India must not ignore Tamil refugees

Mail Today, June 27, 2009
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WHAT ARE India’s strategic goals in Sri Lanka? All visiting Sri Lankan Tamil politicians pose this seemingly innocuous question without getting an answer. The fivemember Tamil parliamentary team that called on the External Affairs Minister S M Krishna on June 13 too left empty- handed unsure of a positive Indian intervention in the worsening Tamil refugee situation in the island nation.

Sure, Mr Krishna did ask the Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s brothers, senior advisor Basil and defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, early this week to let in the relief ship Captain Ali. But beyond Lankan assurances of dismantling the refugee camps in 180 days, the foreign minister, who hosted the brothers, has done precious little for the civilian victims of the ethnic war.

The unfolding human tragedy on the island may not spill guns and gore into the Tamil Nadu coast, and the defeat of Vaiko in the general elections dispels all threat of militant Tamil nationalism resurfacing to avenge deaths across the Palk Strait. But is it official Indian policy to let Sinhalese triumphalism prevail over a defeated race?

After the death of Prabhakaran and the decimation of the LTTE, has the Indian government left the Tamil people, particularly the civilian refugees of the ethnic war, to their fate? The answer is to be had in the story of the “internally displaced people or IDPs” of Vanni — the large north Lankan territory that Prabhakaran once ruled with a border post, no-man’s land and international monitoring. The visiting team of Tamil parliamentarians from Sri Lanka shared their extraordinary tale of woes, which the Lankan government may deny in long rejoinders.

The government needs to understand that it has lost all its credibility after the murder of the known anti-establishment journalist, Lasantha Wickrematunge by state-supported fascists. And in any case, the victims justly deserve more sympathy than the victors on an issue concerning human rights. So, unless the international media is let in to verify the claims of the Tamil MPs and until they are proved false, their stories will be considered as facts simply because the Lankan government has something to hide. This account here is that of the team of MPs led by Tamil National Alliance Parliamentary party leader and Trincomalee MP R Sampanthan.

Camps

About three lakh civilian refugees are being held in camps that are nothing short of prisons, by all nongovernment accounts. Vavuniya has three to four camps, Jaffna has a small one at Tenmarachi, Tricomalee one and Mannar two. Of these the Vavuniya camps have around 2.25 lakh refugees, but the Lankan government is yet to publish a list of inmates. That is, there are no civilian records of lakhs of refugees. The military knows, but it does not even let the elected representatives of these refugees into the camps.

Sampanthan says all that he knows are what others have told him and that they are all terrible accounts of ethnic crimes by the Sri Lankan government against a group of people whose only crime was to be born in Vanni. These prison- like camps, with gun- toting Sinhalese army men guarding even queues to toilets, are out of bounds for Tamil politicians, most international aid workers and particularly the media. There is no free movement to the camp or out of it for the inmates. Even visiting relatives are kept on one side of a wire mesh as in a prison interview.

Doctors at the Vavuniya hospital give first aid or emergency treatment to patients and discharge them to their dingy tents as the hospital, overflowing with 3,000 patients, has no place for even the dead, who are counted and segregated in the evening. But the biggest Tamil worry is that these camps might be turned into permanent structures and the inmates would lose forever their homesteads. Again quoting reports from the ground, Tamil leaders say electric poles, schools, permanent dwellings and large food stores are coming up to cater to the huge population of refugees. Then, they quote, the Buddhist monk and MP, Medhananda Thero who told Parliament that, these lands have been liberated by the Sinhalese forces not to be given back to the Tamils and that the army men ought to be rewarded with the ownership of these lands.

Buddhist shrines have begun sprouting in the newly imagined past of Vanni. In a very familiar setting for Indians, the victors want to build temples where they believed ancient shrines existed. The monks have already identified 1,500 such sites in Vavuniya, Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu and Mannar.

The intentions so far, the Tamil leaders say, are clear: the Sinhalese right wing opinion will not allow Vanni to remain an exclusive Tamil territory. The Tamil MPs seek a pointed intervention from India on this issue. They don’t want their lands to be colonised and their people reduced to the status of permanent refugees next to their villages, with hostile Sinhalese ex- army men occupying their land.

The Sri Lankan government has dropped even the fig leaf of inclusive democracy by setting up a 19- member committee for resettlement and rehabilitation of Tamil refugees without any Tamil participation. There are 18 Sinhalese and one Muslim in the committee and not even a single Tamil MP from Vanni.

Why even the Indian officialdom that had effectively intervened with intelligence and “ non offensive technology and equipment” to defeat the LTTE does not seem to heed the demands of these moderate mainstream Tamil politicians.

Wants

All they want are the removal of barbed wire prison- like camps; an inclusive body to handle resettlement of refugees; Indian involvement and intervention to chalk out a rehabilitation strategy; reuniting of separated families; accounting of refugees in camps; removal of army from within the camps monitoring even queues to the toilet; demilitarisation of the Tamil territory; the release of the Tamil MP and three doctors who were caught from the battlefield. None of this could in any way be termed radical.

On the contrary, by not addressing these genuine Tamil grievances, the Lankan government and its Indian friends are promoting unconfirmed reports that have a resonance in Tamil Nadu. Tamilnet, the pro- LTTE website, had in the last fortnight reported the abduction of teenage Tamil refugee girls by the army.

Generation

In fact, the Tamil MPs insist that 25,000 critically wounded people in Vanni were mowed down and buried in their bunkers during the final assault. The Lankan government had announced that there were no civilians left in the no- fire zone on May 17, but soon, when defeat became imminent, the LTTE claimed that there were 25,000 injured civilians and probably some combatants in the war zone. Tamil leaders allege that the army is not letting in the media to hide this story of mass murder.

Tamil lawmakers say that between May 27 and 30, some 13,100 people had disappeared from the camps. They claim that these people were taken out of the camp after Col Karuna, the renegade Tamil leader who is now a junior minister in the Sri Lankan government, visited them to identify the LTTE cadre in the camps. Well, the stories of camps for LTTE cadres are not even known to the moderate Tamil leaders.

The historic discrimination and the 1983 anti- Tamil riots that led to the rise of Prabhakaran pale into insignificance in comparison with today’s injustice towards civilian refugees. Prabhakaran would soon be a frayed memory of a failed war, but if these civilians are not allowed to return to their homes, they would spawn a new generation of war mongers not unlike the LTTE and they won’t forgive the Indians either.