Sri Lankan refugees returning to the country after decades in India confront a harsh reality of homelessness, unemployment and poverty. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, May 3 2012 (IPS)

Krishnaveni Nakkeeran has fled the country of her birth twice and returned twice in the last two decades. The 36-year-old mother of four from the northern Jaffna peninsula in Sri Lanka first fled the bloody civil war to India when she was just 16 years old in 1990.

Her family mistakenly believed it was safe to return five years later and was forced to flee yet again in 1998. She returned again in 2010, barely a year after government forces had defeated the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009, accompanied by her family. The war may have ended, but a harsh reality awaits those like Nakkeeran, returning after years spent in India. “Life has been hard, very hard, we probably work double (here) what we did in India,” she told IPS.

Tens of thousands of Sri Lankans, almost all of them from the minority Tamil community, fled to neighbouring India during the island’s three decades of civil conflict. According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), there are over 100,000 Sri Lankan refugees in India, out of which roughly 68,000 live in 112 camps in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Since the war’s end in May 2009, some of these have begun to return. Last year UNHCR facilitated the return of over 1,700 refugees to the island.

This year has seen a drop of around 30 percent in the number of returning citizens; the latest figures released by the U.N. refugee agency said that 408 persons returned during the first quarter of 2012, compared to 597 during the corresponding period in 2011.

The UNHCR office in Sri Lanka has attributed the drop to the suspension of a ferry service between South India and Sri Lanka, which had allowed for cheaper passage and the chance to bring back more household material.

However, rights groups working with returnees and those still remaining in India speculate that the hard grind awaiting exiles in their old homeland might explain the reduced rate of return.

This is especially true of those returning to the Vanni, a vast swath of land in Sri Lanka’s northern province that weathered the worst excesses of the war.

“They have to start life all over again. During the years of absence, so much has changed in Sri Lanka that it is a new life in a new country that they come back to,” Sinnathambi Suriyakumari, Sri Lanka’s head of the Organisation for Eelam Refugee Rehabilitation (OfERR), that has worked in India and Sri Lanka since 1983, told IPS.

She added that the biggest problem for the returnees is starting from scratch. While there are programmes aimed at assisting internally displaced persons (IDPs) returning to their homes in the former war zone, there is no special programme for those returning from India.

“This is where the problem starts, these people feel as if they are returning to an alien land, especially those without extended family here,” Suriyakumari said.

UNHCR’s representative in Sri Lanka, Michael Zwack, told IPS that returning refugees lacked proper documentation like identity cards, land deeds and birth certificates that they lost during their flight from the country decades ago. The lack of such documentation is a serious bureaucratic hassle.

The returnees, who are given a standard reintegration grant, are faced with multiple other problems that need special attention.

“Shelter is another key challenge facing refugees returning to former conflict areas, as they need assistance with carrying out repairs or rebuilding homes that were damaged,” Zwack said.

Of the roughly 100,000 houses that were destroyed during the final phase of the war, only 16,000 had been built as of February 2012 according to the latest U.N. figures, which also revealed that reconstruction commitments only extend to the building or repair of 35,000 homes.

Meanwhile, the Indian government is expected to commence building 40,000 houses in the region by mid-2012.

The displacement of thousands of families, be they IDPs or exiles in India, has created a serious land issue in the Vanni. “Many land owners in the Vanni still find it difficult to claim ownership over their property, and land issues have become a serious problem,” Saroja Sivachandran, head of the Jaffna- based Centre for Women and Development, told IPS.

The problem of land and housing is worse for those returning from India, since people who fled as individuals tend to return with families in tow, according to Suriyakumari.

She said one returnee from the Jaffna district who left in the mid 1980s with five children has now returned with five full families. “All the children have their own families, and now all of them live on this tiny plot of land.”

Returnees like Nakkeeran are also forced to confront the phenomenon of squatters, people who have lived on others’ land for decades.

“We don’t have our land now, we (are forced) to live with someone else on our own land,” she said.

Jobs, scarce even among the 434,559 IDPs who are slowly trickling back into the Northern province, is even more pronounced among those who return from overseas.

Most of the returning refugees use a 200-dollar UNHCR resettlement grant to make ends meet. “They are free to use the money according to their own priorities to help them restart their lives, for example by purchasing household goods, a bicycle, seeds, or repairing damaged housing,” Zwack said.

Despite all the obstacles, many of those who have returned and others planning to make the journey feel they have made the right choice.

“It is a land of opportunity and hope for them, that is why they come back,” Suriyakumari said.

Residents evacuate the Sri Lankan coastal suburb of Rathmalana, soon after a tsunami warning was issued on Apr. 11, 2012 Credit: Indika Sriyan/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Apr 11 2012 (IPS)

The fear was palpable for Mohideen Ajeemal when he heard the news of an 8.6 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Indonesia on Apr. 11. The last time an earthquake of similar magnitude hit the same area, Ajeemal lost two of his children, a young daughter and an infant son, when massive tsunami waves crashed onto his house on the eastern coast of Sri Lanka on the morning of Dec. 26, 2004.

“When the police jeep began announcing the evacuations, we were already on the move,” Ajeemal, a resident of the village of Sainathimaruthu, in the eastern Kalmunai region, told IPS.

In 2004 there was no such warning and the monstrous waves left 30,000 dead, a million displaced and a reconstruction bill of over three billion dollars.

“This time people knew what to expect, they knew they had to get away from the beach and do that fast,” Ajeemal said.

