For 20 years or more it was a combat zone, a frontline and a strategic asset. Now light traffic travels down the narrow A9 highway.
From the checkpoint at Omanthai, where Sri Lankan soldiers and fighters from the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam (LTTE) once exchanged their dead, to Elephant Pass – scene of fierce battles in the 1990s – all is quiet. The Tamil Tigers are no more. This territory, once their de facto state, is now very much part of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka.
Soldiers patrol the narrow strip cleared of mines and jungle beside the road. Every hundred metres there is a bunker. Every mile or so is a major base. A few shops have opened, mainly to serve the troops.
The returning refugees whose makeshift homes are scattered in the scrubby forest around the A9 exist on food rations and occasional days of paid labour. At kilometre 254 is a giant roadside advertisement for a bank. "Welcome to Kilinochchi," it says.
Until the town was recaptured by the Sri Lankan army in January 2009, Kilinochchi was the administrative capital of the Tamil Tigers. Only a handful of local reporters have been permitted to visit the former territories held by the LTTE, who were fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority, since the bloody and controversial end to the 26-year civil conflict in May last year. The Guardian was the first international media to report from Kilinochchi and environs, travelling independently but with government permission last week. [See footnote]
A year after the end of the war, some life is slowly returning to Kilinochchi. Though devastated during the fighting, around a third of its population has now come home. Many more former residents remain in the refugee camps further south and make trips to the town to rebuild their houses. Much of the town remains ruined and by far the highest structures are military communication masts.
Muttaya Sandalingam, 50, had travelled from Jaffna to see what had happened to her house. She had left Kilinochchi at the start of the war in the early 1980s. "Nothing remains," she said. "It has been destroyed. I don't really know what to do."
All traces of the LTTE have been systematically removed in Kilinochchi. The town was the administrative base for the Tamil Tigers, who set up a police force, a court system and a functioning bureaucracy. The only evidence of their presence is a signboard outside the derelict courthouse and the enormous shattered water tower that, military officials say, the retreating rebels tried to destroy with dynamite when they evacuated the town.
The office where LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, killed at the war's end, received visitors is now occupied by government officials. Other buildings – the fleeing rebels stripped their tin roofs and window frames – have simply been razed. Whole streets are rubble.
There has been construction as well as destruction – and not just of vast military camps. The A9 itself has been resurfaced, making the drive through the former LTTE zone, at least by South Asian standards, swift and comfortable. New electricity lines have been installed. Military engineers and a bevy of international NGOs are steadily clearing the mines that are strewn throughout the forests and swamps of these fertile plains.
More controversial projects are a large Buddhist shrine – the Tamils are largely Hindu, the Sinhala majority largely Buddhist – in the centre of the town and a vast war memorial which consists of a 4m by 4m cube of concrete fissured by an oversized brass bullet and sprouting a lotus flower and a flagpole. The grass around it is impeccable. It is guarded by jumpy soldiers who permit no vehicle to stop near it, let alone any photographs.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa, from the Sinhala majority, has made no secret of his distaste for any compromise political deal to grant a greater degree of autonomy to Sri Lanka's Tamils.
Instead, Rajapaksa, who won landslide victories in presidential polls in January and parliamentary polls last week, is banking on economic growth to overcome the legacy of a bloody conflict and decades of discrimination. The bank advertisement on Kilinochchi's outskirts is not unique. Others along the A9 promote baby food and mobile phone networks.
Yet conversations with locals in Kilinochchi reveal that economic growth may not overcome deep resentment. Many tell how they lost relatives in the last days of the war when mixed civilians and fighters, many without arms, were bombarded. "We were so close together that every shell hit people," said Basanda Kumar, a mechanic whose father and aunt were killed in the conflict.
Kumar, 30, said he felt "sad" and "nervous" when he saw the Sri Lankan army in the town. "Look at the temple. The army rule this place now. It belongs to them. It was the LTTE who made demands on the behalf of the Tamil people. Now there is no one," he told the Guardian.
Another source of resentment is the Sinhalese tourists who now pass through Killinochchi. Most stop to photograph the ruined water tower where a small fly-blown market has sprung up, including stalls selling refreshments.
Uppali Lyanage, a 47-year-old retired naval officer from Colombo, and his wife, Pritika, had travelled with their family so their children "could see their country". "We are very proud of our president and of our soldiers," Lyanage said. "The local people have been very hospitable and very welcoming and we have felt no ill-feeling at all. It is in the nature of war that people die."
Some locals expressed relief at the end of the Tamil Tigers who, they said, had made themselves unpopular by forcibly conscripted young people. "Tamil, Sinhala, Hindu, Buddhist, LTTE, government, all that is finished now," said Mayuran Shivalingam, a 17-year-old who now earns a living as a day labourer.
Around the town are the huts, roofed with corrugated tin given along with mosquito nets and basic kitchen and washing utensils to "returnees" when they leave the refugee camps. Sudaheran Vanida came back last month to the patch of land where her house once stood. Living on lentils and rice, with no cash income, Vanida, 27, nonetheless said she was "looking forward to a good future now there is peace".
All along the A9, herds of cattle graze blithely in the minefields. Many were abandoned by fleeing refugees and have wandered freely since. There are many calves, and in the evening the herds collect by the water-filled ditches and old craters by the roadside to drink. Around them, the small, scattered fires that mark the tents of returned refugees die out one after another.