By Papri Sri Raman
(March 02, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) Sri Lanka’s President, Mr. Mahinda Rajapaksa, said: “On behalf of the entire Sri Lankan nation, I make an open invitation to all Sri Lankans — Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim, Burgher, Malay and all other communities — who left this country because of the war, to return to your motherland.”
Judging by past experience, the February 5 appeal is unlikely to find a positive response among the fugitives, mainly Tamils, from the island’s war-torn north to Tamil Nadu across the Palk Strait.
Even before such appeals, 1,99,546 refugees in India have returned to Sri Lanka over the years, according to the UN High Commission for Refugees. Aid agencies, however, point out that 50 per cent of them have come back to India. In the Tamil Nadu camps, there are refugees who have come back for a third time, after repatriation.
The numbers reeled out by the aid agencies are truly numbing — 90,000 Tamil Muslims driven out of Jaffna overnight, another 50,000 Tamils told to leave the city in a day. Up to 2005, as many as 2,78,549 people are said to have come to India in three phases of displacement, the first in 1984, the second between 1989-91 and the third since 1996. Half of all these were children.
In December 2008, the 117 camps in Tamil Nadu sheltered a total of 73,613 people. As many as 23,500 refugees live outside camps. Since January 12, 2006, when the latest war began, yet another 21,000 have arrived in India.
India has refrained from taking aid from any country or external agency for the Tamil refugees. For the first time in 2008, however, funds from the USAID Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance and the Public Law (PL) 480 (also called the Food for Peace) programme were used through international relief organisations to rebuild some shelters gutted by fire in the Metupatti camp in the Namakkal district, upgrade sanitary facilities in the Mandapam camp and construct new structures in the Thappathi and Kulathuvaipatti camps in the Tuticorin district.
“Mandapam is our best camp”, says D. Jothi Jagarajan, one of the most senior government officers and the secretary in charge of public affairs, under whom a Rehabilitation Commissioner and a department facilitate refugee rehabilitation.
The Mandapam camp in Rameswaram, with flood-lit high walls, barbed wires and armed guards, is a transit facility for more than 5,000 where the refugees are given shelter, after their authenticity is verified and they go through a quarantine procedure. Most camps are rows and rows of palm-thatched cubicles besides dusty highways, flooded during monsoon.
There are two special camps, one in Chengalpet in Kancheepuram district and another in Cheyyar, Thiruvannamalai district, holding about 40 specially interned people. Some of the Indian camps are very large. The Tiruvallur camp houses nearly 5,000 inmates, of whom 1,300 are children. There are 1,497 children in a camp in Madurai, and the Bhavanisagar camp has more than a thousand children.
All the refugees are required to carry identity cards, are under 24-hour police surveillance, have to report to authorities whenever required to do so and their access to the media is severely restricted.
A category of refugees, to whom Mr. Rajapaksa’s appeal is not addressed, is that of the internally displaced. Together, the internally displaced and the refugees abroad are estimated to total 6,00,000 as of today.
‘There is actually no difference whether a person is an IDP (internally displaced person) or a ‘refugee’ in another country. For the victim, it is not only a loss of home and livelihood, it is also a loss of ownership and freedom, a loss of identity,” says Ashok Gladston Xavier of the social work department of the Loyola College, Chennai.
Particularly distressed among the internally displaced are the 2,00,000 Tamils herded into 13 barbed wire camps by the Sri Lankan government in last two months of the ongoing war. The Rajapaksa government has declared its intention of keeping them in camps for at least three years and is seeking foreign aid.
After a visit to the IDP camps, British Labour MP Robert Evans has said: “These are not welfare camps: they are prisoner-of-war cum concentration camps.” People are allowed to get out of these camps, “only if a relative stays behind,” say Amnesty International officials.
The refugees are fleeing not only the endless war but also its economic fallout. Sri Lanka, according to most United Nation reports of the 50s and 60s, was a state with better human development indices, literacy and healthcare than Singapore and Malyasia. Now, in the island’s north, every step is a mine-field, most buildings are burnt-out shells, and village after village bombed out.
“It has been estimated that the ongoing war has annually taken one to two per cent off the GDP growth in Sri Lanka”, says economist S. Narayan, a former finance secretary of the Government of India.
He adds: “When cumulated over two decades, it is possible to argue that per capita incomes should have been twice what they are now, which would be equivalent to that in Malaysia or at least Indonesia. The cost of the war in terms of overall welfare is, therefore, quite evident. The displaced persons camps are a part of this cost.”
What will the refugees’ rehabilitation cost? Says Narayan: “approximately US $ 600 per person per year including administrative overheads, leakages etc—a huge amount, given the numbers of displaced persons.” Not exactly an easy target to reach, one may add, in these times of recession.
This article is supported by a C-NES UNHCR media fellowship -Sri Lanka Guardian
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This is hilarious of the writer to expect Tamils or any other Sri Lankan who got the opportunity to settle down in the West to go back to Sri Lanka. The President made the gesture in good faith, and the governments in the west should persuade the Asylum seekers to get back as soon as they can. All of them in their refugee claim made similar statements why they left Sri Lanka and parachute in the west without touching a 3rd country on the way to qualify the UN rules for asylum seeking. Most of the people who got to the west were the affluent, who did not suffer like the ordinary folks at Mulathive held by LTTE. The irony as documented by former Canadian High Commissioner is the so called Tamil refugees are their first destination when they get their papers approved is Sri Lanka? These people can talk from their hind legs, as a former Attorney General is crying foul now, Mr. Siva Pasupathy. How can you trust these people to be appointed to high office, when they conduct themselves like this?
As one writer commented in one of the columns, most of the elderly Tamil Diaspora is suffering in Silence in the West having had to pay the mortgages of their children, while living in the basements and if they are lucky, going to a Temple once a week. The temples are run by individuals who make a fast buck on this hapless elderly Tamil community. Almost all the Hindu Temples are privately owned by an individual, and under the faith makes all the money for himself. Do you expect any of these people to return, even Sri Lanka reach good times someday?
With all the artificial glory average Sri Lankan exhibit in both Tamil and Sinhalese populations, given a chance they want to settle down abroad, even doing most menial employment. But materially they can achieve better heights than their counterparts in Sri Lanka. With such a climate of material world, it is not the goodwill of the president or the climate of Sri Lanka which prevents these people returning home.
We will return if you stop corruption,violence and practices that is imposed on people the fundamentalist religious order.We would like to live in a secular society to in a backward society.Get rid of all the petty restrictions as it robs the quality of life.
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