Refugees Magazine Issue 130: (Sri Lanka) – After two decades of war, Sri Lanka is on the mend

The sleek grey vessel sliced out of the midnight darkness and rammed the tiny fishing boat broadside on. Moments before, 23-year-old Mohan Raj Sumathi was flung headlong into the sea, two male passengers grabbed her three-year-old daughter, Rana, as the boatload of 20 people began fighting for their lives in the pitch black waters.

The 18-foot long plastic fishing vessel was following an 'inside' channel on the short 25 kilometer route between India and Sri Lanka when the second ship, possibly a patrol boat, hit it. Fortunately, the panicked passengers, none of them able to swim, were protected from deeper seas and greater danger by a necklace of islands known as Adam's Bridge. As they struggled to stay afloat in the shallows, Rana held above the waves by her two benefactors, the fishermen righted their capsized boat and the group eventually reached safety.

"We lost everything except our lives, but many people kissed the land when we reached Sri Lanka," the young mother said as she recounted her traumatic return in December last year. "It feels good, very good to be back. I have no regrets."

Her homeland had once been described as the Pearl of the Indian Ocean where the term Serendib (fairy tale) was coined, an exotic tourist destination with breathtaking beaches, herds of elephant and other wildlife, rare birds and elegant peacocks.

But this dreamy spice island began turning into a living nightmare within years of achieving independence from Great Britain in 1948. The majority Sinhalese government adopted a series of measures such as making their dialect, Sinhala, the country's sole official language and controlling access to university places, moves which the minority Tamil community viewed as a deliberate attempt to marginalize it.

Simmering resentment exploded into violent confrontation in July 1983, when 13 government soldiers were killed in an ambush by guerrillas of a group calling itself the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) demanding full independence for the nearly three million Tamils.

Nearly two decades of civil war followed. The Pearl of the Indian Ocean became the Teardrop of Buddha – a reference to its distinctive physical shape and the desperate straits into which it had sunk.

DESTRUCTION AND KILLINGS

Hundreds of villages and towns were literally flattened, mainly on the northern Jaffna Peninsula, the neighboring Vanni region and in the east of the country. The world paid only fleeting attention to this obscure internal struggle, but an estimated 65,000 persons were killed in conflicts which ranged from small-scale hit-and-run raids to massive head-on pitched battles. A new form of warfare became commonplace, the precursor of a worldwide phenomenon – the suicide bomber.

More than one million people – one in every 18 Sri Lankans – including Tamils such as Mohan Raj Sumathi, Sinhalese and members of the country's sizeable Muslim community, fled or were forcibly uprooted from their homes. The great majority became internally displaced, moving between temporary welfare centers, friends or relatives homes, sometimes as many as 10 or 20 times during their prolonged wanderings. They stayed in each place sometimes for days, sometimes for years, as the course of the conflict ebbed and flowed across the shattered landscape.

Around one million people left the country altogether. Many established thriving communities in Europe, North America and Australia, though others fled as refugees to neighboring India in several waves during the 1980s and 1990s and became known in the Indian press as the region's new 'boat people.'

Mohan Raj Sumathi was one of the last to go to the 'big neighbor' in 1998 and her story was typical of countless others. Her home village on the Jaffna Peninsula repeatedly changed hands along with the fortunes of war. A teenager, pretty and single, she decided to leave with her mother and brother rather than risk being forcibly recruited by the LTTE as a soldier or running afoul of the army. She escaped in the same kind of fishing boat she would later return home on, spent two years in a refugee camp where she met her husband and started a family in exile.

She had harbored few hopes of returning home quickly, she said. After all, there had already been several peace attempts in the last few years, but all had ended in failure. And the war, like conflicts in Afghanistan and Angola, had degenerated into a grinding conflict seemingly without end and without solution – in humanitarian parlance a so-called protracted crisis (Refugees magazine, N° 129).

BREAKTHROUGH

Remarkably, however, there were recent major breakthroughs in all three regions. An estimated two million Afghans returned home following the fall of the hard-line Taliban regime in Kabul in 2001. In Angola, the scene of one of the world's most intractable wars in which hundreds of thousands of persons were killed and more than four million uprooted, a major repatriation also began and was expected to gather momentum through this year.

