DECEMBER 2016
Monsoon Journal
A parfait media publication
World News
HUMANS OF NORTHERN SRI LANKA The face Book Community page “Humans of Northern Sri Lanka” is a pictorial page by Thulasi Muttulingam. Thulasi Muttulingam is a journalist based in the North of Sri Lanka. Having grown up away from her hometown of Jaffna, it is currently her mission to research and document as much of her culture and heritage as she can. If you are similarly interested, check out more of her work at the facebook page ~ Humans of Northern Sri Lanka: To follow the updates, “Like” the page at:www.facebook. com/pages/Humans-of-Northern-Sri-Lanka
“The adage, “everybody has a story to tell” is especially true of Northern Sri Lanka! Cut off for several decades from the South, the people of the North have many unique characteristics and issues that hardly get press coverage! Here, inspired by Humans of New York, is a small attempt to redress this - dedicated to all lovers of Sri Lanka, including Northern Sri Lanka!” The following is a recent pictorial that featured in Humans of Northern Sri Lanka:
by Thulasi Muttulingam
Dream Houses for Sri Lanka’s War Affected People; India’s gift to Sri Lanka
W
hen the severely war-affected people of Sri Lanka’s North and East made it out of the refugee camps containing them from 2010 onwards, they had a new dilemma to face: where to live? “We became displaced in 1983 and had been on the move ever since. We thought we’d return in three days, which turned into three weeks and then three years… it was eventually nearly 30 years before we could see our beloved land again. “When we finally saw our village in 2010, we found our houses destroyed, our wells caved in, and our lands overtaken by forest,” Says K.Palasivarasa (74), a farmer from the country’s war-torn Wanni region. Sri Lanka’s long drawn brutal civil war drew to a close in May 2009. Many of those who had made it out alive had battled constant displacements, death and destruction, before finally making it to Sri Lankan Army run territory, where they were then placed in refugee camps. The camps took years to close as the people’s lands had to be cleared of landmines and other hazards first. Some of those lands became demarcated as ‘High Security Zones’ by the Sri Lankan government which left the people of those areas bereft of their lands. There are still people living in refugee camps today seven years after the war ended, waiting for the government to release their lands. Many more languish in refugee camps in Tamil Nadu as well. Meanwhile the first of those to be released from refugee camps to go back home in early 2010 did not feel particularly fortunate either. “Our lands had been overtaken by jungle shrubs and we found them infested with wild animals. Snakes, wild pigs and elephants were running amok. We did not possess the funds necessary to clear our lands at that time. So we sheltered under trees until aid agencies came to our rescue with temporary shelters
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A family returned to their ancestral home in Jaffna from a Tamil Nadu refugee camp They currently lack the funds to repair it.bnw
for us to live in,” recalls Prema, a single mother of five in Mannar, Northern Province. Prema’s husband died in the last stages of the war in 2009. A shell piece from an aerial bombardment split his head open and he dropped dead in front of her. She still has nightmares of the incident and is under medication
traumas left behind by war. The temporary shelters the refugees were first given to settle in, were erected with corrugated iron and tin sheets, meant for only six months’ occupation – yet as it turned out, they have served as homes for the people for three to five years and more now. There are still people living in these shelters
A single mother and her family in front of thier new house.
for post traumatic stress. There are many such war widows left behind like her, struggling to bring up their children as single parents in a traditional Tamil community that had not equipped them to be breadwinners, while also still struggling with the
today for lack of anything better, even though the structures have become derelict now.
Dream Houses
It was in these circumstances that the Government of India signed a memorandum of understanding
with the Sri Lankan government to build about 50,000 permanent homes for the war-affected people of Sri Lanka. When the MOU was signed in 2012, people were ecstatic. They had lost all their material assets in the long drawn out war and having a permanent roof over their heads was but a dream – a dream that the Indian Government pledged to deliver. The project was planned to take an owner-driven approach, with the beneficiaries being responsible for building their own houses – while the Indian Government enlisted the aid of several high profile aid agencies such as UN-Habitat, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), Habitat for Humanity and the Sri Lankan government’s National Housing Development Authority as implementing partners in a supervisory capacity. Unfortunately, the reality of achieving this dream has not been a smooth process. The last four years in the North and East of Sri Lanka have been quite turbulent for the resettled refugees, despite the war being over. Much of their stress could be directly attributed to the houses they were building. “Imagine planning for something as simple as a family wedding? How many months would you plan in advance to make it go off without a hitch? And even then you would experience some hiccups along the way due to unforeseen and uncharted challenges. Extrapolate that then to what the Indian Government tried to gift the Sri Lankans. Of course some things went awry and we drew a lot of criticism for it,” says A Natarajan, Indian Consul General stationed at Jaffna, Sri Lanka. The Indian High Commission opened up a consulate in Jaffna in 2010, in order to better promote the Indian Government’s various infrastructure and development activities in these war affected regions of Sri Lanka.
Congregating for follow up discussions at the end of the event
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