RIGHTS-SRI LANKA: Ethnic War Makes Villagers Homeless at Night

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

DEWALUGODALLE, Sri Lanka, Sep 12 2000 (IPS) - Every evening, Mary Nona takes a pillow and sheet from her home in this north-eastern Sri Lankan village and walks to another hamlet to spend the night.

She has done this almost every day for more than 10 years to escape possible night attacks by Tamil Tiger rebels. Dewalugodalle is close to the region where the armed separatists are battling government troops.

“By five or six in the evening, we leave our homes and go to a village about four kilometres away to sleep at night. We return in the morning,” says the 37-year old. “This is our life. We are used to it,” she adds.

Nona is a member of Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhalese community and among the thousands of people in the country who have been displaced from their homes by the violent Tamil Tiger insurgency.

For nearly two decades, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have been carrying out a terror campaign in the Indian Ocean island nation. The Tigers are demanding a separate home for Sri Lanka’s minority Tamil people, alleging discrimination by the Sinhalese.

The Colombo-based office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), estimates that some 800,000 of Sri Lanka’s 19 million people have been displaced from their homes by the ethnic violence. Three- fourths of these are women and children.

The rice-growing hamlet of Dewalugodalle is close to a ‘no man’s land’ zone, which is controlled by government troops by day. The rebels stalk the area at night.

Nona has worked as a housemaid in Saudi Arabia on two separate occasions, but came back to be with her family.

“How can we stay abroad when our family is suffering?” she asks, leaning against the door of her house. Inside, there are valuables like a television set, an electronic music system and an electric pedestal fan. But the family leaves these behind at night.

Most of the men and women here work as farm hands on the rice fields, which are owned by people living in another village.

“We need the jobs and the money. So we can’t leave the village and settle elsewhere,” says Damaris Wijepala, another Dewalugodalle resident. However, over the years, people have been leaving the village with only 20 of the 150 original families remaining.

The Tamil Tigers have attacked the village twice in the past. The first attack was years ago on a nearby police post, but the rebels also gunned down three men and four children in the village.

In the second attack, three months ago, the Tigers abducted a man who had not left his home for the night. His body was found in a small stream the next day.

A few residents, armed with weapons, do spend the night in the village, which is surrounded by a shrub jungle. A small army post with 15 soldiers was set up near the village a few months ago to protect the people during the day.

“We allow the villagers to work in the fields only till five in the evening for their own protection,” says an army officer.

The army post is in a house, its walls pock-marked with bullet holes. It is situated near a small bridge leading to a once-famous Buddhist temple. A notice near the bridge says: ‘No one allowed beyond this point.’

No monks live in the temple now. Before the violence broke out, devotees came from as far as Colombo, some 250 km away.

The only school in Dewalugodalle has less than 50 children on its rolls, who often play outside the classrooms because of a shortage of teachers and teaching material.

“We don’t have qualified teachers and some youngsters in the village have taken up short assignments as volunteer teachers,” says village resident Wijepala.

Dewalugodalle is one of several such villages in this region. A study of some of these hamlets by non-governmental organisations, describes the traumatic daily life of the inhabitants.

“Any noise frightens residents. Children suffer the most. They imagine gunshots and explosions at the slightest noise, having experienced such psychological trauma,” said the study by the Fact-Finding Commission on Border Villages in north-eastern Sri Lanka.

“The prolonged war has generated abnormal conditions that need to be corrected immediately; otherwise the long term impact on the people living there will be devastating,” the report noted.

It advised the government to implement policies recommended by a United Nations report on children and armed conflict.