By Feizal Samath
NURAICHOLAI, Sri Lanka, Dec 12 1998 (IPS)

As his wife and two children tend their vegetable garden in Sri Lanka’s northwest, Christopher Tissera hobbles around with a stick, dragging a leg that was shattered in police firing last year.

“I haven’t worked for 18 months. It is my wife who manages the farm and the household with our two children,” says the 42-year- old farmer from Nuraicholai, a village in the fertile Puttalam district that produces 40 percent of Sri Lanka’s onions.

Tissera was injured on Apr. 25 last year when police opened fire on some 5,000 villagers who were sitting on a peaceful protest against proposed plans to build a 300-million dollar giant coal power plant on the Nuraicholai beach.

One man died and three others, including Tissera who happened to be there quite by accident, were injured. According to Tissera, he was on his way to buy kerosene oil for his water pump when the police opened fire without warning.

The bullet tore through his right leg, which he is still unable to bend at the hip. His 16-year-old school-going son had to be taken out of school to help his wife and daughter, 19, run the farm.

Nuraicholai, previously a quiet coastal village of mostly Roman Catholic and Muslim farmers and fisherfolk, has been in ferment since plans to establish a 900 MW power project in their neighbourhood were unveiled.

With some 10,000 people in Nuraicholai and neighbouring villagers – a rich sweet-water agricultural belt – likely to be affected, villagers have formed a “residents group” to evict the project from Nuraicholai, its third site after protests forced the authorities to move from two other locations.

Farmers Canisius Peiris and Hyacinth Fernando are at the forefront of the agitation here. “We won’t allow them to dump rubbish at our doorstep,” says Peiris, secretary of the “residents group”.

His neighbour, Fernando, protests that the project was thrust on them. “Just because we are a peaceful community, they think we are meek and can force anything down our throats,” he says.

Villagers fear eviction from the lush green farming belt, and the creation of a security zone that would interfere with their movement. A police post has been put up near the proposed site, abutting fertile vegetable fields and a small fishing settlement, but further work appears to have been temporarily suspended.

“According to our information, the Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund which is providing a Japanese loan for the project has got cold feet after the protests and the project appears to have stalled for the moment,” said Ivan Peter Fernando, a local Catholic priest. Religious leaders of both Muslim and Christian communities are behind the local people.

Officials from the Ceylon Electricity Board, the project authority, admit that the protests have slowed down progress of the project. The project had aimed to meet a quarter of the country’s power requirements by 2004.

Opposition to the project has fed on the lack of transparency from the very beginning by the government. Early last year, project surveyors who were seen measuring the area told residents that it was for a road expansion project.

“They came a few more times and gave different excuses such as a development project – all the time hiding the truth,” says Peiris. It was only in mid-April that the people discovered what was happening and chased away the surveyors, after threatening to beat them up.

Tensions mounted with villagers stoning trucks and vehicles belonging to the Ceylon Electricity Board and felling trees to block the roads. One time the police and security forces were called in to conduct a search of the entire village.

Electricity Board chairman Arjun Deraniyagala has, however, vowed to press ahead, and said villagers’ fears were misplaced – environmental pollution would be minimal – and they were being misguided by non-government agencies.

Earlier protests had forced the Board to abandon plans to site the plant in Trincomalee, eastern Sri Lanka, in 1993 and then in Mawella in Hambantota district, in the island’s south.

After Mawella, the project cost was also slashed by 200 million dollars and the authorities gave no reason. “There is a lot of suspicion about the project and the way it is being done,” declares Saheed Mubarak, social activist in Puttalam.

“It (Board) has been lying and cheating all the way,” hedeclares, explaining that he has been carefully documenting the impact of the project on the land and people.

Mubarak says waste water and coal ash from the plant would pollute the environment and also destroy sea life. He rejects the government assertion that the plant is being built on unused land, saying “one must go to the site to find out who is speaking the truth.”

“This region is rich in agriculture and no one is idle. The people have little time for anything other than work. They are trying to force this plant on us, which they could not do in other areas where there are more aggressive populations,” he declares.

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