A bittersweet homecoming for Sri Lanka’s displaced Tamils

JAFFNA: When Balasundaram Rasamalar finally got back her home in Sri Lanka’s battle-scarred north after years of military occupation, there was an unexpected problem. The toilet was still in the militarised zone – where civilians are not allowed.

Sri Lanka’s army this year began returning land it has occupied since the end of a decades-long separatist conflict to its original owners in the Tamil heartland of Jaffna.

The move followed the election in January of President Maithripala Sirisena, who stood on a promise to bring about reconciliation with the island’s Tamil minority.

But the process has created new boundaries that have split communities – and even individual homes – creating fresh resentment.

Before 1990 some 10,000 families were estimated to live in Varuthalai Vilan, which lies south of a military airbase that served as one of the main staging posts in the battle against the Tamil Tiger rebels.

Many, like Rasamalar, have been living ever since in camps for the internally displaced.

For the around 1,200 that have now returned, it is a bittersweet homecoming – all the houses and temples bear the scars of decades of fighting, and only a handful of villagers have been able to reclaim their property in full.

Rasamalar’s neighbour got his water well back, but his house remains inside army-occupied territory.

Another villager faced the opposite problem: able to return to the house but with no access to water.

Village chief S. Sugeerthan said people were hopeful when the new government began handing back military-occupied land this year, but he added, the military’s continued claim over some private land six years after the war ended was not justified.

“The military released 600 acres here in March, but from that they took back a 40-acre enclave for themselves,” he said as he pointed to newly erected fences.

The fences force residents to make a detour of about 50km to travel from one end of the village to the other – a distance of just four kilometres.

Sri Lanka has won praise for starting to hand back land seized by the military after the end of one of South Asia’s longest and bloodiest ethnic wars that claimed over 100,000 lives between 1972 and 2009.

But President Sirisena is under international pressure to do more to restore normality and ensure reconciliation in an ethnically divided nation. — AFP