In
1989, Mohamed Lateef had just got married and had taken ownership of a rice
farm and was looking to settle down to a quiet life of farming and raising his
family. That dream quickly shattered in
1990, when Lateef and 70,000 other members from the Muslim community were
forcibly evicted from Northern Sri Lanka by
the LTTE, only taking with them minimal possessions and limited amounts of cash
with everything else being confiscated by the Tamil Tigers.
Without
knowing where they were going, these desperate people moved south in whatever
mode of transport they could find. Most of them trekked miles and miles, days
on end with many perishing on the way.
Eventually Lateef and the survivors found themselves in Puttalum, a town
with a sizeable Muslim settlement. There
they were received by the locals and housed in makeshift refugee camps.
Eighteen
years on, and Lateef is still in
Puttalum with his family, living in the makeshift refugee camp, in a coconut-leaf hut affording little respite to
the elements, relying on daily wage earnings to support his family which has
now grown to include 3 children, the oldest being 15, all born in the Saltern
Internally Displaced People (IDP) camp in Puttalum.
“I don’t think about the past. It just makes me sick. There is no future for me to think about. I
gave up thinking about the future a long time ago. I just think about the present and how I can
give my family at least two square meals a day,” he says wearily.
This
incident has been largely forgotten in the annals of the Sri Lankan
conflict. Successive governments have
failed to provide adequate reprieve and support for the displaced who find
themselves in a political wilderness without much of a voice despite having representation
in the government. Problems with
education, proper shelter and sanitation plague the camps and so the displaced
people are dependent on menial jobs or handouts from philanthropists or the
government and humanitarian organisations. On top of this, it has also become a
delicate commercialized, criminalized and corrupt political scene.
“Yes we get support” remarks A.B. Niyas,
the camp leader of the Saltern IDP camp, cynically. “Every
so often we get the refugee tourists, who come and see us, take photographs,
give us some money, promise additional help and disappear.”
Puttalam still houses approximately 100,000 displaced
persons across 141 welfare centres, from the five districts of the Northern
Province. Over the recent years, Puttalam has also played host to some Tamil
and Sinhala IDPs who have been driven away from their homes in Batticaloa and
Trincomalee. The town is beginning to
buckle under the pressure of hosting a large IDP population.
Recent incidents in the town have exposed these
cracks. There is now a new fear that tensions between the area's original
Muslim inhabitants, who have grown tired of the newcomers taking their jobs
and, increasingly, buying their land, could lead to further crisis.
"We did all we could for them when they first
arrived," says Naleer, an amiable businessman and Puttalum Resident.
"But they're placing an unbearable
strain on resources. They work cheap, so they've taken people's jobs. They take
education, healthcare, too. They are
supported by the government and INGOs on top of this. We do not get anything from them. The
situation has created a lot of hate."
Many critics go on to say that the refugees are perpetually in this
situation of desperation without doing much to help themselves, since they know
that there will always be sympathetic support.
This is a
charge that M. Rahman, an activist from a local CBO set up by the displaced
people refutes. “We just want to go back home. We
don’t want to live anywhere else. We are
from Jaffna or
Mullaitivu. We lived side by side with
our Tamil neighbors without much problem.
We want to go back to that”
Until the 1990 incidents, the communities co-existed
fairly harmoniously in the north. Eighteen years after the evictions, the
displaced Muslims still speak affectionately of their old Tamil neighbours and
given the chance would return back to their home towns. 34-year-old Fatima
Shafeek, a mother of two, vouches for this. “I was born in Jaffna and that will always be my home. If I am given the chance I will go back“
After the Ceasefire Agreement was signed in February
2002, a number of these displaced families returned to their homes in the North
only to find their houses occupied by displaced Tamils, or rebels, or destroyed. Those who stuck it
out once again left back to Puttalum when the security deteriorated.
As for Lateef, what does he make of the situation? Well
just ask his ten year old son Mujeeb where home is. He will reply that home is the coconut-leaf shanty in a camp in Puttalam.
So as the world celebrates World Refugee
Day, 18 years on from when they were first evicted, the flame of hope needs to
be reignited for these forgotten IDPs of Puttalum, to one day find resolution
to their problems.
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