A lot has been happening in Sri Lanka since mid-May, when the 25 year conflict between the government and the Tamil rebels effectively came to an end.
Last week, Amnesty International posted a call for the government of Sri Lanka to start opening the camps, so people in them can either return to their villages, or, if those homes are destroyed, be relocated to new permanent housing. Earlier, the government justified keeping these camps open on the grounds that it needed to ensure that militants that are mixed in with the civilian population in the camps should be discovered and extracted. It’s now been four months, which should be enough time. The government originally said people would be resettled in 180 days — six months. But as of now (four months in), there is no progress at all on that front, leading one to think that the promise is unlikely to be met. Update/Correction: A commenter links to a report that re-settlement is in fact well underway: TheHindu. The minister in charge of resettlement is named Rishad Bathiudeen; there is more about him, and government reports on resettlement progress here.
The detailed Amnesty Briefing paper can be found here, for people who are interested.
I am curious to hear what readers think about this. How long will this go on? Are there any indications from Rajapaksa or others in the Sri Lankan government on a timeline for closing the camps? Might the government have other considerations or unspoken reasons for keeping these camps open for an indefinite period of time?
I looked at Groundviews to see their thoughts on the Amnesty call, but I haven’t found much specific coverage of the issue there. Other updates:
First, as most readers probably heard, about two weeks ago, LTTE supporters won a majority of seats in a hastily called election in the Vavuniya district in north-central Sri Lanka.
That same New York Times story linked above also strongly suggests that the vote heralds a serious, ongoing political impasse between north and south in Sri Lanka. Many Tamils in the north, who may be willing to give up on the idea of an independent Tamil homeland, will continue to press for autonomy or federalism, while the Mahinda Rajapaksa and the government as a whole do not want to go that route. The continuing friction along these lines might become dangerous; anyone thinks everyone is just going to live happily ever after now that the LTTE has been defeated is surely mistaken.
Upwards of 250,000 people remain in camps, described by the government as “welfare villages” — but by some as “concentration camps”. (See this very interesting debate at Crooked Timber regarding the terminology that ought to be used to describe the camps.)
This summer, there have been reports of flooding and unsanitary conditions in the camps, though these are relatively scattered reports (also see this Groundviews link). The Government of Sri Lanka still is not allowing reporters to go into the camps very extensively. It is unclear how effectively foreign aid that has been sent to help the IDPs in the camps has been distributed; as I understand it, officials from India have come in to help oversee the distribution of that aid.
Indian government officials have also expressed an interest in helping to rebuild the north.
The new leader of the Tamil Tigers, Selvarasa Pathmanathan, was also arrested this week somewhere in Southeast Asia. Pathmanathan was thought to be heavily involved in moving money and materials from the diaspora to the LTTE forces in Sri Lanka. The government of Sri Lanka, having arrested him, now wants access to those overseas financial resources, thought to be worth upwards of $300 million.
Robert Kaplan has an essay on the post-conflict outlook in The Atlantic. As with much that Robert Kaplan writes, it feels a little off to me. The focus on religious communal dimensions (Buddhism vs. Hinduism) just doesn’t resonate.
It’s unclear how much these local elections mean in practical terms. As Robert MacKey’s NYT blog piece you referenced points out, significant power-sharing isn’t going to happen on Rajapaksa’s watch, so these provincial councils hardly have any autonomy. Further – and what’s missing from MacKey’s piece – is the fact that the provinces also have an executive – the governor, appointed by the President. And much like the structure of the central government, the balance of power at the provincial level seems to tilt heavily toward the executive.
The governor of the Northern Province, GA Chandrasiri, is a former army Major General, and even keeps his military title in his civilian role (see sidebar).
A few days ago, some members of the Eastern Province Council sent a letter to the President asking that the Eastern Province governor, Mohan Wijewickrama, be removed for meddling in the affairs of the council (Daily Mirror).
As for Groundviews, they might be wondering why none of us covered the story they broke last week about flooding in the IDP camps. NYT picked it up later that day.
Forgot to mention: The EP Governor is a retired Rear Admiral of the Sri Lankan Navy.
It’s interesting that, outside of groundviews, you cite no Sri Lankan sites–blogs, newspaper, etc. Why?
ptr vivek,
you only got it half right–at the provincial level, political power lies with the executive but control over life, property and liberty is held by the famously corrupt law enforcement in conjunction with their local criminal/political patrons. Both of these, however, are trumped by the military (thus the third layer of insulation from any possibility of locally elected reps expressing the will of their constituents in a consequential manner at parliament.)
Nayagan,
It’s interesting that, outside of groundviews, you cite no Sri Lankan sites–blogs, newspaper, etc. Why?
Well, I did link to one story at Lankanews.lk. But in general, I don’t claim to be an expert on anything Sri Lankan; this post is just a recap of some of the news items that have been crossing my path over the past few weeks, and an invitation to readers to discuss their views. Note also the “?” in the title to the post.
