Ocean currents have a lot to do with why intrepid or displaced humans arrived at the low, skinny and scattered spits of sand now named Maldives many years before they landed on the single, larger and more elevated island now known as Sri Lanka. But somehow, Maldives has been spared pain that has so repeatedly and savagely visited Sri Lanka (known as Ceylon for most of the 19th and 20th Centuries).
Somehow, far-flung and low-lying Maldives has never experienced a damaging hurricane or tsunami while, in 2004, the entire 360-degrees of Sri Lanka’s shoreline was devastated and more than 35,000 people died in a late December tsunami. Only Indonesia suffered more casualties. It’s a sore point among Sri Lankans today that so much attention went to the tsunami’s effects upon Thailand but the world still knows so little about the greater suffering in Sri Lanka.
Maldives came under protection of the British in 1887 and was a dependency of the Crown Colony of Ceylon until 1948. All rather peaceful. However, the land that is now Sri Lanka has been contested by the Portuguese, Dutch and British, was a part of and then parted painfully from the British colonial empire, and ended the last and began the current century with savage civil war which claimed more than 100,000 lives over 25 years.
Maldives is almost entirely a one-religion nation (Islam by its 1997 Constitution), but Ceylon — and Sri Lanka since 1972 — has a volatile ethnic and religious mix. Efforts to establish a single national language further inflamed violent passions. The troubles sent many expats home and delayed the economic benefit of tourism by more than a quarter century.
While exploring Sri Lanka recently I was reading Mosquito, a novel whose story begins in the 1990’s but whose setting included places we were visiting. Author Roma Tearne describes the pull and power of writing, painting, homeland and love, even in the midst of senseless and gruesome violence which characters on both sides of the conflict note is not being widely reported around the world. As with the tsunami, news of Sri Lanka’s civil strife did not travel well.
JER
ALL OVER THE MAP 