Move to the City (or the Beach…again)
Right now I’m pretty flat tack, I’m trying to get the road section of the current project up and running as it looks like it has finished raining (heavily at least) so now we can start the construction. A couple of weeks ago we turned over our 100,000th block, and at the moment we are putting out around 5,400 per day – soon to be increased to our target of 9,000 per day.
We’ve also decided to move our office to the beach, so I’m dealing with the refurbishment of that and also the guesthouse we are going to use – we have found an old orphanage that was abandoned after the tsunami – hopefully all the work (or at least enough to make it habitable) can be finished around the end of the month.
New Guesthouse…
…complete with batsI promised a situation update – as I mentioned before there has been an upsurge in fighting, especially further north up the east coast. The army have taken back some key towns that were under LTTE control and basically scattered the LTTE in the area. The army commander swore to rid the East of the LTTE, and it looks like he has made good on that promise. Unfortunately, this has resulted in around 200,000 people having to leave their homes and this has put huge strain on the humanitarian response to the problem, with some big camps having to be set up around Batticaloa.
There has been a lot of fighting in the jungle to the west of where I am, the STF (Police Special Task Force) say they have overrun around 22 LTTE camps out there. Not so much problem with refugees in that area as there is basically no-one living there, however the elephants from that jungle have turned up near the coast a lot further north of where they usually are, some say due to the fighting.
All this brings in another problem – Karuna. Colonel Karuna was the LTTE commander in the east until around 2004, when he broke away (allegedly he stole a bunch of money) and formed his own group. The worst kept secret in Sri Lanka was that he was working with and being funded by the government, which was hotly denied by all parties but you only have to drive through many towns to see them set up next to SFT camps and police posts. The President has previously stated that “there are no illegal armed groups in Sri Lanka”, and these guys are not Police or Military so I just don’t know who to believe…
Karuna has taken up the old LTTE tradition of “forced recruitment” – basically, kidnapping people (many of them children) and giving them training and making them fight. A recent report by the UN investigator on children in armed conflict has drawn the conclusion that both the LTTE and Karuna are actively engaged in child recruitment, which is denied by both sides but again everyone on the ground knows that it is happening. There are also allegations of government complicity in the Karuna recruitments, hotly denied by the government but again everyone knows that they are involved. One example is the other week in Pottuvil – there were a couple of gunshots in the town (a rare occurrence), and I have subsequently been told that it was because a couple of boys escaped from the Karuna camp and were hiding in the town somewhere, and the Karuna guys were out hunting for them. It turns out that they were found (by the Police, no less) and then handed back to Karuna. So life in Sri Lanka goes full circle, and the government plays a dangerous game to get rid of the LTTE by assisting Karuna and trying to get him into power in the East to police the LTTE threat. What happens when he decides he has had enough of the government and wants to be the boss?
It is such a shame, because Sri Lanka has so much potential, it is such a beautiful and interesting place, if only they could all wake up to themselves and figure it out…
Apart from that, the sun is shining (it’s actually getting bloody hot, but my jandal tan-lines are coming along nicely), the sea is warm and the beer is cold…
Pelicans on the lagoon
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