A Long Watch: War, Captivity And Return In Sri Lanka

By Charles Sarvan –November 18, 2016

Prof. Charles Sarvan

A Long Watch by Commodore Ajith Boyagoda, as told to Sunila Galappatti (Hurst & Company, London, 2016)

So few know, and “those who know will be the last to tell”. (From a poem by Henry G. Lee, 1915-1945; US prisoner-of-war of the Japanese; died in captivity.)

People did not want to hear my story (Ajith Boyagoda)

Incarceration has proved productive because some individuals have refused to accept stone walls as a prison or iron bars as a cage (lines adapted from the poem, ‘To Althea from Prison’, by Richard Lovelace, 1617-1657) while Lord Byron in his poem, ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, celebrates the mind that cannot be chained. Nehru wrote Glimpses of World History while in prison; Mandela’s autobiography which Boyagoda read several times (perhaps A Long Watch is an echo of the title of Mandela’s book, A Long Walk to Freedom) was smuggled out of prison; the Kurdish leader Abdulla Öcalan, still in prison as I write (November 2016), published The Roots of Civilization, and Mohamedou Ould Slahi his Guantanamo Diary, reviewed by me in Colombo Telegraph, 28 February 2016. However, A Long Watch differs in that it is a post-prison memoir. The highest-ranking prisoner of the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) Boyagoda, while being watched, watched. But “watch” is also appropriately nautical: on ships at sea, there’s someone on watch round the clock. (The watch on the ‘Titanic’ saw the iceberg too late.)

With disarming candour, Boyagoda writes that though he had been a sportsman at school, he had “neglected his studies”; employment was not easy to find, and when he joined the Navy in 1974, aged twenty, he “had no thought of dying for my country”. (Naively, he assumed it was just coincidence that all twelve recruited were, like him, Sinhalese Buddhists.) On 19 September 1994, his ship was attacked and sunk, one of the attack-boats consisting of female Black Sea-Tigers. Ironically, being captured also meant rescue from drowning (p. 71). After spending eight years as a prisoner-of-war, Boyagoda was exchanged for the Tiger’s Kennedy (nom de guerre), the one who “had led a group of nine cadres in infiltrating the Palaly air base in August 1994” (p. 190). He wryly observes that he had been a prisoner of one of the most ruthless terrorist organisations in the world; people talk about the Tamil Tigers all the time; he lived with them for eight years and yet, most strangely, no one ever wanted to hear his account (xi). I will return to this aspect later.

On capture, his gold chain was taken but when he complained, it was returned (p. 78). There was no forced-labour imposed on the prisoners. “LTTE paramedics came to see us every day. Yes, every day, in every place we were held” (p. 128). Food parcels sent by their families were meticulously handed over, so much so that between “the ICRC and our families we had better treats than our captors” (p. 170). When a fellow prisoner, Hemapala, fell ill and died, the body was given a gun-salute before being handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross (p. 153). It will be interesting to compare the treatment accorded to Tiger cadres captured by the government, male and female – that is, those who were not killed. One awaits testimony from that side.

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