In double-quick time, the Meteorological Department issued a warning: “An earthquake near Sumatra Island at 02.08pm (Sri Lanka time) today 11.04.2012 has generated a tsunami that will affect Sri Lanka, those living near and along the Eastern and Southern coastal regions are advised to evacuate to safer places immediately.”

The warning came despite the United States government’s Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre failing to issue a formal alert, instead limiting its update on the earthquake to a ‘tsunami watch’. However, local radio and television stations picked up the warning, which was also disseminated by SMS alerts and Sri Lanka’s small but active Twitter community.

Those on the coast, like Ajeemal, were advised by the police to move at least 500 metres inland. “We were asked to remain there till around six (o’clock in the evening),” Ajeemal said. The warning period was later extended when aftershocks hit the island about two hours after the initial quake hit Indonesia’s western coast of Sumatra, in Banda Aceh.

“Almost everyone has moved out of the coast, no one is here,” said Reverend G S K Herath, an Anglican priest from the southern town of Matara. He told IPS that security forces and the police had moved into the areas being evacuated to guard against looting.

“The only people who remain now in the town other than the security forces are journalists and cameramen perched on high-rises, waiting for the waves to come,” Herath said.

The media’s swift response is partly due to the shock of 2004 when the tsunami woke the country, which was deep in its Boxing Day stupor, to the utterly destructive power of natural disasters.

Now, the coast that was pulverized by the 2004 tragedy is dotted with small blue boards on the roadside, indicating higher ground to move to in case of a tsunami.

Just months after the 2004 tragedy, in mid-2005, the government enacted the National Disaster Management Act setting up the Disaster Management Centre (DMC) to coordinate disaster response and early warning.

But the systems have not always worked effectively and have, on some occasions, failed abysmally.

In November last year, neither the Meteorological Department nor the DMC issued a warning before gale force winds hit southern Sri Lanka, killing 29 people, mainly fishermen, and damaging over 10,000 buildings. The two state agencies faced heavy criticism for the fiasco.

However, on Apr. 11, the system seems to have worked smoothly.

“We have put so much energy and resources into the early warning systems after the 2004 tragedy, this time we could find out how effective they were,” Mahieash Johnney, communications and reporting manager for the Sri Lankan delegation of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, told IPS.

The Sri Lanka Red Cross (SLRC) swiftly mobilised its volunteers in coastal areas to help in the evacuations and requested its staff to be available to assist government agencies.

In some areas like the eastern town of Batticaloa, Red Cross volunteers used boats to move people living on islands, or in areas cut off by floods, to safety.

“We will have drills once every three months or so, to keep the people alert on how to face these kind of situations. This time, we had to do it for real,” Johnney said. The SLRC had invested over 1.2 million dollars on early warning mechanisms, with a focus on the eastern coast that was hit hardest in 2004, he told IPS. “It is good to see the investment (paying off).”

Ajeemal added that villagers like him had undergone awareness campaigns since the tsunami on how to deal with such events.

Nandasa, a resident living on the beach in Rathmalana, a suburb just south of Colombo, expressed a similar sentiment. “In 2004, when waters receded before the tsunami came, people took it for a joke, they went out to collect shells. This time no one was taking things lightly, everyone knew what to do and what to expect.”

Still, there were some lapses. As coastal roads were closed, others became jammed with traffic, mobile networks became overloaded and petrol stations in coastal areas ran out of fuel, leaving many people stranded.

But overall, the harsh lessons from 2004 seem to have been learned.

By Amantha Perera and - -
COLOMBO, Mar 28 2012 (IPS)

Most things in Sri Lanka are becoming expensive these days. In early February fuel prices were increased by margins ranging from eight to 49 percent, with the all-important diesel, used widely in commercial transport and power generation, going up by 36 percent. The Sri Lankan rupee that was trading at 107 rupees to the dollar in January surpassed 130 rupees per dollar last week.

Backbreaking ways of transferring agricultural produce also mean wastage. Credit: Indika Sriyan/IPS.

Already electricity, transport and bread prices have increased. Gas and milk foods are also baying at the door for increases but have thus far been blocked by the government. Everyone is getting ready to face the traditional New Year, in mid-April, amidst rising costs.

But not everything is going up in price. Surprisingly, vegetable prices have been at a two-year low. According to data gathered by the Hector Kobbekaduwa Agrarian Research and Training Institute (HARTI), all vegetable varieties have recorded a significant fall in prices.

By the first week of March, beans were down by 50 percent compared to 2011, tomatoes and aubergines by over 60 percent and beetroot by 50 percent. “These are significant drops,” Ajith Rathnasiri, a researcher at HARTI, told IPS.

He attributed the plunge to several reasons, partially to good weather but particularly to the fact that the former conflict zones in the north and east, which had been almost completely cut off from the national market during the three decades of civil war, have been able to keep supplies coming continuously since early last year.

“There are vast areas of land whose harvest is now getting into the national supply centres on a weekly basis,” Rathnasiri said.

Agriculture and fisheries were cornerstones of the Northern and Eastern economies, not only in the pre- war period but even during the conflict. As much as 30 percent, if not more, of the Northeastern economy may be dependent on the two sectors.

With new employment opportunities at a low ebb in the former conflict areas, many of the hundreds of thousands who have returned to their villages since the war ended in May 2009 have begun cultivating small plots of land, or home gardening.