In February last year, Colombo and the LTTE, both wearied and debilitated by the years of fighting, signed a cease-fire accord, began protracted negotiations and announced a series of compromises. The Tamil Tigers, for instance, eventually dropped their demand for an independent state in favor of autonomy within a new government structure and in turn were allowed to expand their political presence in some regions of the country.

All sides were only too aware of previous failures, but under the umbrella of a Norwegian diplomatic initiative, the cease-fire held throughout last year and into 2003.

Traumatized civilians inside the country voted with their feet. With few possessions and little money, small family groups hopped aboard trucks and tractors and headed back to their destroyed towns and villages. The Sri Lankan return lacked the drama and spectacle of Kosovo or Rwanda where hundreds of thousands of people went back in a matter of days in unstoppable waves, filmed every inch of the way by the world's media.

Here it was almost a stealthy homecoming in ones and twos, but no less significant than those other returns. By spring, around 260,000 Sri Lankans had gone back and if the guns stay silent, the rate of return was expected to continue at a similar pace through 2003.

Several hundred of the estimated 64,000 refugees in Indian camps also came home, some like Mohan Raj Sumathi preferring to risk the perilous trip by boat because initially it was faster and involved less official red tape than other routes. UNHCR has now established a free and safer formal repatriation program for potential returnees.

INCREASED PACE

Neill Wright, UNHCR's representative in Sri Lanka, said he expected the pace of this refugee return to increase significantly once cheap sea ferry routes, halted during the war, were re-established.

Assisting those refugees will be a major focus for the agency, but it has already significantly boosted its activities to support the dramatic shift toward peace, approving a $10 million supplementary budget for this year and expanding its physical presence in the war-affected areas.

The organization will continue to spearhead international efforts to enforce its traditional mandate – offering legal and physical protection for war-affected civilians – as well as financing a range of special projects to provide new temporary shelter, health and sanitation facilities, kick starting various community services and cheap and quick income generating projects to enable returnees to become self-sufficient.

"A lot of these activities are bridging programs which are necessary until long-term aid from other agencies can kick in later this year," Wright said. "There has been a major breakthrough and it is essential to keep the momentum going."

Other, earlier repatriations have faltered at this stage because what is now referred to in humanitarian circles as the 'gap' was allowed to develop between the emergency phase of a refugee crisis and the subsequent need for sustained, long-term development. In response to harrowing television footage of refugees fleeing and dying, the international community all too often has been prepared to pump lavish funds into an emergency, but has been much more reluctant to foot the bill for less sexy and even more expensive community and national rebuilding. Humanitarian and development organizations compounded this problem by cooperating only fitfully.

Last year, High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers announced what he called a 4Rs initiative in which governments and major organizations would in future work much more closely together with the aim of providing a seamless flow of aid through an emergency's major phases – repatriation, reintegration, rehabilitation and reconstruction – hopefully eliminating the infamous 'gap.'

Sri Lanka was selected as one of four global regions to field-test this concept. "Returnee and reintegration assistance alone won't help Sri Lanka erase the damage wrought by years of conflict and economic stagnation," Lubbers said recently and pledged UNHCR would work closely with institutions such as the World Bank, the U.N. Development Program and the Asian Development Bank.

The refugee agency has one other major plus in its column as it helps to try to put Sri Lanka together again, according to Wright and other senior UNHCR veterans. "We were one of the few international organizations which was involved throughout most of the crisis, even when things got very rough," Wright said. "We now have a lot of credibility – with the government, with the LTTE and with the civilians we have been helping. We helped make a difference and this has translated into donor support for our operations here."

LONG, DIFFICULT, DANGEROUS

When the agency opened its first office in Colombo on November 2, 1987, its aims appeared to be clear-cut and short-term. The military situation had apparently stabilized and India dispatched a peacekeeping force to Sri Lanka. UNHCR agreed, under its mainstream mandate, to help the estimated 100,000 refugees then in India to return home. The prospects for a lasting peace looked good.