I know you follow this stuff much more closely than I do, so any recommended reading on the current status of (or long term GoSL plans for) Manik Farms/Vavuniya would be welcome.
“The government originally said people would be resettled in 180 days  six months. But as of now (four months in), there is no progress at all on that front, leading one to think that the promise is unlikely to be met.”
59,608 families re-settled: Colombo
B. Muralidhar Reddy
Sri Lankan Re-settlement and Disaster Relief Services Minister Rishad Bathiudeen told Parliament on Thursday that the government had re-settled 59,608 war displaced families in Batticaloa, Trincomalee, Ampara in the east and Mannar and Jaffna in the north.
As per the figures provided by the Minister, 35,766 families have been re-settled in Batticaloa, 22,068 families in Trincomalee, 669 families in Mannar, 51 families in Ampara and 1,054 families in Jaffna districts., Disaster Management and Human Rights Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe told the House that the goal was the resettlement of IDPs in the areas in which they originally resided.
http://beta.thehindu.com/news/international/article7111.ece
More IDPs resettled in Sri Lanka North
Sat, Aug 22, 2009, 09:32 pm SL Time, ColomboPage News Desk, Sri Lanka.
Aug 22, Colombo: Sri Lankan authorities today resettled another group of displaced families at Musali in Mannar.
According to the sources in Mannar, 1,898 persons belong to 442 families have been resettled this morning after completing the demining in the area.
These families have left the area few years ago due to the clashes between the government forces and the LTTE and settled in IDP camps in Nanattan, Mannar.
The Governor of Northern Province Major General G.A Chandrasiri and Minister of Resettlement and Disaster Relief Services Rishad Bathiudeen were among the officials at this resettlement occasion.
http://www.colombopage.com/archive_091/Aug1250956976RA.html
Thanks for posting about the plight of Srilankan Tamils.
Here are couple of short films to highlight the current situation. The picture is worth 10000 words
http://youthful.vikatan.com/youth/document21082009.asp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spkxWbDt-bQ
I think there are a few issues to consider wrt to the camps:
1) how many people live in them. The number is not relevant not as a way of establishing ‘importance’ or ‘not importance’ in the media in your own mind but both for kjnowing the actual scale (i have been told 300,000) as well as the politics of the number.
2) who is taking responsibility and for what ends – my friend told me the u.n. has been unwilling to address sanitation issues because it would contribute to establishing the camps as a permanent structure, which would be in violation of what the camps are tolerated for by the international community.
3) where people are resettled to and how much agency they have in their choices – if they are resettled in a way to minimise concentrations of Tamils in particular areas, that’s potentially problematic. so what is actually happening and where poeple are going if they are going or why they are being kept there if they are being kept there is worth looking into. More broadly, this begs the question of the relationship between the government and the refugees in the camps.
4) What the exit strategy is from the conflcit, if the government has one. If they believe that the military victory has resolved the issue, it will just lead to further bloodshed, now, or in the future, while people, for lack of a better word, are left to rot.
just thoughts- i’m sure they’re not wholly accurate, but i thought they were worth posing.
Real reasons are simpler than all conspiracy theories above in post and comments – there are just too many landmines planted by LTTE to be worried about.
SL army and Indian contractors are working tirelessly to remove those land mines. Land mine detection and removal is a time consuming process – especially in Lanka where no sort of any documentation exists by either parties on where they were laid.
Till land mines are removed no point in allowing citizens to go back. If SL govt did allow them and people get killed/maimed same bloggers will be shouting from rooftops “SL Govt does not care about Tamilians! They force Tamilians to walk on mines!” blah blah.
Anything coming out of bloggers in West/Australia about Lanka situation should be read with boat loads of salt considering most of them are from fake asylum seeking Tamilians who have used “SL Govt kills us” excuse to get easy asylum/Greencard in Western Countries and Australia. War is over – but SL Tamil Asylum Industry is still alive and kicking.
Time to open the camps? They should never have been “locked”; as many have observed, it’s a violation of basic rights to imprison people who have committed no crimes (which is clearly happening in this situation). Many people in the camps have relatives in other parts of Sri Lanka who would willingly take them in. Freedom of movement is a basic standard for such situations; it’s up to the displaced to decide where they want to go.
There are a few reasons why these camps do not close.
1.) They provide a good source of income from rather naive foreign nations.
2.) The Sri Lankan Government is trying to turn the predominantly Tamil North into a full-fledged militarized zone. By its own admission, there are plans to recruit 50,000 more Sinhalese soldiers to the Sri Lankan Army and build 3 new high security zones in former LTTE controlled-areas.