“Some of the most fertile land in the country for vegetable cultivation has traditionally been in the north,” Kiruja Sivasubramaniyam, a field worker with the International Labour Organisation working on agricultural projects in the Northern Vanni district – the vast swathe of land that bore the brunt of the war – told IPS.

The latest United Nations situation update for the region said that field crops’ yields grew by 60 percent during last harvesting season. “Maize achieved its highest cultivation extent reaching about 68,500 hectares. Higher yield is expected in this season for maize, potato, green gram, black gram and ground nut,” according to the report.

“Some varieties, that were traditionally only cultivated in cooler areas in the Central Province, are now grown in the north and east. Sometimes these areas record better yields,” Rathnasiri added.

The yields were so high in February that tomato prices plummeted to around 10 rupees (less than one cent) per kilo.

“Whereas a year back, the main national distribution station at Dambulla would get around 600,000 to 700,000 kilogrammes per day, in February we saw twice that much coming in.”

Other factors like cheap fertiliser, high-yielding seeds and a national policy that encourages small-scale agriculture have also helped, Rathnasiri said.

But the high yield is not without its own pitfalls. A high harvest sometimes means large losses to farmers who fall victim to buyers’ price-fixing, as a small group in the village of Olumadu, in the Northern Vanni’s Kilinochchi district discovered midway through 2011.

The villagers had enjoyed a bumper crop of aubergines but ended up making a loss as buyers drove the market down to as low as eight rupees a kilo. “Even now we are having difficulties selling some varieties at a profit,” said Chitra Gurukularaja, a cultivator in Dharmapuram, in Kilinochchi.

Researchers at HARTI say that farmers are making losses because they don’t plan ahead. “When one variety makes a profit, everyone will go for that, then the prices are automatically pushed down,” Rathnasiri said.

According to L.P. Rupasena, HARTI’s deputy director of research, the country lacks an integrated agricultural sector. “We don’t have information going back and forth, we don’t have a system where farmers will look at data and assess the market,” he told IPS.

One of the biggest dupes farmers face right now is seeds. In this unregulated market, importers often dump three times more than the national requirement of popular seed varieties onto the market.

“That is why we have so many tomatoes now, because there is an over-supply of a fast-maturing imported seed variety,” Rathnasiri said.

Rupasena told IPS that the only way to avoid such pitfalls is to develop a regulated and integrated market. But he warns that it is not easily achievable.

“We can’t get our farmers to shift to crates, they still prefer burlap or coconut fibre bags,” he said, referring to last year’s island-wide protests against a government policy forcing farmers to transport their produce in wooden crates.

Experts like Rupasena say that crates could reduce wastage during transport from as much as 30 percent to negligible levels.

However, “(agriculture) still remains largely an unregulated, unprofessional sector, despite its national importance,” he concluded.

Excerpt:

By Amantha Perera and - -
COLOMBO, Mar 22 2012 (IPS)

As the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) voted in, Thursday, a resolution asking Colombo to act on recommendations made by its own Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), Buddhist prayers reverberated through the Sri Lankan capital.

President Rajapksa has vowed not to allow outside interference in Sri Lanka's affairs. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

As expected, Sri Lankan leaders rejected the resolution. Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe, head of the Sri Lankan delegation in Geneva, termed it as misconceived, unwarranted and ill timed. “Shouldn’t we be given more time and space?”

But, two years and 10 months have elapsed since the Sri Lankan military decisively ended this island’s three-decade-old civil war, and the majority of UNHRC members thought it was time Colombo acted to safeguard the rights of the Tamil minority on the island.

Thousands of civilians died as the war ended in 2009 with a bloody offensive into the northern areas of the country where the militant Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was then entrenched.

The U.S. – led resolution was passed with 24 voting in favour, 15 against and eight abstaining in the 47-member U.N. body.

“It is a matter of great satisfaction to us that 15 countries voted with Sri Lanka, despite the intensity of pressure, in a variety of forms, exerted on them all,” said G.L. Peiris, Sri Lanka’s foreign minister, in a statement.

“As far as Sri Lanka is concerned, our policy in respect of all matters will continue to be guided by the vital interests and wellbeing of the people of our country. It hardly requires emphasis that this cannot yield place to any other consideration,” Peiris’ statement said.

Significantly, Sri Lanka’s ally and influential neighbour, India, voted in favour of the resolution. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had indicated to Indian parliament, on Mar. 19, a shift in stance by a country that had stood with Colombo against U.S. and European moves to bring the war before the UNHRC in 2009.

An Indian official statement said the Sri Lankan government had committed at the UNHRC in 2009, to “forge a consensual way forward towards reconciliation through a political settlement respecting all the ethnic and religious groups inhabiting the nation.”

India urged Sri Lanka to “take measures for accountability and to promote human rights that it has committed to. It is these steps, more than anything we declare in this Council, which would bring about genuine reconciliation between all the communities of Sri Lanka, including the minority Tamil community.”

“As a neighbour with thousands of years of cordial relations with Lanka, with deep-rooted spiritual and cultural ties, we cannot remain untouched by developments in that country,” the Indian statement said

Rights activists in Sri Lanka told IPS that the UNHRC resolution’s impact on the country would be symbolic.

“The symbolism is that many countries have expressed their assessment that the country has not lived up to their expectations in terms of international human rights obligations,” Ruki Fernando, head of the human rights in conflict programme at the national advocacy and research body, the Law and Society Trust, told IPS.

Fernando said much now depends on “whether the government is willing to move ahead with the LLRC recommendations and work with the Council as suggested in the third recommendation in the resolution.”

