[lg policy] Sri Lanka: Refugees struggle to rebuild--Tens of thousands in postwar Sri Lanka live with uncertainty.

[Harold Schiffman]

Refugees struggle to rebuild--Tens of thousands in postwar Sri Lanka
live with uncertainty.

By Erika Kinetz

Associated Press

BATTICALOA, Sri Lanka - Three years ago, Vairamuttu Bavani left her
home in eastern Sri Lanka to attend her cousin's wedding in the north.
She didn't make it back until September this year. Trapped by the
civil war, Bavani, a Tamil, lost six members of her family and both
her legs to a bomb. She spent months detained in an overcrowded
refugee camp. Even now, she remains under tight scrutiny by local
authorities, who have visited her almost every day since her return
from the northern Vanni region, she said.
"They ask me where I went in the Vanni and what I was doing there,"
said Bavani, 25, who spends her days seated on the floor of her
sister's house, fighting boredom.

Bavani is among tens of thousands of refugees struggling to rebuild
their lives in postwar Sri Lanka, under tight government control.
During the final months of the war, which raged mainly in Tamil areas
in the country's east and north, nearly 300,000 civilians were trapped
between Tamil Tiger rebels and advancing government troops. These
refugees, mostly Tamils, are now in various states of uncertainty. The
quarter-century war cost 80,000 to 100,000 lives, as the rebels fought
for a separate state for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority. After the rebels
lost in May, the government herded civilians, along with some
straggling rebels, into overcrowded camps.

Rights groups and Western governments decried conditions in the camps,
saying they amounted to illegal collective punishment. Under
international pressure, the government has vowed to close the camps by
the end of January. Even those allowed to return home say they have
been told not to travel without police permission. Security officers
regularly visit their homes. Many wait for news of loved ones who
vanished or were known to be taken by the military for questioning.
Rights groups fear the government's surveillance of refugees and its
failure to provide them with livelihoods will reignite ethnic
tensions.

"It's alienating the 300,000 displaced and their relatives," said
Meenakshi Ganguly, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. "They're all
going to feel like they're living in a state where they are not
trusted and don't belong." Sri Lanka's mostly Hindu Tamils, 18 percent
of the country's 20 million people, have complained of decades of
discrimination at the hands of the Sinhalese majority, which is mostly
Buddhist.  Rishard Badurdeen, Sri Lanka's resettlement minister, said
refugees are getting support from the government and charities.
Refugees being resettled in the north, swathes of which were flattened
during the final battles, are getting tin sheets from neighboring
India to help rebuild their homes, 25,000 rupees ($219) in cash from
UNHCR and six months of dry rations from the World Food Program, he
said. Farmers also get agriculture grants, he said.

Many refugees bear hatred for the Tamil Tigers as well. They say
rebels shot civilians who tried to flee the war zone and stole their
children to replenish the ranks of dying fighters. UNICEF has accused
the rebels of forcibly conscripting 6,000 children. "Raising children
in that area was like raising cattle and sending them to slaughter,"
said Sugadas Rajvathani, 34, who in October returned to her sister's
house in Trincomalee, a port town in northeastern Sri Lanka. When
rebels came, she hid her children in ditches, placing a metal sheet
and a cooking pot on top for camouflage.

One night, rebels came to a tent next to theirs and shot dead a man
who tried to keep them from taking his son, she said. The boy,
enraged, began to shout: "Let's teach them a lesson!" Rajvathani
recalled. The villagers took up sticks and hoes to fight. In the
commotion, Rajvathani and her family fled across a lagoon to
government territory. There was shelling from both sides, she said.
The woman in front of her was hit and slipped beneath the water. "We
had to ignore bodies falling in front of us and walk on," she said.
She is glad to be home. Surrounded by solid walls and a dozen members
of her family, she can't stop grinning.

But no one has any income. The family is living off 30,000 rupees
($263) she got from pawning two gold bangles. Even here in the east,
where fighting ended two years ago, few find economic opportunities
when they return, especially women. Sasikala Sivaraja and her husband
left their small village outside Batticaloa in 2006, going north in
search of work. She came home in August. Her husband didn't. Now she
and her two daughters live off food rations and her sister's largesse.
Job prospects for Bavani are even worse.

She once had planned to attend a sewing class offered by a local
church. Now she doesn't know what to do. "The machines are all
operated with the legs," she said.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/world_us/79150412.html

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Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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