"In that first, revealing hour, when impressions accumulate as if pressed upon a blank surface, all that I saw that could be called Sri Lankan were police units, barricades that turned the road into a kind of driver's training track, and army units equipped with automatic rifles and submachine guns. … There are checkpoints along the road beneath the wall, which rings what amounts to a large military quarter. Drive past one of these and you may be stopped and your papers checked. This procedure might take five minutes, or twenty-five. In such situations the police are free to detain you as long as they wish and to ask you anything they wish, and if you are Sri Lankan you are best advised to set constitutional legalities aside and answer them. Patrolling police and army units enact the same scene more or less constantly all over the city. Whatever the necessity of such exercises, there is a subliminal message in them: If Sri Lanka is anyone’s space, it is theirs, not the space of its citizens. Public space is now military space. ... It is this collapsed consciousness that accounts for one of the strangest characteristics of the Sri Lankan people. Amid all the wreckage, amid all the murders and disappearances and abuse, this macabre silence prevails. No atrocity seems to stir them. If anything, the greater the atrocity the deeper the silence. Only the few still know the importance of raising their voices. And among these, still fewer have devised ways of doing so. A friend in Colombo once described Sri Lanka by saying simply, "ours, an ugly country." He meant the brutality, the bloodshed, the corruption, and so on. One must consider whether it is not the silence of the living that is most truly unattractive." Excerpts from the book

[Published in March 2008 by the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), 204 pages, ISBN 978-962-8314-36-2]