Established in September 2010 by President Mahinda Rajapaksa to look into the conduct of the war from 2002 till May 2009, when it ended, the LLRC handed over its final report with the recommendations last November.

Indications, in the build up to the vote in Geneva, suggest that the government is unlikely to cooperate. Sri Lankan delegation leader Mahinda Samarasinghe told UNHRC that his country would inform it periodically on progress, voluntarily, as it had done even before the war.

Barely 24 hours before the vote, President Rajapaksa told a public meeting in the northwestern town of Puttalam that he would not allow any form of foreign intervention.

“This is the second battle we are facing, after the war (against the LTTE),” Wimal Weeravansha, minister for housing, told another packed rally in Colombo on Mar. 13.

Weeravansha who has been leading public protests against what he terms as attempts by West to interfere – he launched a fast-unto-death in mid-2010 before the U.N. offices in Colombo that only ended when the president intervened – called on Sri Lankans to boycott U.S. products, including Coca-Cola and Google.

The overwhelming sense at public rallies is that Sri Lanka and the Rajapaksa government are being targeted by Western powers for independent policies and alignment with powers like China, Russia and India.

Tamil political leaders have a completely different view and support the U.N. resolution.

The Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the largest party representing minority Tamils in parliament, said that it was pushed to support the resolution because of the government’s lethargy in acting on power devolution and feels that only international prodding will help.

“The government has not done anything towards finding a solution (to power devolution) but has been going on according its own agenda. We have no option but to ask for international support,” TNA parliamentarian Suresh Premachandran told IPS.

“The LLRC is the government’s own baby. But, it has not even implemented the interim recommendations of the LLRC. We strongly feel that these issues cannot be solved without international participation,” he added.

The resolution, however, avoids reference to war crimes or an international investigation, as called for by international rights groups like Amnesty International, the Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group.

The final draft said assistance from the UNHRC will be obtained “in consultation with, and with the concurrence of, the government of Sri Lanka” – reportedly through Indian influence.

These nuances are, however, no reason for a change of heart from the supporters of the government on the streets.

“This is a veiled attempt to influence our country, to make sure that they (West) can set up a proxy administration here,” said Waragoda Premarathana, a Buddhist monk who had taken part in the Mar.19 rally.

Excerpt:

By Amantha Perera and - -
COLOMBO, Feb 29 2012 (IPS)

Strung across the main road leading away from the international airport is a banner that has an intriguing message: ‘USA, Pls Do Not Support Terrorism’.

Most of the other large billboards and banners on the same stretch are also directed at visiting tourists, but these are less political and exhort them to visit beach locations or buy jewellery.

The banner is part of a government campaign to thwart or at least discredit a United States-led resolution to be tabled at the ongoing session of the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) that began in Geneva on Monday.

The resolution calls on the Sri Lankan government to detail how it plans to act on the recommendations made by its own Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), according to U.S. assistant secretary of state for south and central Asia Robert Blake.

The LLRC was set up in May 2010 by President Mahinda Rajapaksa to inquire into the civil war and related events between 2002 and May 2009, when the conflict finally ended. It presented its final report in November 2011.

The Sri Lankan government has steadfastly rejected international intervention into the conduct of the final phase of the war, despite mounting allegations of rights abuses. So far, it has successfully resisted all attempts to bring on international scrutiny.

In May 2009, as the war was ending and government troops were mopping up the remnants of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Sri Lankan diplomats in Geneva were able to quash a resolution at the UNHRC calling for an international inquiry.

The South Asian nation, backed by India, China and Russia, was then able to get passed a counter-resolution hailing the victory of government forces.

Since then, however, the diplomatic atmosphere in Geneva has changed. Colombo appears shaken by the impending resolution, with high-ranking government officials publicly dubbing the move by the U.S. as intrusive intimidation.

“President Rajapaksa had challenged the conflict management theory introduced by some Western countries. They have named Sri Lanka a country engaged in human rights violations,” youth affairs minister Dullas Alahapperuma told media a day before the Geneva sessions were to start.

“At a moment when they should be supporting Sri Lanka’s revival, they are trying to impose their will on us,” Alahapperuma complained.

Mahinda Samarasinghe, minister and leader of the Sri Lankan delegation at Geneva, said as the sessions began: “We are of the view that this (resolution) could be perceived as undue interference with internal processes of recovery and reconciliation containing strong elements of prejudgement and the application of double standards.”

The government, Samarasinghe said, had in fact begun to implement some of the LLRC recommendations. He was referring to the army and the navy setting up internal inquiries to ascertain whether there were any rights abuses.

Separately, the attorney-general’s department too has begun interviewing some of those who gave evidence at the LLRC.

However, rights activists say that the government needs to show a consistent intent that it is serious about carrying through the LLRC recommendations, rather than reacting when calls for international scrutiny are heard.

“It has to set up an apex body, with possibly the president at the head, to carry out the recommendations. Then it would be clear that the intent is there,” Jehan Perera, executive director of the Colombo-based advocacy body, the National Peace Council, told IPS.

Perera believes that despite the criticism, the final report of the LLRC does give the government a vital entry point into national reconciliation after three decades of civil war. “It is a very important document, one that gives a lot of opportunities.”

Other activists say that widespread protests – some 150 were held in various parts of the country on Feb. 27, mostly organised by ruling party legislators – were unlikely to create any kind of pressure in Geneva.

“I don’t think protests here will change anything in Geneva. Any resolution in Geneva is usually negotiated for several months and weeks,” Ruki Fernando, head of the human rights in conflict programme at the advocacy body, Law and Society Trust, told IPS.

