bombs

This is how it begins

Had a lunch meeting with a partner at Slave Island. After lunch, one of our staff members gets a call to say that there has been a bomb blast in Fort (ten minutes away from where we are).
We frantically try to call staff/friends who are known to be in the area. No response as all the networks are frozen and only high-priority military communication can get through (so as to also not incite immediate communal violence)
.
We get into a car and put on the radio and the news filters through: General Sarath Fonseka, the new military commander under the new administration is dead after a bomb blast inside the high-security army headquarters.

Silence inside the car. This marks the beginning. We had all expected it to start soon, but probably in July and certainly after the Geneva peace talks had finished their second round. Such a deliberate and successful suicide bombing is provocative. It will result in increased army clampdowns and brutality in the Northeast which will in turn provoke a violent response by the LTTE. It means escalation and immediate escalation at that.

As we drive back the calls and messages start flooding in. Everyone is safe. I get back to the office and make sure we have emergency contact details for everyone. The other news filters in slowly: a female suicide bomber, almost certainly from the LTTE, blew up the General's 5 bodyguards and herself. The General himself looks like he will survive. The attack it turns out was not successful. But then these politicians have always had nine lives.

It also means that Colombo is not going to be immune to attacks and as someone said, every day when we go to work now, we do not know whether we will come back. It is this culture of fear and uncertainty that is most difficult to live with. And even that I could live with. What I fear is the day that communal violence will begin and even the most pacifist amongst us will be turned into raging bloodthirsty mobs, hunting down Tamils and Sinhalese to kill. Like in July 1983.