DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [33]
Little Renu was used to turbulence like this. It had punctuated his life from an early age. Five years earlier, in July 1983, he was evacuated from Colombo when still only six years old. Tamil militants had murdered thirteen soldiers of the Sri Lankan army. Taking revenge, a Singhalese mob slaughtered hundreds of innocent Tamils in Colombo, the capital, triggering a sustained civil war, which only came to an end twenty-six years later.
Sitting tight in Colombo as Singhalese gangs marauded through the city was no longer an option, and so Renu’s parents packed up and took their three children to Jaffna, the main centre of the Tamil community in Sri Lanka. Lying at the northern tip of the country, Jaffna was separated by only fifty miles from the south-eastern coast of India. It was also the stronghold of militant Tamil guerrillas. Resistance to the Singhalese-dominated government in Colombo was growing.
It was not long after Renu’s move that the unpredictable violence of civil war and insurgency started to creep ever closer to his new home. By 1987 government troops were laying siege to Jaffna, battling with various armed groups, notably the LTTE, the infamous Tamil Tigers. The number of refugees streaming from the city into southern India across the Palk Strait reached a critical mass, persuading the government in New Delhi that it had to act. In a deal reached with the Sri Lankan government, the Indians sent a large peace-keeping force into Jaffna to oversee a peace agreement.
Before long, relations between the Indian peace-keepers and the Tamil Tigers had broken down and once more Jaffna became one of the most dangerous cities on Earth. In October 1987 Indian troops were responsible for the massacre of several dozen innocent civilians in the city’s main hospital, the only incident during a quarter of a century of civil war that united the Colombo government and the Tigers in their outrage. For Renu and his family, the risks of staying in Jaffna were too high and so they trekked back down south to Colombo.
One afternoon, Renu’s father asked the young boy to buy some groceries. Renu had never seen so many rupees and he stuffed them in his pocket, along with the list of things to get. On the way to the shops, he spotted a man by the side of the road playing a game. There were three pots and underneath one of them was a pebble. Renu watched as people placed their money against one or other of the pots after the deft entertainer switched them around at lightning speed. Renu was mesmerised and shocked that the players consistently failed to find the pebble, and yet he had guessed right every time. He wriggled his way to the front of the queue and pulled out his father’s crumpled banknotes. One by one they were scooped into the man’s pocket as Renu failed to guess the right pot, just like those before him. The more he lost, though, the more frenziedly he placed his bet. Oblivious to his losses, he just couldn’t stop himself – until there were no more notes and his little body, woozy with adrenalin, was suddenly overcome by a cold sweat and a vision of his father’s hand raised high above his head. He never gambled again.
In the years since they had left for Jaffna the capital had calmed down somewhat, although the safety of Tamil residents was never fully assured, as the raid on their house by the military made clear. But the options for Renu’s family were running out.
Not yet in his teens, Renu had spent much of his life toing and froing between the frying pan and the fire, sometimes literally avoiding the crossfire. Soon after the army’s raid on the house, when a birthmark almost made a terrorist of the young lad, Renu’s grandmother decided that his situation as a Tamil coming of age in Sri Lanka’s capital was too perilous. He might either be tempted to join the Tigers or fall foul of the nationalist Singhalese groups