Fernando felt that the government was trying to drum up support by harping on charges of a foreign conspiracy against an independent leadership.

“I think it’s misleading to call this a resolution against Sri Lanka,” said Fernando. “How can a resolution that calls for the implementation of our own LLRC’s recommendations, dealing with accountability issues that the LLRC couldn’t address and having an action plan and road map with specific timelines be against Sri Lanka?”

No official version of the resolution has been made available, but leaked drafts indicate that it will call for the implementation of the LLRC recommendations.

In August 2011, the government acknowledged for the first time, in a report, that there were civilian casualties in the final phase of the war, but did not give any numbers.

The report was released soon after a U.N. experts panel spoke of tens of thousands of people having been killed in the last months of the war and deliberate shelling of civilians.

Excerpt:

On the eve of the Feb. 27 Human Rights Council Session in Geneva, during which human rights advocates had hoped the issue of alleged wartime abuses in Sri Lanka would finally be put to rest, the Sri Lankan government announced its appointment of a five-member court of inquiry to investigate laws of war violations during the first five months of 2009.

Soldiers at the funeral of a man who was fatally shot during a protest of the government's pension scheme. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Sources like U.N. spokesperson Gordon Weiss, informed by real-time bulletins and post-war reports from grassroots agencies, doctors, survivors and international NGOs operating in the country’s northern and eastern warzone, posit that the war ended in a “conflagration of grenades and gunfire”, killing tens of thousands of civilians and leaving hundreds of thousands shell-shocked, maimed and homeless.

The Sri Lankan government, meanwhile, insists that it performed a “No Civilian Casualties” humanitarian operation in the last days of combat during which it rescued countless Tamil civilians from the clutches of the Tigers and ferried them to safety in government “welfare camps”.

Backed by allies such as Iran, Burma, Libya and China – the latter of which plied Sri Lanka with over a billion dollars worth of aid and military hardware between January and May 2009 – the Sri Lankan government has, for the last three years, managed to stall U.N. Security Council resolutions and ignore the recommendations put forward by the U.N. panel of experts’ fact finding mission in Sri Lanka, deferring instead to its own Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) to establish a roadmap towards justice and accountability.

“This government has a long record of setting up commissions and not implementing their recommendations,” Elaine Pearson, deputy director of the Asia Division at Human Rights Watch (HRW), told IPS.

Given that the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war was “one of the worst episodes in U.N. history – including failure to even table a discussion while the abuses were taking place – the HRC really must take this forward,” Pearson added.

She stressed that the U.N.’s decision to respond relatively quickly to the Arab Spring, even in highly controversial cases like Libya and Syria, suggests that bringing Sri Lanka back into focus would be not only timely, but also essential in the spirit of justice for the victims of war and for the sake of consistency in international standards.

However, “The Sri Lankan army’s announced inquiry appears to be a transparent ploy to deflect a global push for a genuine international investigation, not a sudden inspiration nearly three years after the war,” Brad Adams, Asia director at HRW, said in a press release Wednesday.

“This inquiry, coming on the eve of a possible Sri Lanka resolution at the Human Rights Council, looks like yet another cynical and meaningless move,” he added.

Various human rights groups have also expressed incredulity at the fact that Lt. General Jagath Jayasuriya – the man responsible for commanding all security forces in the Vanni, a region that weathered intense fighting during the last stages of the war – was in charge of appointing the army court of inquiry.

“An inquiry appointed by the commander who oversaw and was a colleague of senior officers who might themselves have been implicated in serious abuses cannot possibly be expected to be an independent and impartial finder of facts,” HRW said.

Yet this process is indicative of a larger, much more insidious trend in Sri Lanka today, where, despite a so-called declaration of peace, the presence of the army in nearly every aspect of civil and political life in the former warzone has raised the ire of the Tamil people and a slew of human rights organisations across the country.

The North and East remain the only places where former military personnel hold key government posts, including that of governor and government agent – the highest-level district officer in the country.

Many rights advocates believe it is a “shame” to see Sri Lanka’s once-proud civil service fall piece by piece into the army’s hands.

The government insists that these measures are both necessary and temporary. Earlier this year, Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa proclaimed that troops “are maintaining an absolutely essential presence” throughout every district in the country.

He added that the government has accomplished unprecedented post-war development and should be lauded for its efforts rather than chastised as “human rights abusers”.

But voting patterns in the Tamil community ever since the war’s end suggest that roads and water wells matter less to a politically disenfranchised people than personal dignity and a political voice.

Though well over 70 percent of the island turned up at the ballot boxes for the January 2010 presidential election, only 18 percent of registered voters in Jaffna made the trip to the polling stations.

This was largely chalked up to the fact that scores of Jaffna residents had fled during the war or were incommunicado in the government “welfare camps”. But every subsequent election since then suggests that the Tamil people are hungering for political representation.

Despite a dearth of election promises beyond land, language, resettlement and self-determination, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) have won everything from parliamentary elections to pradeshiya sabha (local government) elections since 2010, Ruki Fernando, head of the human rights in conflict programme at the Law and Society Trust in Colombo, told IPS.

“Unlike the government, the TNA did not have the capacity to promise a massive development programme – yet the Tamil people voted for them, proving that they cannot be bought over by schools, buses and hospitals. Their votes have been an absolute rejection of the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime. In elections that the government itself declared to be free and fair, this government was fairly and squarely beaten (in the North and East),” Fernando added.