3.) Most of the people held in the camps sympathize with the LTTE on one level or another. Therefore, the Sri Lankan Government has taken the extreme measure of confining these people (behind barbed wire) indefinitely to prevent such sympathy from blossoming into a full-fledged rebellion, so to speak.
4.) There are plans to colonize the now-empty Tamil villages with ethnic Sinhalese people, backed by the direct presence of the Sri Lankan Armed forces. Imagine Israel building an army camp in the West Bank, if you will, to protect Jewish settlers. Of course these settlements start small, but they are directly subsidized by the State, and eventually the percentage of “new settlers” will exceed the “older ones” relative to demographics. This is actually the moral of the story behind Sri Lanka’s East. Thus, it is logical that the Sri Lankan Government will attempt to colonize the North the same way it did the East.
Given all these reasons, the one that bothers me the most is (1). These camps are funded mostly by Western nations through various aid agencies. Most of these agencies, however, do not have unfettered access to the inmates, e.g. they can’t talk freely to the inmates. Furthermore, none of these agencies has been allowed to take a head-count of the number of inmates, and thus build a database to keep up with people’s whereabouts.
In my opinion, the best way to get rid of the camps is for (1) the UN to impose sanctions on Sri Lanka and (2) Western nations ban their nationals from visiting Sri Lanka. This might create a bit of a humanitarian crisis, but it would force the Sri Lankan Government to amend its ways fast. I do not see the point of this needless charity; most of these people being held in the camps are able-bodied men and women who can look after themselves – thousands of them have relatives abroad who are willing to send money (given the right circumstances). The behavior of the Sri Lankan Government is not very surprising; considering that Buddhist monks are in the government (yes, they sit in the Parliament), and the Constitution is all but defunct. What is surprising is the complicity of the international community, not least of all, India, in giving the go-ahead and a big thumbs-up to Sri Lanka’s strangling of every last vestige of freedom possessed by a Tamil.
Amardeep,
i’ll get you some sources later but on why groundviews (and much of the lankanosphere) is ignoring the Amnesty call for opening the camps is that, in a nutshell, international human rights groups have been speaking in bad faith, without regard for the possible, without knowledge of what IDPs need first, second and third. Amnesty’s letter, to many lankans, is simultaneously pompous, self-indulgently patronizing and offensively lacking in substance (i.e. whether building concrete structures would mitigate flood-borne diseases).
The call doesn’t even include a guide for real stake-holders, the Lankans, on how they may force their govt’s hand in doing the obvious (opening up the camps) or why international humanitarian organizations feel as if they must be a part of everything that happens to the IDPs.
Mr “Yas V Khan”, what is the point of using a fake Punjabi name to mask who you really are. the (false) point that you make below tells all and sundry that you are Singhalese. ‘most of them are from fake asylum seeking Tamilians who have used “SL Govt kills us” excuse to get easy asylum/Greencard in Western Countries and Australia. War is over – but SL Tamil Asylum Industry is still alive and kicking.’
Additionally I’m sure that you are intelligent enough to know that it will NOT take 3 years for the Indian (and Sri Lankan) army to de-mine the area, this is just a fig leaf story proposed to keep Tamils locked in the camps, and for the Indians to attempt to maintain some influence on the island. I have spoken to members of my family who were in touch with Tamils in the “Safety Zone” during Sri Lankan Army shelling, to some of those who were ‘fortunate’ enough to ‘benefit’ from the Sri Lankan military’s “liberation” operation – unfortunately your point about the Sri Lankan government forcing Tamilians to walk on landmines is not untrue.
