On May 18, some 800 women in Sri Lanka’s northern region will hold Hindu religious ceremonies for the welfare of thier husbands who disappeared or surrendered to the military as it moved in to mop up nearly three decades of armed Tamil separatism.

“These women continue to live in hope even though many of those Tamil men may have died in the last days of the fighting,” says Shreen Abdul Saroor, a prominent rights activist working with conflict-affected women in northern Sri Lanka.

“On the other hand, even if they do acknowledge that their men have died, they don’t want to be known as widows as that could result in them being seen in a negative light in the community,” Saroor explained to IPS. “They prefer to be known as single women or as women heading households.”

Traditionally, Hindus consider widows to be inauspicious and the religion does not favour remarriage. Tamils, who form 12 percent of Sri Lanka’s 20 million population, mostly follow Hinduism while Sinhalese, who make up 74 percent of the population, are predominantly Buddhist.

According to government estimates, the ethnic conflict has widowed 59,000 women, the bulk of them in the Tamil-dominated north and east.

With rehabilitation tardy and options to earn money few, many women have been compelled to resort to sex work to earn a livelihood and provide for their families.

“We try to wean them away from sex work but they say they have no choice,” says an activist asking not to be named for fear of reprisal. “We provide the women with condoms and give advice on contraception as protection.”

The government is selective about permitting non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to work in the north. Only NGOs involved in development work – housing, livelihood development and infrastructure – are allowed in, while those that raise awareness on issues like peace, trauma or women’s rights are discouraged.

“The moment you say you are from an NGO, there are issues,” says Saroor who is founder of the Northern Mannar Women’s Development Federation and the Mannar Women for Human Rights and Democracy.

Saroor, one of four winners of the first ‘N-PEACE’ award, instituted by the United Nations Development Programme last year, says abuse of girl children is now a major problem in the north and with 26 cases recorded in the last three months alone. Many more cases go unreported.

The N-PEACE (Engage for Peace, Equality, Access, Community and Empowerment) strategy supports women in leading community recovery and peace building in the networked countries of Nepal, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste.

There is concern that the atmosphere of uncertainty, caused by lack of resources, broken families and the absence of responsible males, has impacted the security of young girls.

“In one case, a nine-year-old was abused. Women say they are scared to leave their homes fearing for the safety of their children. So how do we provide them a livelihood?” Saroor asked.

The problems of women in northern Sri Lanka are enormous with their inability to speak out a major hurdle in the post-conflict healing process.

“They have no opportunity to tell their stories,” says Shanthi Sachithanandam, executive director of the Viluthu Centre for Human Resource Development that works with conflict-affected women. “There is an urgent need for counselling.”

The government has repeatedly denied charges by Western countries and international human rights groups that large numbers of civilians were killed in crossfire and aerial bombing in the months leading to May 2009.

Journalists were not permitted into the war zone and NGOs and humanitarian agencies asked to leave, with the result that there are no independent versions of what may have happened in the killing fields of the north.

In March, the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council passed a United States-proposed resolution calling for implementation of recommendations made by Sri Lanka’s Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) as a measure of accountability.

The LLRC, appointed by the government to look into issues relating to the conflict from February 2002 to May 2009, called for a probe into allegations of deliberate attacks on civilians and the prosecution of those responsible.

Rights groups working with war widows and mothers who lost their loved ones, fear repercussions if they dare to speak out publicly on sensitive issues.

When Seela (not her real name) spoke to reporters some weeks ago about a northern village where women have turned to sex work en masse, she and other members of her organisation received threats.

“These women are very vulnerable. We are very concerned about their plight and want to help them liberate themselves from this trap but there is not much we can do without support from the state,” she told IPS.

Seela said the lack of awareness of birth control methods has led to illegitimate babies being born and reports of spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Visaka Dharmadasa, founder and chair of the association of war affected women and parents of soldiers missing in action, said a clearer picture would emerge when a survey being conducted by her organisation is completed in June.

