Tamil Time

I travelled north by train to Vavuniya, arriving late Wednesday evening. My visit would allow me to spend time at the MSF-Holland project and also provide coverage for the project coordinator (pc), who was going to spend a few days at the other project in Kilinochchi.

On Thursday morning prior to his departure, Jonathon gave me a thorough security briefing. The general theme was that the line-of-control is just 17 kilometers north so basically bad things could happen just about anywhere. While reading one of the reports I amused myself with a bit of mental wordplay by altering it to sound like a weather update…”Light shelling with a slight chance of aerial bombardment.” Jonathon showed me a map pinned with coloured tacks indicating where claymore mines had been detonated in the region. Some were near to town and others were along outlying roads. There were a lot of tacks.

We were at the house having lunch when we heard the explosion. It sounded kind of like a car backfiring, but had enough oomph to it that I went outside to check with the staff. They knew immediately that it was a claymore mine, it’s sound being all too familiar, and they also knew that it had exploded nearby. I had the pc’s cell phone and over the next several minutes received a number of text messages from the local UN Security service:

• “Explosion took place at Kurumankadu junction. Avoid”
• “Kurumankadu junction can be used for movements but the shops closed; military and police are on the street at the location
• “3 EPDP members and small boy killed; 7 civilians injured by the Kurumankadu incident”
  

The junction was only about one kilometre away from our house, much closer than those indicated by the tacks on the map. I had passed through there on a tuk-tuk just 30-minutes earlier. For our staff it was disconcerting because this happened close to where many of them live and shop.

The rest of the day proved to be uneventful. Those of us at the house stayed put and it wasn’t until later in the day that we felt comfortable to transport our national staff to their homes. Steve, an American surgeon, was our only expat at the hospital at the time and he was fully engaged that afternoon. “Days like this,” he would later say, “are why I joined MSF.” It may have just been a coincidence, but the next morning our staff would comment that the past night’s not-so-distant shelling had been heavier than normal.

That same night I heard the news from Pakistan that Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated. I knew that people back home would think that I’m fortunate not to have returned to Islamabad and instead to have gone somewhere safer. Not being so sure I contemplate this theory, knowing that another tack would be added to Jonathon’s map.