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Bystanders to Suffering


A young American journalist finds herself confronted with the stark realities of Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war.

by Maura R. O’Connor
 

This past fall I traveled to work as a journalist in Sri Lanka, the island state known equally for its unparalleled tropical beauty and its violent protracted war. The conflict between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sri Lankan government that finally ended this past May was one of the longest-running insurgencies in Asia. Despite this, the conflict and the country’s deep ethnic crisis remain largely off the radar of the international media. If eighty thousand people die in an earthquake, it’s big news. But if eighty thousand die over the course of twenty five years, as they have in Sri Lanka, it seems the world’s interest cannot be sustained. As journalist David Rieff once wrote, it was an “inchoate idea about witness” that sent him to war zones and places of great suffering around the world. Similarly vague notions—of purpose and obligation, not to mention adventure—guided me to Sri Lanka, where I thought I might be able to use my reporting skills to cover an underreported war.

On the western edge of the capital Colombo, which abuts the Indian Ocean, are the colonial-era hotels where wealthy people go to drink lime sodas and watch the equatorial sun set on the horizon. One evening I found myself attending a dinner at one of these hotels and seated next to a high-ranking UN official. He asked about my work for a local newspaper and then began to describe how enthusiastic he had been about his job when he first arrived in Sri Lanka. A few years later, exhausted by the bloodshed and corruption, he said he wanted to get out as soon as possible. “Eventually, you just realize, ‘It’s not my country. I can’t change it. It’s not my responsibility,’” he said. His comment rattled me. Three hundred kilometers north of where we were sitting, an estimated two hundred thousand civilians were stranded on a small beach without food, water, or medicine. Hundreds were dying each week from artillery attacks. Why, I thought to myself, was the UN in Sri Lanka if it couldn’t help them? Indeed, why were any of us there if this man—who had decades of experience in places of conflict—was right: We can’t change it and it’s not our responsibility.

Sri Lanka

At the newspaper where I worked, I heard echoes of this sentiment from my younger colleagues. To them, it was as though I had squandered my privilege as an American to live there. “Why would you come here?” they asked with disbelief bordering on scorn. “Aren’t there jobs in America?” No matter how I presented it, the idea that I would leave New York City for crowded, militarized Colombo struck them as the dumbest thing they’d ever heard. And, in a way, it was dumb. I left a country that had one of the world’s strongest constitutional guarantees for freedom of the press in order to live in a place where local journalists were often beaten, or worse. I moved from the land of interstate highways to a land where you can’t travel a mile without being stopped and searched by soldiers armed with assault rifles. Sometimes, sitting on a crowded bus in sweltering heat, inevitable paranoid suspicions of suicide bombers creeping around in my mind, the notion of “making a difference” seemed both ridiculous and irrelevant, a plan that could only be hatched by someone who knew nothing of brutality or survival.

The thing is, until I lived in a place where poverty, corruption, and violence are a daily experience for most, I was shockingly unaware of my own inborn sense of freedom, opportunity, and optimism. I was naïve and spoiled, but I didn’t know the true extent of it until I was confronted by an utterly different reality. Being American, it now seems to me, is like standing at the helm of a ship looking through a telescope and seeing unobstructed sea in every direction. Blue. Beautiful. The Future. You have to have the skill and wits to operate the ship, but it’s yours! And you’re entitled to do with it what you want. Before I went to Sri Lanka, I could not conceive of these things through metaphor—even that would have been too constricting. No matter how educated or interested I’d been in the world’s problems, on some fundamental level I always assumed that freedom and opportunity were the wealth of humanity we all shared.

Over the months, I talked with Sri Lankans who came from a radically different perspective. I interviewed a former LTTE child soldier, a young woman who had lost her leg in combat as a teenager and was now afraid to leave her house for fear that her wooden prosthetic would give her away to the military and she would be abducted. I interviewed a priest who explained that people who kidnapped civilians used to burn their victims on tires to get rid of the bodies. Now, he said, they’re dumping the bodies in the sea tied to cement posts. I met an elderly journalist in a hospital the day after he was beaten by a group of men wielding cricket bats. In squalid displaced persons’ camps that felt like prisons, I talked to people who had had their livelihoods, homes, and self-determination taken away. The ship they are standing on? They don’t control it. They can only try and survive the journey. After these experiences, I felt cynical. What could I do about any of this? The problems were so protracted, so violent and complex, that they were beyond my control or understanding. Maybe it was arrogant to think I could arrive and be anything more than a bystander to suffering.

These ideas had taken hold of me when I met an American Jesuit priest, an eighty-four-year-old man who had volunteered to leave New Orleans and travel to Sri Lanka in 1948. Since then, he had lived in a remote town where he championed the local community and witnessed every stage of the civil war. He kept records of thousands of human rights abuses, murders, abductions, rapes. Even when his brother in the Order who had traveled on the same boat from New Orleans was killed by a mob in 1990, he chose to remain in Sri Lanka. This priest is a favorite source for foreign reporters, and every time I visited his office in the attic of an old boys’ school, he always claimed to barely remember me. At the same time, he spent more and more time talking about his experiences through the years. Finally, on my fourth visit, I asked him the question that I was desperate to know the answer to: Why had he stayed for so long? What made him different from everyone else?

He explained that when he became a Jesuit, the decision was rooted in the realization that he had a profound moral obligation to do more with his life. Even at the young age of sixteen, when he joined the Order, he knew that this was a lifelong commitment, and it didn’t matter where they sent him or how difficult it was going to be. He had a “higher motivation.” For more than sixty years, he said, he had seen the aid organizations, the UN, the journalists, and the human rights people come and go. The difference was that his allegiance was not to an institution or a mandate or an idea. “Mine was a bigger commitment,” he said. He never once spoke the word “God,” but it was implicit that his relationship with his Maker was at the root of everything he had done.

Two months later, I came back to the United States. Save for a head full of stories and a keener appreciation for the overwhelming complexity of the world, I was broke, and I justified my departure from Sri Lanka as a wise financial decision. But I nonetheless felt guilty—guilty for leaving the heat and insanity behind and being back in Manhattan 24 hours later, standing in Tribeca at a coffee shop, so seamless it was almost as though I’d never left New York in the first place. I could recognize the kernel of hard truth in what the UN official had expressed to me: In so many ways, we can’t change things, and it didn’t make a difference whether we stayed or went. At the same time, I can still feel glimmers of the incredible elation I experienced when I left the boys’ school that evening in Sri Lanka. It was a sense of conviction that selflessness and sacrifice do exist in the world, despite the complexity, and that I can be more than a bystander to suffering. At that moment, I had a visceral sense of being released from doubt and an immediate, pressing, thrilling sense of responsibility that was purpose-driven, endless, and true.

Maura R. O’Connor is a regular contributor to EnlightenNext magazine and a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.



 

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This article is from
The Evolving Faces of God - New perspectives on the meaning of spirituality for our time

 

September–November 2009