“No comprehensive study has been done on the software issues (fate of the missing and trauma) in the north and the east. Only the hardware (infrastructure and development) is being addressed,” she said.

“Widows of (government) soldiers are better off economically than widows in the north and the east, but in both cases social and psychosocial issues have not been tackled. These are major challenges,” Dharmadasa said.

According to Sachithanandam rehabilitation in the north has been difficult with loans for livelihood development and empowerment failing to reach the intended beneficiaries.

“Multilateral agencies say women are key to post-war reconstruction. But the women are confined to the house because of young children,” said Sachithanandam. “Small loans given for goat-rearing or poultry-raising vanish when the animals die and the women are back to square one.”

That, says Saroor, is the point when women look at sex work as an option.

The LLRC report drew attention to the plight of Tamil widows. “Their lives are often lonely and insecure, and they are treated as a symbol of bad omen in their own social circles.”

Problems start with the definition of widowhood. While widows elsewhere in the country have marriage certificates to prove marital status, women in the north are unable to produce documents because of the destruction of official records during the war.

Military spokesman Brig. Ruwan Wanigasooriya told IPS that of 11,995 suspected rebel cadres who surrendered in May 2009, with 10,874 have been rehabilitated and reintegrated into civilian life.

Another 852 are in detention with investigations continuing or undergoing rehabilitation ahead of release while 13 had died of natural causes, the spokesman said.

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.

Reacting to a series of deadly crocodile attacks, the Sri Lankan government has drawn up plans to capture the free-ranging beasts and confine them to parks. Conservationists oppose this move.

Villagers bathe behind wire mesh to ward off crocodiles in the Nilwala river. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

On Apr. 12, Sri Lanka’s wildlife department ordered an operation to capture crocodiles lurking in the rivers and estuaries of this island country and relocate them in conservation parks for the safety of citizens – and that of the protected animal.

What triggered the wildlife department’s move was an attack on an 18-year-old woman in the Nilwala river, just outside this village, on Apr. 4. Nuwanthika Sathsaran’s remains were recovered by villagers.

Wildlife officials later captured a four metre-long crocodile that was believed to have attacked Nuwanthika and also dragged away a mother of three who was washing clothes in the river, a week earlier.

Whether the wildlife department will persist with the capture programme is uncertain and it is currently in consultation with experts and conservationists. Meanwhile the department has also undertaken a crocodile census, the first in the country.

Encounters with crocodiles – living fossils that once breathed the same air as the dinosaurs – can and should be avoided, says Anslem de Silva, vice-chairman of the crocodile specialist group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in South Asia and Iran.

“I have told the government that setting up conservation parks is not feasible. With this new plan, whenever people see a crocodile, they will ask authorities to come and catch it, even if it is a harmless one.

“We should be paying attention to educating people and stopping them from encroaching on crocodile habitats,” de Silva told IPS.

According to de Silva the two species of crocodiles found in Sri Lanka, the saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus) and the marsh crocodile (Crocodylus palustris) are apex predators in the ecosystem and ‘keystone species’, surviving from the Jurassic age.

Herpetologists estimate that over the past 15 years more than 130 people have been attacked by crocodiles, resulting in 35 fatalities. At least 50 crocodiles have also been killed in encounters with human beings in the same period.

De Silva says the wildlife department’s plans to set up crocodile conservation centres – in Kirala Kele in the Southern Province and in the Muthurajawela wetlands in the Western Province – are unsound.

Muthurajawela, a heavily populated area north of Colombo, has vast stretches of scrub and marshlands which are crocodiles habitats. Rathmalana, a marshy area south of the capital city, is also steadily being encroached upon.

Crocodiles often stray from marshy areas into urban waterways, especially during floods.

While the government remains undecided on how to deal with crocodiles and encroachments, people have begun retaliating against known man-eaters in their neighbourhoods – though this is illegal because crocodiles are protected animals.

On Feb. 12, the residents of Ragama town, north of Colombo, used a large hook baited with a chicken to capture and kill a five-metre specimen, weighing more than 1,000 kg, believed to have been responsible for the disappearance of Sebastian Angelo Uday Kumara, 36, who went missing on Jan. 26.

