Yes, this was a hotel called Lagoons Edge. It was built as a resort hotel, a place for parties—it had a dance floor. It was right in the heart of the war zone overlooking the massive lagoon where hundreds if not thousands of people probably died. When I talk about people, both sides, soldiers as well as LTTE and civilians, would have died there. It's a place where Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, wanted to sprinkle flower petals in commemoration of the dead. It's one of those quite eerie places where a lot of blood has been shed. To have a sort of party hotel there, owned, run, and promoted by the Sri Lankan military, was pretty crass.
On top of that, the military has been grabbing land from civilians for, it says, future hotel developments in that area. You have to remember the coast along that eastern stretch is stunning. It's very beautiful.
As well, the military has created a sort of terrorism-tourist trail, where you can go as a Sinhalese tourist—primarily it's the Sinhalese who go from the south—and you can see the LTTE leader Prabhakaran’s bunker and his various weapons, and you can see how the LTTE leader operated his prisons, and this kind of thing. In a way, it’s run by the army, or certainly the facilities around it. There are souvenir shops and cafes. It's obviously a very one-sided view, but beyond that it's also, I think, about keeping the bogeyman of the LTTE alive. I think the government needs to keep the fear psychosis going among the majority of the Sinhala community, and that's what this is about.
There's a real problem about the military in the north more broadly taking over many of the economic roles that normally would be left for local people to do, and pushing them out of these areas. We hear about a lot of cultivation of agriculture in military camps, for example, which then puts local farmers out of business.