An internal report underlined the reality: "Though only modest, UNHCR's role is widely acknowledged as being a catalyst in promoting a favorable climate for the re-establishment of normal life in the north and east of the country."

There was no foreboding at this time the situation would soon change so dramatically that the organization would be plunged into uncharted waters, becoming involved in one of its longest, most difficult and most dangerous operations.

Fighting between the army and the LTTE intensified in the early 1990s and swirled with increased ferocity across the north and east. The numbers of newly displaced persons increased dramatically. Even some of the refugees UNHCR had helped return home to start a new life were forced to flee again.

The government and the U.N. Secretary-General asked the agency to expand its operations to include not only the refugees immediately under its mandate, but the far more numerous internally displaced. In the context of Sri Lanka's civil war, it was virtually impossible to differentiate between IDPs and refugee returnees.

UNHCR agreed. It would be one of the first times the agency became heavily involved with IDPs in such large numbers, but this new commitment did raise questions about its mandate and when, where and how it should help some or all of the 20-25 million internally displaced people worldwide. Although suffering similar privations to refugees, internally displaced persons do not enjoy similar international protection afforded refugees.

Many live in so-called 'failed states' such as Somalia. Paradoxically, this may make it easier for international organizations to help them because they can impose their own rules and guidelines. But in Sri Lanka, while providing material assistance and advocating on both sides that civilians must enjoy basic human rights, UNHCR was fully aware that a functioning sovereign government was the ultimate authority and protector of the population while the LTTE insisted it spoke for the entire Tamil community.

RAZOR'S EDGE

"We were walking a constant tightrope," said Janet Lim who was the agency's representative in the late 1990s. "Whatever move you made, it was likely to unsettle one side or another."

As an internal debate within the agency on its global role towards IDPs continued through the 1990s and into the new millennium, UNHCR's operations in Sri Lanka periodically came under review.

"At times it was touch and go," Lim recalls. There were doubts about the IDP involvement, about costs and the seeming futility of the conflict. Luckily, perhaps "It was a low cost program and we were punching above our financial weight at the time," Lim said. "We gained enormous respect for staying, but if we had pulled out, as it was suggested occasionally, we would never have been able to return. It would have been a disaster for so many people we were trying to help."

On the ground, field personnel were confronted with enormous personal risk. In the past, protection officers worked on the fringes of ongoing conflicts, helping refugees who had already reached safety. But they, along with other emergency staff, were now pitched into the center of the storm. Officials worked on both sides of the front lines, in government and LTTE-controlled territory, trying to protect civilians, ferrying emergency supplies through and around fighting zones, risking attack from both the ground and the air, and even on occasion, from the sea.

Officials had to win and maintain the confidence of both sides to be able to continue their work rather than being branded as military spies, an easy charge to make against anyone moving between opposing armies.

A 1989 internal assessment described the delicate situation: "The repatriation operation in Sri Lanka skates on a glassy pond, and the pirouettes and arabesques that we go through bear no resemblance to those in any other UNHCR program."

It added: "Security is tenuous, and incidents resulting in injury and death are frequent. The staff must be simultaneously diplomatic, courageous, patient, wary and energetic. They must also maintain their neutrality."

In addition to working with large numbers of IDPs, the agency introduced the new concept of 'open relief centers' – sites where vulnerable civilians received material help and protection in-country and where both armies agreed to respect UNHCR's moral authority. The centers also obviated the aim of some civilians to flee further afield to India.

Tens of thousands of people took refuge in these centers though there were setbacks. The most infamous occurred at a center called Madhu when one shell hit a church steeple, killing around 50 people. Critics questioned the very concept of the centers and their aim of short-circuiting another mass flight to India, but Janet Lim said, "For me the argument boiled down to the relative safety these centers offered when there was so much fighting and misery. We didn't have the luxury of guaranteeing absolute safety. A practical solution was the key. They worked."

ASSESSING THE SITUATION

As peace talks continued through spring this year, a visitor recently toured the war-affected areas.