“What is happening is that human beings are increasingly encroaching on crocodile habitats. There have been crocodile attacks reported from the Nilwala river for hundreds of years – but this is a crocodile habitat,” Namal Kamalgoda conservationist and former president of the Sri Lanka Natural History Society, told IPS.

Citizens compelled to share streams and waterways with crocodiles see the situation differently. “Look, I have been living here all my life and these creatures were never here until about 5-6 years ago,” says Kuruppuarchachi Dharmapala, a middle-aged resident of Pallupitiya village.

Dharmapala told IPS that the animals have seriously disrupted life in the village where it is customary for people to bathe and wash clothes in the river. “We are now forced to bathe in wire mesh cages,” he said.

Survivors of crocodile attacks are certainly not impressed by the fact that the crocodile is a living fossil or by its status on the food chain, but see it as a serious menace.

Six months ago, Sunil Shanta was taking a dip in a stream that runs behind his house in Pallulpitiya when he felt a stabbing pain in his buttocks. “I turned around to see a long snout and a pair of shining eyes,” he told IPS.

The predator tried to drag Shanta into the water, but he managed to grab an overhanging tree branch and scream for help. His neighbours were able to beat back the beast, leaving a severely injured Shanta to spend the next two months in a hospital.

Other crocodile attack victims who have saved themselves by screaming for help include M. Seneviratne, a politician belonging to the left-wing Peoples’ Liberation Front, who was set upon by a reptile while fishing in Anuradhapura, a famed pilgrimage and tourist centre, in 2010.

Attacks are not confined to the rural areas, and sightings are now being frequently reported in the urban areas of Sri Lanka, a sign that the crocodile population is growing.

De Silva said increasing salinity in the island country’s estuaries and rivers, attributable to climate change and rise in sea levels can affect crocodile populations. “There is evidence to suggest that the crocodile population increases when salinity and acidity levels rise.”

As Sri Lanka urbanises conflict is inevitable, says Kamalgoda. “We are forcing crocodiles to eat us as there is nothing else left for them to eat.”

Kamalgoda said the situation of the crocodile is no different from that of other Sri Lankan wildlife such as elephants and leopards that are being crowded out by human settlements. “This is the inevitable path of development and animals will always be the losers,” he 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.

In some parts of Colombo, informal housing structures, or slums, are built right on waterways. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Apr 4 2012 (IPS)

Sri Lanka’s capital city Colombo, the vibrant economic and administrative heart of the bustling island nation, is rapidly turning into a city of slums. Home to over 30 percent of the country’s population, one in every two people living in the Greater Colombo Area is a slum dweller.

Sadly, Colombo’s bulging urban population is not a rarity in South Asia, where most of the region’s major metropolises are scrambling to stitch up their bursting seams.

Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, is home to 34 percent of the country’s population and is the fastest growing city in Asia – around 40 percent of those living in Dhaka are slum dwellers. A quarter of Nepal’s population lives in cities, while 36 percent of Pakistan’s population is now concentrated in urban centres. In India 93 million people are estimated to be living in slums; fully half the population of the capital, New Delhi, lives in slums, while the figure could be as high as 60 percent in glittering Mumbai.

Indu Weerasooriya, deputy director general at the Sri Lankan Urban Development Authority, told a recent World Bank symposium on regional cities and sustainability, “Forty-three percent of the Greater Colombo (population) lives in slums and shanties.”

Ming Zhang, the World Bank sector manager for Urban Water and Disaster Management for South Asia, predicted that the urban population in South Asia would double in the next 25 years. Already one in every four persons is categorised under ‘informal population’ or living in shanties or slums in the urban areas of the region, Zhang warned.

The expansions are so rapid that in Dhaka, according to Nazrul Islam, chairman of the Centre for Urban Studies in Dhaka, one of the most profitable businesses nowadays is developing and renting out ‘slums’ that stand on stilts near waterways.

