Whose truth? > A Tiger for Tamil Eelam > Before the genocide

As a young man, Father Xavier married a Sinhalese woman. That was before the genocide in the 1980s that killed thousands upon thousands of Tamils. In those days, he would not have believed the tensions between the Sinhalese and the Tamils would lead to civil war. He first realized how serious things were when he took his son to a hospital in Columbo for a medical test, and the doctor refused to see him.

"He looked at me, and I looked at him," Father Xavier remembers. "I became very emotional. I said can you please ... he said no. And then it came to my mind: something is happening that is very serious, that even in a situation when a child is sick, there is no acceptance of us, and soon afterward the riots started."

That was 1977. The refusal to treat a Tamil child was the least of what was to come. After the election, there were horrific reports of Sinhalese thugs locking up buses filled with Tamil passengers and setting them on fire, women and children being raped, and Tamil villages where most of the men had been killed. Together with his Sinhalese wife, Xavier began visiting refugee camps filled with Tamils. As a counsellor and theologian, his help was desperately needed.

Atrocities and refugees

"During the riots, there were children who were thrown into the fire who escaped," he remembers. "There were cases in which young women saw their father being tied to a tree and gasolined to death and their mother raped. The stories were horrendous, so at that time I went to Vavuniya area, in order to help the refugees."

Father Xavier sent photographs to Amnesty International and to churches in the West, documenting the stories. In the spring of 1983, he was arrested and evicted from the camps. Church officials ordered him to leave Sri Lanka for his own safety. But those 12 years in the refugee camps had made him a different person. "I think what happened to me was my whole psyche changed. I myself was made to feel I am not worth a person, my child could not even get an examination at a government hospital, how much more were those people suffering who were disenfranchised."

And he came to believe that Tamil people must have their own state, Tamil Eelam, and that the Tigers were their only hope of achieving a separate state. Along the way, it's transformed his understanding about the traditional Christian teachings of forgiveness, of bearing the cross.

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