The fighting had generally been confined to the north and east, the rest of Sri Lanka escaping the brunt of the destruction. But war did periodically and violently shatter the surface calm of the port capital of Colombo. President Premadasa was killed in one bomb attack in 1991; more than 100 persons were killed and 1,300 wounded by a suicide bomber at the country's Central Bank in 1996; and fourteen persons were killed and several planes destroyed in a similar attack on the international airport two years ago.

Amidst today's big city bustle and renewed signs of optimism, physical scars are vivid reminders of the recent past: a line of gutted office buildings near the downtown naval headquarters; police and army posts, heavily sandbagged and ringed with barbed wire, maintain a wary vigilance at the airport and other key buildings; a machine gun post perched high above one downtown hotel scans the ocean. At hotel reception desks, collection boxes still urge clients:

"Help provide shelter for your brother
He has given his today for your tomorrow."

Most of an increasing number of tourists taking advantage of cheap package tours and the relative calm, head to the palm-fringed beaches south of Colombo, but the refugee story is due north. A narrow two-lane trunk road hugs the west coast of Sri Lanka to Puttalam district, an area of sweeping, shallow lagoons, salt pans, fishing boats and prawn farms. In more peaceful times this region, too, might be a popular tourist destination, but the only visitors in the last 15 years were tens of thousands of civilians fleeing the fighting further north.

The area's population doubled with the new arrivals. Dozens of welfare and relocation centers were established. Fleeing civilians were housed in mosques, schools and civic centers and private homes. Puttalam is not a wealthy area, but like many areas around the world inundated with displaced persons, it has displayed both a remarkable tolerance and resilience in absorbing so many homeless civilians with so few resources.

Many of the displaced persons are Muslims from the Jaffna or Mannar regions further north who gravitated here because of the large number of local coreligionists. Some have already returned home. Others are more cautious, waiting to see if the peace lasts, wondering whether to settle here permanently and what awaits them, if anything at all, 'back home.' Can they believe the politicians' promises? Should their children's education come first?

DASHED HOPES

Like all uprooted peoples, each individual relates heart-rending stories of violent upheaval, the hope of immediate return and then the despair of long exile. Fifty-seven-year-old Abdul Hameed Badurdeen was part of Jaffna's thriving Muslim community with a home on the main thoroughfare, Moor Street, when one day in October 1990, the community was destroyed. All the Muslims were summoned to a local school, given just two hours notice to leave and with virtually no possessions or money, bused into exile.

"We were told we might be back in two days," he recalls ruefully. "Thirteen years later and we are still not home." Refugees worldwide are often told by their tormentors or wrap themselves in self-delusion that their exile will be fleeting, but the reality is often very different.

Abdul Hameed Badurdeen and his family wandered the country as nomads for years before settling in Puttalam. Since the cease-fire, community members have returned to Jaffna on exploratory visits but as one said, "What would you do if you returned and found a tree growing in your old living room and the rest of the house destroyed?"

There is a constant tug-of-war in the gut of all displaced persons between hope and fear, a deep seated desire to return to the ancestral hearth or to turn one's back on a dreadful past and begin life afresh somewhere else.

Often the wanderlust is strongest in the young, but 21-year-old Liyakath Aikhan Mohammed Aslam is in no doubt: "I was seven when I fled. I can't even remember anything about my own village. But I will be so proud when I return there," he said. When will that be? "Oh, in a few days. Or maybe in a few years." Followed by a fatalistic shrug.

For now he lives in Kuringipitty, a tiny hamlet of nearly 200 displaced persons at the head of a lagoon. He is clearly very bright and clever, but because of his nomadic existence, he has had no formal education and cannot read or write. His future looks bleak even if the peace becomes permanent.

Several homes in Kuringipitty burned down recently, and on this visit a UNHCR team drops off emergency supplies – plastic buckets, sleeping mats, blankets. Each package is worth a little over $40, but for people with nothing, even this modest help is priceless.

Protection work – the core of UNHCR's mandate – is both labor intensive and basic. It may take a full day or even longer for a team to visit a few people in an isolated community.