In essence, the TNA has been all but stripped of its political efficacy by the presence of the military, which answers to a higher power than the will of the people.

*This is the second of a two-part series on Sri Lanka in the aftermath of its three-decade civil war.

With the Feb. 27 session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) looming on the horizon, human rights watchdogs are making yet another push to get Sri Lanka onto the agenda – and once and for all settle the issue of alleged wartime abuses that the government continues to deny.

Nedunkerni village limps back to peace. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

In a recent letter to UNHRC permanent representatives, members and observers, Human Rights Watch said, “Almost three years after the end of the military conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the government has not kept its commitments to the people of Sri Lanka, the U.N. Secretary-General, and the Human Rights Council to undertake credible measures to provide justice and accountability for the widespread and serious wartime abuses.”

In fact, far from taking steps towards accountability, the Sri Lankan government has embarked on a process of intense militarisation of the formerly rebel-held areas of the North and East, which, according to local and international advocates, could be the death knell for any meaningful reconciliation process after the 30-year-long civil war.

An internal report circulated in early January by Sri Lanka’s National Peace Council notes that very little effort has been made to facilitate a transition from an environment of war to one of normal, civilian life.

A senior NPC policy advisor speaking under strict condition of anonymity told IPS that the main road from Jaffna to Kilinochchi is dotted with checkpoints every few thousand metres, outposts that hint at the level of control deeper inside those areas, where the military has become the dominant institution of both civil and political life.

By various NGO estimates, 35,000 Sri Lankan troops are still stationed in Jaffna alone, overseeing a population of 626,000 people – roughly one soldier to every 18 citizens, including women, children, the elderly and the sick.

“Even in the most interior villages it is impossible to walk or travel by motorbike for even five minutes before seeing, encountering or being stopped by a soldier,” Ruki Fernando, head of the human rights in conflict programme at the Law and Society Trust in Colombo, told IPS.

“The presence of military personnel is very different in Colombo, where they are mostly hailed as war heroes. But in the North and East, civilians are forced to walk among soldiers who bombed their homes and villages, killed their family members, abducted their loved ones and engaged in physical and sexual abuse – this is hardly a recipe for reconciliation,” he added.

Same day, different uniform

It is a widely acknowledged fact that a necessary part of human healing is the expression of grief. But in the North and East, the military has rendered collective grieving virtually impossible by tearing up graveyards thought to contain fallen Tigers, buried amidst civilian remains; razing memorials to the ground and paving over historic battle sites where once school children had laid flowers and lit candles for their martyred parents.

Having lived for 30 years under the LTTE’s steel-toed boot, Tamil civilians had hoped that the war’s end would bring a chance to eke out a living and rebuild their lives, but the military’s omnipresence appears to be stifling every possibility for the largely impoverished population.

“The army is blatantly obstructing people who are trying to develop themselves economically by taking over a range of commercial establishments and sectors,” Fernando said.

The NPC and the Law and Society Trust – both well-respected human rights defenders – have extensive documented evidence of the army’s creeping presence in the economy, including scores of army-run restaurants alongside major highways; military-owned farms, souvenir shops and grocery stories; navy control over fishing and the transportation of food as well as the civil-military coordination website listing “tourism” as one of its primary services.

Even more troubling, according to NPC, is “the appropriation of land in Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu and Vavuniya for agricultural purposes; the presence of soldiers at all civilian activities, including temple or church meetings; and family gatherings such as weddings, naming of a child and even funerals requiring prior permission from the nearest police post.”

By the defence ministry’s own admission, a new security forces complex complete with air-conditioning and conference halls was built at the princely cost of 40 million rupees (roughly 360,000 dollars), even at a time when funds for refugee relocation, humanitarian aid and livelihood development have been virtually bled dry.

The International Crisis Group recently carried out an in-depth study on the particular impact of militarisation on women, who occupied an unusual social space during the LTTE’s three-decades-long reign and are now bearing the brunt of the post-war nightmare.

Many women and young girls became hardened cadres, forming the ranks of the LTTE’s female wing, Birds of Freedom. Others rose swiftly to the head of tens of thousands of households, as men and teenage boys were absorbed into the Tiger’s armed forces.

“That women must (now) rely on the military for everyday needs not only puts them at greater risk of gender-based violence, but also prevents them from building their own capacity within communities,” the ICG report said.

“Fear of abuse (at the hands of the army) and the reassertion of patriarchal norms within the Tamil community have further restricted women’s movement and impinged on education and employment opportunities,” said Robert Templer, Crisis Group’s Asia Programme director.

The LTTE spent years developing a complex and coercive centre from which to dictate civil and political life. While its collapse is doubtless a blessing for thousands of civilians, “the devastation of the final year of war and the replacement of the LTTE in effect by the military and its proxies negate the gains for these communities,” the report concluded.

“All of this is very harmful to reconciliation,” Fernando told IPS. “How can people move on when the harassment and language discrimination that led to the conflict in the first place is ongoing? When you are not allowed to farm or cultivate? When children are disappeared and their mothers are left without a trace?”

“While many people around the country are celebrating the end of the terrorist threat, people in the North and East feel that nothing has changed, except the uniforms of the armed forces who are controlling their lives – in reality, they are still living under a military occupation,” he concluded.

*This is the first of a two-part series on Sri Lanka in the aftermath of its three-decade civil war.

