India's beaches are bellwether of Sri Lanka's war

Early one morning last week, K. Thangaraja, a tractor driver from eastern Sri Lanka, stood knee-deep in seawater fearing his end was near. Surrounding him was the murky confluence of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean – the barrier between his home in Sri Lanka and a new life in India.

Five hours earlier, a fisherman pushed Mr. Thangaraja and 19 relatives, some of them young children, from his 26-foot wooden boat and onto a shallow sand bank. "Someone will be along shortly to take you to the Indian coast," he had said, before hurrying off into the darkness.

No one came. Not until 4:30 the following afternoon, when they were nearly unconscious from exhaustion, hunger, and dehydration. An Indian fishing vessel happened to spot their improvised white flags and brought them ashore.

"It was the worst experience of my life," says Thangaraja. "If I had to do it all over again, I would take my chances in Sri Lanka."

Yet for ethnic Tamils now caught in the crossfire of an increasingly bloody civil war between the ethnic Sinhalese dominated government and armed Tamil rebel groups, staying can be an equally undesirable option.

Fighting since August in the northern Jaffna region – considered the heartland of Sri Lanka's minority Tamils – has left hundreds of combatants dead in some of the bloodiest clashes since the government and rebels signed a 2002 cease-fire that temporarily halted two decades of civil war.

Many fear that the near-daily attacks and killings will drive Sri Lanka back to full-scale war, although the government and Tigers say they are committed to the truce.

Since January, over 16,000 refugees from Sri Lanka have fled to the shores of Tamil Nadu, India's southeastern state, where they fan out in refugee camps across the region and receive basic support from the Indian government. The refugees who have arrived in India constitute only a small fraction of the nearly 200,000 people who have been displaced since April. But they represent some of the most desperate cases – those who have given up hope for a quick end to hostilities and are trying to start anew.

"It is an expensive and difficult journey to the Tamil Nadu coast," says Meenakshi Ganguly, with New York-based Human Rights Watch. "These are people who are so terrified that they believe survival is impossible back home."

The number of monthly arrivals has decreased significantly since August, when over 5,700 arrived here; so far this month, less than 200 have attempted the journey. That is partly because of the weather, with rough seas and thunderstorms making the crossing far more perilous in November and December. Many Sri Lankans had also held out hope for peace talks last month in Geneva. The talks collapsed, however, when the two sides disagreed over whether to reopen the major north-south artery that connects northern rebel-controlled Sri Lanka with the rest of the country.

With the recent surge in violence, aid workers are expecting an increase in the number of arrivals in the coming weeks and months ahead. The cost of being smuggled to India is anywhere from 6,000 to 15,000 Sri Lankan rupees, or US$55 to $140. Refugees often sell property or family jewelry to fund the trip.

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