A check list: Do they have basic shelter, water and a little medicine? Are they being harassed by the locals or military? Has the school reopened? Is there any work or income support? Help may be needed to resolve land and home ownership problems. Ensuring that if people do go home, they do so voluntarily and once there enjoy their basic human rights. Has the only access road to the village destroyed during the fighting been repaired? Have there been any recent incidents of child abductions? If UNHCR officials cannot help directly, liaise with local government officials or another organization to provide a clinic or school books. One thousand and one mundane tasks.

EYE OF THE STORM

Moving north, the signs of war and its destructive aftermath proliferate. When the guns fell silent in late 2001, the LTTE controlled a 100 kilometer deep swath of jungle, east to west, known as the Vanni, isolating from the rest of the country the vital government-controlled northernmost Jaffna Peninsula, the crown jewel which the two sides had duelled over.

The A9 trunk road cleanly bisects the north of the island, running south to north, slicing through the government front lines into the heart of the Vanni region and snaking into Jaffna town. It had been dubbed the Highway of Death during the war and even in more peaceful times is a useful barometer of the country's health.

The military tried to choke this rump Tamil state of Vanni during the war by imposing both a military and economic blockade on the region, but some emergency humanitarian supplies for the civilian population were allowed through. Field officer Kilian Kleinschmidt recalled the extreme tension and danger of running a convoy through no man's land between the opposing armies in 1997:

"Boy, it's hot – 45 or 50 Celsius, but who cares? Who dares to breathe anyway?

Pitch dark – there is the abandoned farm half way; the little Hindu shrine where truck drivers pray during the day crossing no man's land.

The palm trees with their tops shot away by artillery.

Big Dany driver is so quiet, hiding behind his wheel and driving so slowly – crawling, inching. Waiting for the bang which will tell us, for a fraction of a second, that the mine has got us and we will never make it home.

No time to write a last letter; no time to cry and scream. Advancing carefully – 500, 400, 300, 200, 100 yards. Made it all the way back to where we had started. Totally wet. Wrecked. Greeted by this little black clothed fighter at the rebel checkpoint.

My decision to try to get back from rebel territory through the front lines. Didn't my friend the brigadier promise to let me 'in' even at night?

Didn't I tell my friend, the rebel checkpoint commander, that we would be allowed to cross by the army?

Didn't he reply that if our convoy crossed there would be no return – he would mine the no man's land for the night, attack any moving object?

The army didn't open the barrier. We had to return through no man's land.

The mine didn't rip us into little chunks. They didn't shoot.

Safety."

PROGRESS

When the A9 was reopened for civilian traffic early last year, it was the most tangible sign of progress. The embargo on such sensitive items as cement has been gradually lifted and prices in the enclave, once prohibitive for virtually everything, are now on a par with the rest of the country. Traffic volume has increased and modern Japanese trucks joust with World War II vintage Morris Minors and Austin cars for bragging rights on the crumbling highway. Burned out armored personnel carriers still litter the shoulders but de-miners in rubber galoshes and visors sweep for mines and unexploded ordnance with garden rakes. An ambitious plan is on the drawing boards to rebuild this vital artery.

But to travel on the A9 one enters a twilight zone between war and peace and two nations, the Sinhalese land of Buddhists and a Tamil-controlled territory of Hindus. The two armies are on stand down but eye each other warily. The LTTE has established its own police force, court system and tax authority, though many civilians say the collection of taxes amounts to nothing more than a crude shakedown. The Vanni even operates in a different time zone, 30 minutes behind national time.

In a great swirl of movement, a partial reordering of the civilian landscape, tens of thousands of displaced civilians have returned to the Vanni region or have left it for the densely populated Jaffna region as have other groups from Colombo and Puttalam.

Off the main highway, monsoon rains have washed away bridges and rural roads. There has been no maintenance for two decades. The jungle encroaches on everything.

Deep in the interior at Murippu village, protection officer Kahin Ismail checks on the progress of nine Muslim families who returned last year. The news is good. There has been no harassment. Tamil neighbors loaned one family money to buy nets and a fishing boat and an elder tells visitors, "Even if I die, I will die here happily."