It’s a new year, a new beginning but probably a harsher reality in Sri Lanka’s former war zone. As the country enters its third year since the end of a bloody sectarian war that tore the nation’s fabric apart, for many of the survivors of the worst fighting, a tough but true reality is dawning. Life in peacetime may yet be a hard struggle.

The north of Sri Lanka carries the scars of war. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS.

More than 236,000 had returned to the Vanni by the end of 2011, according to the government, and only around 6,500 people now remain displaced. When the war ended there were close 300,000 who had fled the battles, most escaping the fighting with nothing in hand.

The war is over but a newer struggle is just beginning – one to make a decent living in peacetime. That option is much harder under the scorching Vanni sun than it appears on paper.

Whatever help there was is drying up fast. The Sri Lankan government and the U.N. made a joint appeal for 289 million dollars in 2011 for work in the Northern Province. By the time the appeal was closed at the year-end, only 93 million dollars had been raised, a shortfall of almost 70 percent.

Sri Lanka received 170 million dollars in other aid, according to the UN, but given the needs of the war- devastated region, massive amounts are still needed. Such support would be needed for years to come.

The U.N. is yet to spell out how the shortfall would be handled, whether some projects would be postponed or curtailed. There has been substantial input for setting up permanent housing, but in fields like economic development, education, civil administration and water and sanitation, facilities are running short, according to a report by the Asia Pacific Regional office of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Thailand.

U.N. officials in Colombo are reluctant to make predictions. “It’s difficult to predict the level of funding for 2012 as fund-raising continues throughout the year,” Sulakshani Perera spokesperson for the U.N. High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Sri Lanka told IPS.

On the ground, more and more people find it hard to get by. A World Food Programme (WFP) assessment in October last year found that more than 60 percent of the population in the Vanni lacked enough income generation levels to be classified food secure. WFP also found that 1.1 million people in the Northern Province owed sums as high as six months average income, because they had got into debt buying food. The WFP said that despite funding constraints it did not cut down on rations distributed.

No government figures exist on this, but unemployment in the Vanni is estimated to be around 20 percent, five times the national rate. About 30 percent may be earning less than a dollar a day. The WFP survey last year found that more than half the Vanni population lived below the poverty line of a spending power of one dollar a day. There is the very real possibility that things will get grimmer.

UNHCR’s Perera said the agency was gearing up to work under tighter budgets this year. “UNHCR will continue to protect and assist our persons of concern, within the constraints of its funding from donor nations,” she said.

People in the Vanni need any help they can get, not cutbacks. “The main source of income is agriculture, but I have not met anyone who can still support a family without any help in the Vanni,” said 70-year-old Sellaiah Thiyagarasa from Oddusudan village. He worries that economic woes will be exacerbated by the lack of jobs.

“When we came back after the war, there was nothing left for us. No one can expect us to regain a lifetime in two-and-a-half years, we need help,” said 40-year-old Thurairaj Krishnasingam from Tharmapuram village.

For those who have returned and live in interior villages like Oddusudan in the deep Vanni, there are few options. With employment generation low and likely to remain that way at least in the short term, many are trying to take matters into their own hands rather than wait for help. Cottage industries like chicken farming, bee-keeping and home gardening are becoming popular as returnees try to make the fertile earth around them work for them.

“These are popular because you can easily find a market in your own villages,” Kanagasabapathi Udayakumar, general manager of the Vavuniya North Multi-Purpose Cooperative Society (MPC) in Nedunkkerni village told IPS.

But these are limited options, and it is a bitter test that awaits the war returnees – that of grappling with making a living in peacetime.

Every weekend it has been the same ritual for so many months. Buying the newspaper, going through the classified and the employment sections inch by column inch, marking job offers that could offer a chance, even remotely.

Unemployment among women is almost three times higher in Sri Lanka. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS.

“I don’t know, but for some reason I have never got a job,” Hathurusinghe told IPS. She is qualified, holds a post-graduate diploma and speaks passable English. But she says that jobs on offer for women like her are far too few for the ever-increasing applicants.

Her friend has had a similar experience despite the two short employment stints; no jobs in the last year and a half. “I think women are getting a raw deal,” she said.

Such inability to secure a job is common in Sri Lanka where unemployment rates among females are higher across the board. The latest labour force data released by the government’s Department of Census and Statistics listed overall unemployment at 4.2 percent by the middle of last year. The figure changes when men and women are taken separately.

The more educated women like Hathurusinghe and Ganegoda are, the higher the rate of unemployment. “The highest unemployment rate was reported from the General Certificate of Education Advanced Level (university entrance exam) and above group which was about 7.8 percent,” the government report said.

“They were 4.4 percent and 11.6 percent for males and females respectively. This shows the problem of unemployment is more acute in the case of educated females than educated males.”

Experts point out that many women with higher education qualifications tend to wait for a job of their choice, like teaching, or in the public sector. “Many educated young women wait for what they consider a suitable job. Hence, the period of time taken to obtain a job can be fairly long,” Harsha Aturupane, lead education specialist for the South Asia Region for the World Bank told IPS.

Ganegoda, who has for the time being suspended her search for a job to complete a masters degree falls into this waiting category. “I did not study this hard to go for just any job, I will wait for the right job,” said the graduate in mass communications. She says the sense of security afforded by a government job and retirement benefits still lure many graduates to the public sector.

Another reason could be an oversupply of arts graduates; more than a quarter of those who graduate from Sri Lankan universities have arts degrees. They find it hard to secure high paying private sector jobs, while public sector openings are limited.