And when unannounced floods come, like they did in Colombo in November 2010 and May last year, it is the low-lying areas where most of the slums are located that go under first. A similar situation was experienced in Bangladesh in July last year.

Urgent need for urban planning

Regional experts and those from the World Bank agree that most of the problems faced by the cities are man-made, primarily due to lack of proper planning.

“If we thought about proper urban planning, institutional coherence and community participation, we would be able to address a big chunk of this (problem),” Abha Joshi-Ghani, the World Bank’s Sector Manager for Finance Economics and Urban Planning, told IPS.

Colombo, particularly, knows the ramifications of haphazard expansion. When the rains come down in buckets, even for short periods, parts of Colombo go under in double-quick time.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa, secretary to the Ministry of Urban Development and Defense, told the World Bank workshop that the flooding is mainly due to informal housing structures coming up on or near water retention areas, canals and other climate-sensitive spots.

In some parts of Colombo, like along the sections of the Hamilton Canal and connecting waterways north of the city, the structures are not near but actually on the water. Weerasooriya said that rain patterns affected by climate change – resulting in shorter rainy days with intense downpours – have exacerbated the problem.

Joshi-Ghani told IPS that cities like Colombo sitting near the coast now face the added risk of coastal erosion.

“In South Asia we have a large number of coastal cities threatened with inundation,” she said.

Drinking water is also becoming a major issue in other regional cities like Dhaka. Islam told IPS that overuse has already made the water supply from two of the four rivers that feed the city unreliable, because “they are running dry,” he said.

Climate change experts warn that cities need to adapt fast.

“Most of these places have seen unplanned development take place for decades, they need to change that,” Rutu Dave, a climate change expert at the Washington-based World Bank Institute, told IPS.

Her colleague Joshi-Ghani added urban centres have to fix the problem of overuse of limited resources. “We are depleting our resources by inefficient and indiscriminate use of resources.”

Secretary Rajapaksa told the World Bank workshop that authorities have launched a massive programme to relocate 70,000 families living under poor conditions in Colombo and to clear blocked waterways. “Providing proper housing for the under-served settlements is a significant problem for town planners and architects,” Rajapaksa said.

With space at a premium, the project envisions resettling slum dwellers in high-rise buildings.

Joshi-Ghani told IPS that any relocation has to take into consideration the incomes and lifestyles of those affected, which, if disrupted, could turn the solution itself turns into a problem. “Many think that cities make people poor, when in fact cities attract the poor who think they can make a better living (there),” she said.

Dave told IPS that awareness was growing among authorities as well as ordinary people on the dangers faced by unplanned urban development. “Some of the best awareness campaigns have been at schools. Children can be drivers of change,” she said.

But as long as city planners lack the political will, at national and local levels, to go head with strong decisions, cities like Colombo, Dhaka and others in the region will have to deal with more chaos as nature’s fury increasingly joins hands with man’s ignorance.

“The scary thing is that natural disasters don’t honour geographical boundaries, they hurt the poor most,” said Jesse Robredo, secretary of the Department of Interior and Local Governments in the Philippines, who travelled to Colombo to advise his South Asian colleagues on the issue.

Excerpt:

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 - -
WELIGAMA, Sri Lanka, Mar 10 2012 (IPS)

The gentle waves of Weligama bay that lap at the small, tight-knit fishing village of Kaparratota, 140 km south of Colombo, can be deceptive.

The waters of Weligama bay can prove deceptively calm for fishers. Credit: Indika Sriyan/IPS

A total of 29 people had died along Sri Lanka’s southern coast, and over 10,000 buildings damaged, though Weligama was the worst affected area. Many who faced the storm were left stunned by its ferocity as well as the suddenness with which it whipped up and died down.

“We never knew a storm was coming, no one told us…suddenly the sea just rose,” Lamahevage Chandana, a fisher told IPS. He survived by floating on the waves for seven hours, his small boat smashed.

Experts say the tragedy could have been avoided if ordinary folk like Chandana, as well as authorities, had paid better attention to changing weather patterns around this island country.

