RIGHTS-SRI LANKA: Muslim Refugees To Lose Land to the Law

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

KALPITIYA, Sri Lanka, Aug 15 2000 (IPS) - Habib Mullah longs to go back home, far from this small fishing town on Sri Lanka’s north-western coast where he lives with thousands of others like him.

Sitting in his thatched roof hut, his clothes hanging on a rope strung between cardboard walls, which partition the house, the middle- aged peasant worries about his small farm, which he left behind 10 years ago.

“Can we go back with the situation like this? We are worried that we’ll lose everything we have back home,” he says, referring to the ethnic violence that drove him and the other Muslims out of their home in the north-western town of Mannar.

Tens of thousands of Muslims, who are Sri Lanka’s third largest community, fled Mannar in October and November 1990 when Tamil Tiger militants ordered them to leave the area or face death.

For the past 17 years, Tamil Tigers have unleashed a terror campaign, demanding a separate home for the minority Tamil people in the north and east of the Indian Ocean island nation.

Mannar had a mixed population of Tamils, the country’s second largest ethnic group, Muslims and a few Sinhalese, the majority community.

Like Mullah, Sithy Nazira is also worried about her land. “I would like to know what would become of the land,” says the Muslim woman who fled Mannar with her eight children.

“If there is no problem we can go back, but can we? I think of my little plot of land back home and how we tended it,” she adds, breaking down in tears.

Mullah and Nazira live in the Kandakuli refugee camp in Kalpitiya, some 175 km from the Sri Lankan capital. They arrived here by boat 10 years ago with the other Muslim refugees.

They are worried about losing the land they left behind, because under Sri Lankan laws, owners forfeit land they have not occupied or used for a continuous period of 10 years.

The land can be claimed by anyone who has occupied and used it during this period. The Muslim refugees from Mannar do not know if anyone is living on their land.

Rights groups are trying to help the refugees. The Colombo- based Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), a think-tank and rights advocacy group, is backing a petition before the state-run Human Rights Commission (HRC), seeking justice for the Muslim refugees.

“The HRC is trying to formulate some amendments to exempt internally displaced people from the prescriptive law which allows non-owner users of land, possession on the grounds of continued, uninterrupted occupation,” CPA director, Rohan Edrisinha, told IPS in Colombo.

The petition has been filed by the Citizens Committee for Forcibly-Evicted People, a group based in Sri Lanka’s north- western region.

The ethnic crisis has displaced more than half a million people who live in refugee camps or homes of relatives across Sri Lanka. However, government officials say the land problem immediately affects the Muslims from Mannar.

“Except for the Kalpitiya refugees, others have not been displaced for periods of more than five years, so they don’t have this problem right now,” says an official in Colombo.

The refugees in Kalpitiya work with the local fishing community, cleaning and mending their nets and boats. The women help gather the onion harvest on the farms, being paid one rupee for each kilogramme.

Community workers in the refugee camps say the Muslims are worried not only about their land back home, but also about losing the right to vote.

S.M. Mubarak, a local development worker from the nearby town of Puttalam, says the Muslim refugees are being denied voting rights.

“The constitution guarantees the right of residents to vote from wherever they are, but these refugees haven’t had voting rights for the past 10 years,” says Mubarak, who is with a non-governmental organisation (NGO) working in the refugee camps.

According to CPA’s Edrisinha, his group and others are also fighting for the rights of internally displaced people to vote and access to basic services.

Rehabilitation officials say education and health care are provided to the refugees, though these are of a temporary nature. However, children of refugees often face hostility from local youngsters in schools, say officials.

The prolonged presence of the refugees in their midst is also causing worry to the locals. Mohamed Careem, who owns some of the land on which the refugee camp has been set up, knows the chances of the refugees returning to their homes are remote.

He is worried that he will never get back his land. When the refugees first arrived, local officials appealed to residents to provide land to house these people. Careem says he gave his land because he felt sorry for the refugees.

“I can’t even pluck the coconuts on my land because they’ve already been taken by the refugees. For the remaining nuts, I have to get a coconut plucker. We cannot pick them with a stick because this will damage refugee huts,” he complains.