f o r e i g n p a r t s larger black population into compliance with a social order in which they willingly submitted to complete domination by whites’.
There were attempts to temper the most brazenly illegal excesses of this system. In 1903, Alabama’s federal prosecutor, Warren Reese, even secured some unlikely convictions. Yet within months, the perpetrators had been pardoned. The use of forced labour continued well into the 20th century, until eventually a combination of changing social attitudes and increasing impracticality caused it to peter out.
The period covered by Blackmon’s book saw post-Civil War America grow from a divided nation into a global superpower. In the South, a large and prosperous middle class emerged. But for thousands of African-Americans, deprived of access to the vote and a fair justice system, and forced to work without wages or freedom, this was still an age of slavery.
Douglas Blackmon’s long catalogue of suffering does not make easy reading, and would be improved by removing the occasional rhetorical flourishes in which he imagines the fate of the convict labourer a little too creatively. Nonetheless, it is an extremely valuable piece of history, and Blackmon sums up its importance for contemporary America effectively in his conclusion, stating that only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery’s grip on American society – its intimate connection to present-day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to millions of black Americans, the shocking nearness of its true end – can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life.
To order this book for £10.39, see the Literary Review bookshop on page 45
As Asian countries such as the Philip- pines, Burma and Thailand, among others, contemplate how to resolve longrunning ethnic insurgencies, there is always the ‘Sri Lankan option’ to consider now. Much touted by the Sri Lankan government, this was the winning strategy deployed against the Tamils in the north of the country over the winter months of 2008–9. The Sri Lankans even held an international conference in 2011 to show everyone how to do it. Rather than a lot of boring jaw-jaw and months, years maybe, of messy give-and-take, the Sri Lankan option, as summarised by Frances Harrison, is to use ‘brute military force’: ‘it involves scorched earth tactics, blurring the distinction between civilians and combatants, and enforcing a media blackout.’
If any politician or government seriously contemplates this formula, even for just a second, then they should immediately be locked away in a room and be given Harrison’s book to read. For Still Counting the Dead chronicles in overwhelming and often horrific detail exactly what the Sri Lankan option means in practice. Having fought an on–off guerrilla war for decades against the Tamil Tigers, the Sri Lankan army in the end decided simply to erase them, their villages, their families, their whole way of life, in a final assault that ended on the island’s idyllic northern beaches in an orgy of killing and blood-lust.
The numbers who died during those final months are hotly disputed, and Harrison goes into some detail on the matter. Suffice to say that estimates vary from about 25,000 up to 150,000. One of the r i c h a r d c o c k e t t
The Last Days of the Tamil Tigers
Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Hidden War
By Frances Harrison (Portobello Books 259pp £14.99)
awful truths of the final defeat of the Tigers is that, despite the scale of the atrocities (including what were clearly war crimes), we still know so little about it; the Sri Lankan authorities rigorously excluded anyone from the killing beaches who might have borne some objective witness to what happened.
So, as Frances Harrison, the BBC’s correspondent in Colombo in the early 2000s, couldn’t be there herself, she has done the next best thing, meticulously assembling a range of witness accounts by those lucky enough to have escaped. Harrison talks to a teacher, a Tamil Tiger fighter, a nun, a journalist, a doctor, and a rebel mother, among others, and they all give searing and convincing testimony as to what really happened to the Tigers, and the Tamil population as a whole, as the Sri Lankan army tightened the noose.
These accounts are not for the squeamish. What is clear, though, is that, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, the Sri Lankan army targeted not only civilians in the open, but churches and even hospitals – anywhere that might have been regarded as a sanctuary for the young, the sick and the injured. The ‘safe zones’ designated by the Sri Lankan army to, they claimed, protect civilians turned out to be cruel hoaxes.
Take the account of the doctor whom
Harrison interviews. Dr Niron worked in a makeshift hospital with a large red cross painted on the roof. He would phone in the exact location of the hospital to the Sri Lankan army in the expectation that this would spare it bombardment. In fact, the exact opposite happened. The doctor shared the location of his hospitals seven times, and each time the buildings were attacked ‘within a matter of days, if not hours’. The locations of five other, smaller hospitals, however, with no red crosses on their roofs, were never disclosed to the army and they were never even targeted. Without the red crosses to identify them the Sri Lankan army’s drones that circled above the battlefield clearly never spotted them. Dr Niron thus concludes that the army was deliberately shelling hospitals: ‘They were attacking purposefully: they wanted to kill as many as possible.’
What provoked such savagery, such inhumanity? One of the chief virtues of Harrison’s book is that while she expertly skewers the Sri Lankan army for its actions, she is equally level-headed about the Tamil Tigers. Her sympathy for the Tamil people doesn’t in the least blind her to the cruelty and self-destructiveness of these ‘freedom fighters’. After all, these were the people who perfected the modern use
Literary Review | f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 3 8