Of late, extreme weather events have increased in frequency, Mudalihamige Rathnayake, who heads the geography department at the Ruhuna University in southern Sri Lanka, told IPS.

“Gale-force winds hitting towns and villages are being reported as cyclones, or mini-cyclones, which they are not,” he said. “They are the creation of cooler air rushing in to fill the vacuum created by an extreme temperature rise in a small area.”

Gale-force winds are defined as those reaching a speed of up to 117 km per hour on the Beaufort scale and though not as strong as hurricanes, they create exceptionally high sea waves and are capable of uprooting trees.

Statistics show that there are now fewer rainy days, with the monsoon now dumping its water in a shorter time span. This was what happened between January and February 2011, when a year’s worth of rain fell on parts of the Eastern Province in one month, flooding hundreds of villages.

Nimal Dissanayake, who heads the Rice Research Institute of Sri Lanka, told IPS that the changing rain patterns have forced experts to develop quick maturing rice varieties. “We have developed them, but need a better understanding of the rain patterns to recommend them,” he told IPS.

Rathnayake recently carried out a survey of awareness levels among ordinary people in southern Sri Lanka of changing weather patterns and was disappointed with the results.

“There is hardly any knowledge of climate change or changing weather. No one is really interested in knowing how to cope with natural disasters,” he said.

Rathnayake found the lack of knowledge and the disinterest surprising given that the southern coast of Sri Lanka was pulverised by the 2004 Asian tsunami. Signboards that dot the coast do indicate higher, safer ground to run to in the event of a tsunami.

“Everybody knows that they have to run if a tsunami is coming, but they don’t know how to deal with a cyclone, or fast moving winds that come in short bursts. No one even thinks that a prolonged drought may have been caused by changing climate,” he said.

Only around 20 percent of Sri Lanka’s 1,520 km coast is prone to erosion, but the bulk of it is in the densely populated southern and western coasts that take the brunt of the monsoons.

The western and southern provinces account for over 40 percent of the population or around eight million people. Economically, these two provinces contribute around 47 percent of the GDP, with the western province serving as the island’s financial and administrative centre.

Much of the erosion-prone coast is protected by a sea wall of boulders, a solution that the Coast Conservation Department (CCD) has now found to be counter-productive.

Anil Premarathne, CCD director-general, told IPS that the barriers built of boulders limit economic activity and transfer the erosion from one part of the shore to another.

The CCD is now encouraging ‘softer solutions’ like wider beaches, sand filling, mangroves and strict zoning regulations. But with the coast thickly populated, Premarathne says it is difficult to even discuss these options.

“In Sri Lanka we need strict zoning measures,” Premarathne said. “But unless there are beaches where there are no houses or businesses nearby – which is hardly the case in the south and the west – it is not easy to implement.

“Because erosion takes place over many years, even decades, there is not much concern. People don’t seem to notice it happening nor are they worried,” he said. Already some coastal urban areas are at risk from rising sea levels.

Coastal districts like Gampaha, that lies just north of Colombo, meet at least 40 percent of water requirements by pumping out groundwater, increasing the risk of saline ingress.

“Salinity will rise in coastal areas if sea levels rise,” said Premarathne. “We have also seen that wave heights are tending to get higher during the monsoons,” he added.

Sri Lanka’s National Climate Change Adaption Strategy (NCCAS) has prioritised mainstreaming adaptation, healthier human settlements and minimisation of impacts on food security for the period between 2011 and 2016.

Since stopping climate change is unrealistic, the NCCAS focuses on preparing and understanding what needs to be done by way of preparation, economically and environmentally.

Yet, most ordinary people do not take climate change seriously. Chandana, even after his near death experience, says nonchalantly: “These incidents happen…we just have to live with them.”

Such indifference, says Rathnayake, is cause for concern. “These things are beyond our control, but we can be better prepared to face them and save lives.”

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.

Experts agree that Sri Lanka’s free pre and postnatal clinics across the island nation have helped bring infant mortality down to 15 per 1,000 live births and the under-five mortality rate to 21 per 1,000 live births.

