September 1996
Dear Friends,
My name is Peter Leblanc and I am a recently arrived Peace Brigades International volunteer in Sri Lanka. If you know about Sri Lanka, you know that the country is in the throes of a long-running civ il war. In the midst of this and other conflicts, the PBI team responds to requests for accompaniment from people who have been threatened for working nonviolently for peace, development, or the prot ection of human rights in their country. Last month Yvonne Beaudry (Canada) and I travelled to the town of Trincomalee for a field visit and escort. The following violent incident at a guest house pai nts a small part of the picture of life in Sri Lanka.
Yvonne was napping, and I had gone out for a bike ride around Trincomalee. I turned up the quiet street to our guest house, and it was crowded with people. I entered the courtyard to find Army soldie rs searching the roofs and hallways and questioning the guests and the owner's family.
A guest came over to me to tell me what happened - he spoke in Tamil, a language I don't understand - but I could tell from the look on his face and the deliberateness of his actions that it was bad. And then I saw the owner's daughter-in-law and her son; both of them were covered in blood, her foot newly bandaged.
Just one half hour before, two men came to the guest house asking for the owner's son. When he emerged from the family residence, the two men drew pistols, shot him, and fled. Wounded in the shoulder and side, he was sped to the hospital and has survived.
The man who was shot is one of only a few Tamil officers in the Sri Lankan Army, which is primarily Sinhalese. Trinco is a town in the war zone where people raise their families, attend school, farm, fish, go to movies, work and play. Under tight control by the army, many people feel almost safe here, even though the front line of the war is only a few miles away. But the price of this uneasy fe eling of safety is checkpoints, round-ups and cordon and search operations. Even so, things happen. Hit and run squads squeeze into town, walk into a guest house and shoot a man in front of his famil y and guests.
And so, a curtain of fear descends on the minds and hearts of the people who live here and my own. I was ready to get OUT of there and fly back to the U.S. and leave the work of PBI in the hands of p eople who have more courage. And suddenly, I understood how important Peace Brigades is _ for thirteen years, people have been living under these conditions, and our escorts and presence help these p eople do their work, when otherwise they may be immobilized by fear. Peace Brigades helps lift the curtain for some very courageous people in Sri Lanka.
I invite you to help make it possible for PBI to maintain this team in Sri Lanka and teams elsewhere in the world. The majority of our financial support comes from people just like you; without you we would not be able to keep our teams in the field.
In peace,
Peter Leblanc