"So far," according to Ismail "most of the returnees are people with nothing to lose. Those with businesses or homes elsewhere are holding back, waiting to see what happens. But the authorities here are handling the returnees with kid gloves." He added, "I spend maybe 50 percent of my time monitoring civilians like today. The rest involves helping to solve problems like land disputes. Soon UNHCR will also begin monitoring a government program to assist families returning to their original homes with cash grants.

Further along the rutted track lies Mullativu. Government soldiers and rebels fought one of the biggest pitched battles of the war here in the mid-1990s. Hundreds were killed. The town is still a wreck. Two rusting freighters captured by the LTTE and sunk by government warplanes scar the beach. It may take years to breathe new life into this town.

In contrast, Kilinochchi, a nondescript center sitting astride the A9, which has become the LTTE administrative capital, is bustling with energy. Offices are being rebuilt, shops opening and returning civilians cobbling together simple huts on the outskirts of town.

Heading towards Jaffna, the A9 has become a different kind of battleground for the hearts and minds of the country's civilian population. Every few kilometers, gaudy, hand painted billboards extol the bravery of Tamil martyrs though the accompanying English translations are somewhat convoluted:

"In the entrance of enemy
The life in prison will get lightness
If we are strong

In the earth without barriers
Braveness blooms when we left."

Across another front line and into army-controlled territory and a black and yellow banner proclaims "Highway for Unity and Peace." At every war-scarred bridge, a government notice instructs the public that it had been destroyed by Tamil fighters. Both sides are keeping their options open, reminding their respective publics of the sacrifices they made during the war.

ULTIMATE PRIZE

Once the jewel of Tamil culture, the peninsula was the ultimate prize, the center of the military storm where many thousands of persons died in set piece battles and the bulk of the civilian population uprooted from their homes.

Much of the mainland, lagoons and islands remain in ruins, heavily fortified with bunkers, berms and barbed wire.

Professor Thaya Sumasundaram of Jaffna University's Faculty of Medicine, says the psychological damage suffered by the population may be even greater. "Where are we on the ladder compared with, say, Cambodia or Bosnia?" the professor, who worked extensively in Cambodia, asked rhetorically. "It became very bad here and had the war carried on much longer we would have hit rock bottom – just like Cambodia."

He added, "The ages-old social net is no longer there to protect society. The role of women has changed dramatically. Elders have lost their legitimacy and young people their inhibitions. We can't go back to the old ways, that's for sure, but if there is one glimmer of hope it is that some important structures have not been completely wiped out."

But as the crush of returning people mounts, the army has gradually reduced the size of its formerly out-of-bounds high security zones. Some reconstruction, including work on a sparkling white library, is underway. Civilian flights have resumed to the once isolated pocket. Ferry services may get underway soon, facilitating the return of refugees from India.

It is a modest beginning. Moor Street, the home of nearly 4,000 Muslim families before the war, including Abdul Hameed Badurdeen quoted earlier in this report, remains gutted and apparently empty.

One man poked around a ruined home. He told a visitor during a chance meeting he had returned that very day to assess the damage and decide whether to bring his family back. Attracted by the conversation, other Muslims emerged from the shadows and sought reassurance from UNHCR protection officer Rafael Abis about the future.

"When we came here a month ago, there was no activity at all. Nothing. Nobody," he said. "This is progress. It is slow, but it is progress."

There was another encouraging encounter at Manddaitivu village on one of the outlying areas the same day. While Abis discussed with recently returned Catholics the possibility of removing rolls of barbed wire from the beaches, a lone sailing vessel anchored and unloaded piles of building poles, ripe mangoes, suitcases, pots and pans, kettles, fishing nets, a bicycle and finally a loudly bleating black goat.

It was the first time returning civilians had been allowed to sail back to their old homes rather than going via the heavily guarded highway.

"Another small first," said Abis. As if to emphasize how peaceful and even 'normal' the situation appeared, off duty sailors enjoyed a game of cricket in the afternoon heat nearby, the lazy thwack of a ball on bat making war and destruction at that moment seem a long way off.

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Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 130: "Sri Lanka – Emerging from the ruins" (April 2003). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (880Kb) here or high-resolution (1.5Mb) here.

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