Children living in Sri Lanka's tea estates are among the country's most malnourished. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

But, beneath that general picture of success lie pockets of vulnerability where poverty and lack of awareness are causing high levels of malnutrition in this country, classified as a middle-income country by the International Monetary Fund in 2010.

According to a November 2011 paper released by the Institute of Policy Studies, a semi-government research body, a fifth of children under the age of five suffer from malnourishment, as also every sixth newborn.

“This is a fairly high rate,” Angela de Silva, lecturer at the Colombo University and a vice-president of the Nutrition Society of Sri Lanka, told IPS. She said the high rates of malnourishment were primarily “due to certain pockets with high levels of underweight.”

“Overall, there has been an improvement in underweight over the years and, for most areas, underweight is not a huge problem. But the government’s (most recent) demographic and health survey (2006-2007) indicated that certain areas were badly off,” de Silva said.

One of the areas identified by the Institute’s report was the Nuwara Eliya district, famed for its tea plantations. “Children in the estate sector are twice as likely to be underweight than children in the urban sector,” said the report titled ‘Eradicating malnutrition in Sri Lanka, looking beyond health’.

Around five percent of Sri Lanka’s 21 million people are from the plantation sector – descendants of workers brought from south India in the 19th century by British colonialists to work in the tea plantations.

The research paper said that one in three children under the age of five was underweight in the plantation sector and 40 percent of newborn babies had low birth weight.

The main reason for these levels of high undernourishment appears to be poverty. According to the government’s indicators, at least 11 percent of the plantation population lives below the national poverty line of 27 dollars per month.

The research paper said that over 60 percent of the same population was categorised as poor.

“Evidence from many countries has proved that poverty plays a large part in malnutrition as access to resources will reduce food insecurity in a household,” said Kumari Navaratane, a public health specialist with the World Bank.

Nutrition levels are also low among the tens of thousands of people returning to north after the end of the civil war that pitted separatist Tamil militants against government troops, according to de Silva.

An assessment carried out by the World Food Programme in August 2011 revealed that at least 60 percent of the war returnees in the northern province were food insecure.

Navaratane and de Silva stressed that one vital area that impinged on child malnutrition was the education level of the mother, the primary caregiver, and knowledge of matters relating to healthy hygiene.

In the estate sector, awareness remains low. The Institute of Policy Studies paper said that nearly half of women in the reproductive age in this sector had not finished primary level education.

“Poor education reduces the ability of mothers to benefit from the awareness programmes on family health and hygiene,” the paper said.

Sri Lanka has a successful programme of encouraging breastfeeding in the first six months with over 90 percent of newborns breastfed, reducing the risk of malnourishment and improving child immunity.

Healthcare centres and outreach workers ensure that pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers and infants get dietary supplements.

The problem starts thereafter, especially in vulnerable pockets like the plantations. “You will see that usually a child gets malnourished after the period of exclusive breastfeeding period of the first six months,” de Silva said.

Poor feeding practices, such as giving the child food with inadequate energy density, following myths and practices that deny the baby certain foods, especially animal products, and lack of variety in the diet are to blame, de Silva said.

Poverty and low levels of awareness can combine to create a vicious cycle of intergenerational malnutrition, she said.

“If a low birth weight child does not receive adequate nutrition the child’s growth potential is not reached and when the girl child is underweight her body is not able to produce a good weight baby,” World Bank’s Navaratane said.

There are ongoing interventions that are being fine-tuned to target these vulnerable pockets, de Silva said.

The National Nutrition Council headed by the president has in fact launched pilot projects to fight malnutrition by adopting an integrated approach to health and other vital sectors like agriculture and education.

Such steps are expected to help Sri Lanka achieve the fourth United Nations millennium development goal of reducing the under-five mortality by 2015 to 12 per 1,000 live births and the infant mortality rate to 12.8 per 1,000 live births.

Experts like de Silva and Navaratane agree that the best option is to target those communities identified as vulnerable.