“Not having skills for available ‘good jobs’, the white collar jobs with benefits and good work conditions in the market, is also a reason for the high level of unemployment,” Nisha Arunatilake, fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka told IPS.

Social practices are also in the way of women. “Unlike males, females are not flexible about working long hours and moving out of (the capital) Colombo for work. So they wait for jobs with more attractive working conditions mainly in the public sector,” Arunatilake said.

Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, a Sri Lankan research fellow at Monash University in Australia calls for a fundamental change over attitude to working. Women, Sarvananthan said, should take up jobs in more sectors, while society should actively encourage the process.

Employers still tend be nervous over women taking time off on maternity leave. “The child-bearing role of women and patriarchal family roles and norms also limit employment opportunities for females by design or choice. This is an institutional bias against female employment,” Sarvananthan said.

“An equal opportunities law should be instituted in order to stamp out structural and institutional discrimination against women in the labour market. That is, discrimination of women in the labour market should be outlawed.”

Excerpt:

By - - and Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Dec 23 2011 (IPS)

Seven years after monster waves crashed into homes, hotels and vehicles on Sri Lanka’s coast, people in this island nation continue to be haunted by demons from the sea.

For those who lived to tell the tale of how 30,000 souls perished on that fateful Boxing Day in 2004, the slightest change in the mood of the sea is enough to send a chill down their spines.

Udayam Sujatha, who survived the tsunami after being dragged some way by the waves, now lives with her husband near the coast in the eastern town of Batticaloa. “I sometimes hate the sea,” she told IPS.

Yet, thousands of people who live in the numerous towns and villages along the coast have set aside their fears and managed to put their shattered lives back together again.

In Weligama, a small town with a scenic bay about 140 km south of the capital Colombo, residents say they are slowly coming to terms with the tragedy, although they are periodically reminded of how destructive nature can be.

One month before the seventh anniversary of the Asian tsunami Weligama lost 14 people and 11 were listed as missing when gale force winds and rains hit the area.

Most of those killed or reported missing at Weligama on Nov. 25 were fishermen out at sea when the winds roared in. In all, 29 were killed and over 8,800 houses damaged along the southern coast.

“The whole area is like a giant funeral now,” said Chandana (one name), a fisherman from Weligama. “The last time something like this happened was in 2004. We never thought that the sea demons would come back so soon.”

All along the coast there are reminders of what started out as a calm December morning seven years ago. About 50 km north of Weligama, at Peraliya, stands a large replica of the Bamiyan Buddha statue facing the ocean, erected with funds from Japanese donors in memory of those who perished.

A little distance away stands another memorial where a packed train was swept off its tracks by the waves. Over 1,000 died inside carriages that later were to become sought after props for TV stand-ups.

The beaches are dotted with reminders of the tsunami. Near Sujatha’s home there are three monuments listing the names of people who died.

There are also large, newly constructed villages. Tsu-chi village in Siribopura in southern Hambantota district has 1,000 houses built for those who had lost their homes in the tsunami.

Every year mourners gather at the beach on Dec. 26 to remember all those killed in the tragedy, though the memorials are becoming less elaborate.

“We have been getting over it,” said Chandana, the fisherman from Weligama.

Till the tsunami Sri Lankans did not pay much attention to natural disasters. But since then there has been heightened emphasis on disaster mitigation and early warning.

In May 2005, five months after the tsunami struck, parliament enacted a law to set up a Disaster Management Centre (DMC).

But as the tragic events of Nov. 25 show, the island is a long way away from preparedness. No early warning was issued before the gale force winds swept ashore despite all the investments in disaster preparedness.

Pradeep Koddippilli, the DMC assistant director-in-charge of early warnings, told IPS that the centre had not received any warning from the meteorology department tasked with assessing dangerous weather events. “We kept contacting them repeatedly through the 25th, but there was no warning,” he said.

Despite the millions spent on setting up early warning towers and networks, a recent assessment by the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released in November said that the meteorology department, in fact, lacked the technical capacity to predict rainfall and fast moving weather patterns.

“The U.N. assessment confirms the technical capacity of the department of meteorology needs to be further developed in order to enable it to deliver reliable quantitative rain forecasts,” said the report titled ‘Disaster Response and Preparedness Assessment Mission to Sri Lanka’.

Experts told IPS that multiple dissemination systems are at the disposal of the DMC – ideal for a country where communication infrastructure is poor in rural areas.

In addition to the 67 warning towers set up island-wide, the DMC can also tap into the wide network of public officials at the village level, volunteers with the Sri Lanka Red Cross Society, secure satellite communications and, at least, one national mobile network to send out alerts.

“You cannot say what is the best system because each one has its own strengths and weaknesses. What is important is to have several systems to make sure vulnerable communities receive warnings in time,” Suranga Kahandawa, disaster management specialist at the World Bank, told IPS.

However, none of the networks was working when the gale struck, and there was no warning. Experts said that awareness on how to respond to different warning levels was also poor among communities.

“We need to raise community awareness levels so that they understand clearly the various levels of public messages,” Indu Abeyarathne, project manager (early warning) at the Sri Lanka Red Cross Society, said.

Abeyarathne said many tend to mistake initial alerts as an evacuation order. A typical reaction was seen this week when rumours spread in some parts of the country of a tsunami, when the DMC had announced it would be conducting a drill on Dec. 20 afternoon.

While the psychological scars are healing with time, the biggest demon of all appears to be the one of unpreparedness for the next natural disaster.

Excerpt: