular hip-hop radio station, which in January infamously broadcast the "Tsunami Song" that referred to the disaster victims as "screaming chinks" and "Africans drowning". The station, whose deejays have a history of spewing racist comments and encouraging conflict between rappers in order to boost ratings, aired the song for four days.

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In Toronto, the Canadian Committee for Relief to Eastern Province, for its part, made a successful partnership with the Toronto Women's Bookstore that allowed organizers to issue tax receipts for donations and raise about $31,000 (Canadian) in less than a month through a series of popular benefit concerts and DJ nights. This money was converted to more than two million Sri Lankan rupees, which group members took to the island in February. They spent the money on medical supplies, vitamins, menstrual pads, and art and school supplies and went directly to refugee camps in the Eastern Province to disperse them. There, they set up clinics where Lena, a medical doctor who speaks Tamil, could see patients with local medical workers. The group plans a second mission later this year to set up an art and play therapy initiative run by local community mental health workers who are hoping to address the tremendous trauma the children have faced.

In February, giving a report from their trip, Lena and another member of the committee, Anjula Gogia, spoke of significant gaps in cultural understanding and service delivery in refugee camps run by big nongovernmental organizations. "It's not that they're not doing any good," said Lena. "OXFAM was charged to bring potable water to all of the East, and it's there. But one camp didn't create separate bathroom areas for men and women, or bathing areas with any kind of privacy. It was literally a mud hole dug into the ground with some garbage bags tacked up around it. This means that the women won't use them; they go into the fields, and this has meant a dramatic increase in the numbers of sexual assaults we're seeing. And there's no need for it." Gogia pointed out that the camp are traumatized residents. "It's hard to talk about moving forward when people can't see their economic future," she said.

Both women observed that more effort is being given to setting up camps, which they fear may become permanent, as have other supposedly temporary ones set up during the civil war. A better alternative, they say, would be to help people clear rubble and debris from their homes so they can move back. Many people on the island are questioning whether there is a state agenda in this displacement, as in proposed new regulations for "tsunami-safe buildings" that may make it too expensive for local fishermen but feasible for big tourist hotels. Particularly ominous are the U.S. government's hints that in exchange for receiving aid, Sri Lanka may have to accept a U.S. military base at Trincomalee, the first base in the island's history.

The strong bonds being built between progressive diaspora communities and communities back home, however, could herald a new beginning. One thing's for sure: many Sri Lankans are hoping and praying for a just peace to emerge from the tsunami's ruins.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is the daughter of a Burgher-Tamil Sri Lankan father and an Irish-Ukrainian mother who prays daily for a just peace in Sri Lanka within her lifetime.