Here are some relevant links…
Yesterdays channel 4 news report – http://www.athirvu.com/target_news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1251225978&archive=&start_from=&ucat=4&
Just wait till the US decides to release the pinpoint accurate satellite images, evidence of sri lankan artillery shelling of no fire-zone, the massacre of the last few weeks, and the massive clear up operation after that constituted of burning the thousands of dead bodies and dumping the ashes in the sea in order to hide/destroy evidence. in the meantime we will have to rely on these… – http://shr.aaas.org/geotech/srilanka/srilanka.shtml – http://www.innercitypress.com/UNOSAT19April09.pdf
The Indians have once again fudged their foreign policy on Sri Lanka but then again the Ministry of External Affairs is renowned neither for its prescience nor its ability. – http://truthdive.com/2009/08/25/sri-lanka-india’s-latest-security-nightmare/
here is an interesting piece on groundviews…”As a Southerner and a Sinhala Buddhist, I am ashamed of what we have become, and how we silently countenance, nay justify, this significant post-war violence against fellow Tamil citizens.” – http://www.groundviews.org/2009/08/23/the-shame-of-menik-farm/
Unfortunately the Singhalese Left are, for the most part, an irrelevant and impotent (when not rabidly supremacist – see Dayan Jayatilleke et. al) bunch, there seems not to be much point in hoping for too much from them. See… – http://www.tamilcanadian.com/page.php?cat=135&id=2575
“As this monograph suggests, however, irrespective of when the civil war ends, Sri Lanka’s Tamils and other minorities may have no choice but to continue to live as subordinated citizens in a state dominated by political ideology. Taming or vanquishing the LTTE may be a prerequisite for peace, but those who support eradicating the LTTE as a prerequisite for federalism or expansive devolution fail to understand the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist agenda (and may be inadvertently assisting that agenda). Consequently, the international community’s entreaties notwithstanding, Sri Lanka is unlikely to institute in the foreseeable future any devolution that satifies basic Tamil aspirations.… …Buddhist monks will continue to play a pivotal role in Sri Lankan politics unless drastic changes take place within the sangha. So will Buddhist nationalists, whose influence has now reached new heights. Once the LTTE separatist struggle is neutralised, Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists may even renew campaigns against Christians and Muslims, for their ideology is fundamentally anti-minority and requires agit-prop to mobilise and survive.” – p.53, Neil DeVotta, ‘Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist Ideology: Implications for Politics and Conflict Resolution in Sri Lanka’, 2007
“But concerned with stabilising the Sri Lankan state for the sole purpose of furthering their own strategic and economic interests, the international community pretends to be unaware of the justice of the struggle of the Tamil people. They are not asleep. They pretend to be asleep. And therefore, for Tamils to respond to the international community on the basis that it is all a question of waking up the international community to the facts and to the justice of our cause is to act out a surreal dream drama.”
Nadesan Satyendra, ‘Black and White Pebbles’ – http://www.tamilnation.org/saty/060910pebbles.htm
Given the above then, the best hopes for the Tamil people would appear to stem from groundroots civil society awareness of the Sri Lankan ‘Singhalese’ problem [n.b I put the phrase in this order, as what is usually written is “the Sri Lankan Tamil problem”, wherein the blame is seemingly assigned to the Tamils – whilst we all know that Tamil nationalism and the Tigers, with all their accoutrements, were reactive phenomena.]. This is especially important in India and the ‘West’ – EU countries and the US. In addition to this, cold-blooded geopolitical machinations need to be carefully read, registered and eventually manipulated to the benefit of the Tamils.
I shall leave on this final assessment…Tamils will be rotting in these same camps this time next year and for many years after that, if the Sri Lankan government has its way. It is certain that outright conflict will resume, perhaps in a few years time, in the meantime the Tamils will slowly and inexorably be wiped off the Sri Lankan map [note the long term malnourishment, wasting and stunting of upto 40% of Tamil children in the North+East is no accident but one part of wider strategy]. Whilst it is notable that though the war in Sri Lanka has ended, the army is to be expanded to 300,000, it is not so frequently noticed however that aside from being used to settle into ’empty’ tamil lands, this disproportionately sized military force will potentially be used to deal with the restless Singhalese poor in the south who may begin to glean that they are STILL poor and that maybe the Tamils were not the enemy after all. The impact will be especially felt once the IMF conditions begin to kick in, as we all know an increase in food prices leads to all sorts of interesting outcomes of which “food riots” is but the most obvious.
I sound exceedingly pessimistic? It is because I am.
I speak only negatively about the Singhalese? I do because unfortunately nothing positive has emanated from the modern manifestations of Singhalese nationalism and identity politics for the last 60 years, and seems only to be getting worse.
I speak provocatively about the inevitability of renewed war with glee? Absolutely not. Aside from an abhorrence of war, the fundamental unity and brotherhood/sisterhood that should exist between the Singhalese and Tamils makes it all the more painful. For those of you in the Human Rights ‘industry’ and those who lounge intellectually in the “false category†camp of ‘reconciliation’, I beg you to wake up and open your eyes. This conflict started way back in 1948, when over 1million Indian Plantation Tamils were disenfranchised. [arguably it started in 1883 at the riot between Christians and Singhalese Buddhists in Kotahena] It most certainly did not begin with the LTTE in 1983, it is not over now the LTTE are seemingly finished and lastly, it will not end until there is a radical restructuring of the state.
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/world/asia_pacific/is+this+evidence+of+sri+lankan+aposwar+crimesapos/3321087
WATCH THIS AND TELL ME THIS IS OKAY.
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/world/asia_pacific/is+this+evidence+of+sri+lankan+aposwar+crimesapos/3321087
Why has it taken so long for some action to finally take place? Was there lack of evidence? Is it still the case that the Chinese, Pakistan, India have financial gain in the Indian Ocean. Does China still patrol the Indian Ocean to protect their oil reserves? Does Libya and Iran still offer lower interest amounts to Sri- Lanka for them to buy the weapons and men to assist the Buddhists to fight the Tamils? Why did America and England not do more- were they worried about investments in this region or with oil reserves? Or were they using all their energy for the Iraq war?