Deja vu? Sri Lanka’s Tamils fear return to civil war

By Simon Gardner

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka (Reuters) – Displaced four times by Sri
Lanka’s two-decade civil war with the Tamil Tigers, 22-year-old
Nirmalashanthi Vijayakanth is ecstatic to finally settle into
the first home she can call her own.

The ramshackle shelter in the artillery-ravaged northern
town of Jaffna has no running water, no electricity and she and
her husband sleep on a plastic sheet laid on the hard dirt
floor. Their baby, due this month, will have to do the same.

But since she moved in earlier this year, a rash of
violence culminating in the assassination of the island’s
foreign minister has raised the specter of a return to a war
that killed more than 64,000 people and she fears she may be
displaced again.

“The way things are going I feel that war will come back,”
Vijayakanth said, recalling how she had to flee the crumbling
town in 1995 along with hundreds of thousands of others in a
mass exodus ahead of an army offensive.

“Back then we moved inland to live under trees, where they
provided us with sheets to put up temporary tents. I was 13,”
she added, her floral maternity dress and pigtails blowing in
the wind. “I am more afraid now because I am expecting. Any
moment this month I will give birth.”

Relief agencies estimate around 100,000 Jaffna Tamils are
still displaced from their homes 3- years after the government
and the rebels agreed to a ceasefire. Many live in abandoned or
rented properties or in shelters.

But Jaffna — which Sri Lanka’s Tamils regard as the cradle
of their civilization — is re-emerging gradually from the
ashes of the two-decade war waged by the Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam’s (LTTE) for self-rule.

Newly built banks and shops sit alongside charred, empty
shells of bombed buildings. The town’s colonial Dutch fort is
still off-limits, strewn with landmines. Walls pockmarked by
years of shelling serve as a constant, eerie reminder of war.

Heavily armed soldiers, who have controlled Jaffna since
wresting it from the Tigers in 1995, patrol the streets,
resented by many residents with whom they cannot communicate
because of a language barrier.

ETHNIC RIFT

Many Jaffna Tamils still scorn what they say is decades of
discrimination by the majority Sinhalese in the south, a
central trigger for the Tigers’ war. The north is largely
dependent on fishing and agriculture, infrastructure has long
been neglected, and is far less developed than the south.

“Here in Jaffna, if a person has to fill in an application
form in Sinhalese, it’s not fair, no?” said Prof. Ponnudurai
Balasundarampillai, former vice-chancellor of Jaffna
University.

“We don’t feel that we are treated equally,” he added. “We
struggle to maintain our nationality, our Tamil identity and
also devolution of power and our cultural rights,” he said. “A
political solution must come.”

Any solution is still a long way off. However, the south —
the island’s industrial heartland and political powerbase —
has enjoyed steady economic growth since the ceasefire, and
fears of a return to war are more muted.

President Chandrika Kumaratunga has accused the Tigers of
assassinating Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, himself a
Tamil but a vocal opponent whom the rebels and many hardliners
regarded as a traitor to their cause.

The Tigers have denied any hand in the killing, but few in
Colombo believe them given the fact that dozens of their
opponents have been murdered since the ceasefire.

But they have watered down the rhetoric since the
assassination, backtracking on earlier threats of imminent war
and saying they won’t resume the conflict unless it is thrust
upon them.

They have also agreed to break a months-long deadlock and
meet high-level government officials to find ways to preserve
the truce.

Analysts say the main reason the island’s longest truce
since war broke out in earnest in 1983 is holding is because
most northern Tamils and southern Sinhalese are weary of war
and neither want it to resume.

YEARNING FOR PEACE

“I want peace. I want my children to study, to become big
people, like doctors,” said N. Sundarabawan, 42, tending his
vegetable stall in Jaffna market. “Before the war, most Jaffna
people were graduates. Now it’s very rare.”

“If the war starts, nobody will do business. I will leave
and go to a safer place. There won’t be any jobs,” added the
father of two who reopened his stall only in 2002 after the
ceasefire was signed and makes around 500 rupees profit a day.

Sundarabawan says many of his clients have moved south for
fear of a return to hostilities, but is loath to do the same.

“This is their traditional homeland,” said Father
Christopher Jeyakumar, who heads the Jaffna branch of Caritas
– the social arm of the Catholic Church — and is helping 400
families displaced by the war to resettle.

“The fruits of peace must be tangible. Rebuilding their
houses, rebuilding their livelihoods, being able to move
freely,” he added. “Unfortunately, these things are not
happening.”

Until government and Tigers find a way to stem a silent war
in the east that the military and the rebels each blame on the
other, Tamils such as Vijayakanth can only hope against hope.

“I don’t know what my future holds for me,” she said,
gazing at an adjacent lagoon ringed with razor-wire and green
sandbag army sentry points.

“If war starts, I can’t tell you where I would go. I will
join the rest of these people and go wherever they go,” she
added, gesturing to her neighbors — dozens of other families
trying to start again from scratch.