This October marks the 29th anniversary of the exodus of Northern Muslims forcibly driven from their traditional homeland by the LTTE.
It was a white porcelain rice bowl. One delicately decorated in patterns of gold, with an inscription on the bottom saying ‘made in Japan’. A simple porcelain rice bowl that M. L. Kadar’s mother wanted to take with her 29 years ago when the LTTE came to their village in Mannar and asked them to leave within 24 hours.
Kadar was 21 years old then. Now at 50 he still remembers October 22, 1990 as it was yesterday. “The day before they (LTTE cadres) asked us to gather at the village mosque. Then they told us to leave the next day. They said we can only take a change of clothes in addition to those we were wearing,” Kadar recalled. The villagers were told to hand in their valuables before leaving. In much larger villagers it was announced through loud speakers.
The tone this message was delivered wasn’t impolite but authoritative. The community was already tangled in a bloody war between the LTTE and the Sri Lanka military. Some villagers have died when they were caught between shootouts. Kadar himself narrowly escaped being shot on three occasions. So, without questioning the families in the little Muslim village prepared to leave.
“My mother insisted we had to take this bowl with us,” Kadar now an In-service Advisor at the Zonal Education Office, Puttalam, said holding, almost cradling, the piece of china his mother cherished for over three decades. The rice bowl was given to his mother by her father when she got married. It was the only token she had to remember her deceased father by.
With a couple of packets of ‘viskothu’ (biscuits) they embarked on their journey, not knowing where the roads would lead them. Kadar remembers being hungry most of the time, ‘frying under the scorching sun’, getting wet in the rain and resting for the night in mosques or by roads. People from villages they passed gave the newly-homeless biscuit and water. Thousands of them, most from other villages, walked this way for two days till they arrived in Nachchaduwa, Anuradhapura.
The journey took an uglier toll on Kadar’s family. His mother had a mental breakdown on the way. This memory still pains Kadar. “She was worried about our safety. She was scared her children would all suffer,” he said as tears welled up in his eyes. Kadar’s mother was taking care of seven children carefully managing the biscuits they took with them. It took three years for his mother to recover.
Around the same time Shreen Saroor, now a Human Rights activist, lost her home too. She was reading for her administration degree at the University of Colombo when her family and the community were evicted from Mannar. As the two bridges connecting the Mannar Island to the main land was destroyed by the LTTE, her family and relatives had to move to a coastal village and get on fishing boats to escape.
Saroor remembers leaving behind neighborhoods where Hindus, Catholics and Muslims not only coexisted but cared for each other, and celebrated each other’s festivals as one. But all of that has changed now. Saroor said it was particularly bad for the women and children from her community.
“Many men, due to stress and dishonour, either died or fell ill. Women had to find livelihoods and either they went for daily wage jobs (chillie plucking or working in salterns) or they went to work in the Middle Eastern countries,” she said.
Then came another issue, when they finally settled in Puttalan. The Northern Muslims had to adapt to their hosts’ beliefs. “All these took away Muslim women’s and girls’ rights and wellbeing,” she said adding that they were constantly blamed for being like the Tamils culturally than the Muslims.
These incidents edged Saroor towards activism. She also wants to be connected with her roots like other evicted Northern Muslims in a land where they are treated as ‘foreigners’.
Meanwhile, Kadar also has built a house in Palliwaslthurai in Puttalam where his family settled. Married and having children on his own now, he does not want them to go through the same difficulties he had to go through. Facilities are scarce in his new village and though he sometimes want to go back to Mannar, his children are established here.
Unlike Kadar, there remains thousands of Protracted Internally Displaced Persons who are still homeless and lost in-between place of origin and temporary settlement, after, when on the third week of October in 1990 the entire Muslim community in the Northern Province was wiped off by the LTTE.According to statistics given by the Ministry of Resettlement of Protracted Displaced Persons a total of 21, 663 families, including 5, 543 Sinhala families, are still awaiting resettlement. Most of them are from Mannar, and 90 per cent of the IDPs settled in Puttalam.
First, they were for years in refugee camps and later in houses made using funds given by international communities. Dry rations were also given to the families by the World Food Organization. The project ended in 2002.
The families left behind villages that were distinctive to the Muslim community. Once bustling with the activities of day-to-day life, they are now deserted. One such village is the Moor Street area located close to the Jaffna town. Though following the end of the war, in 2009, the Jaffna town developed, the little village of Moor Street further deteriorated with rotting buildings and bad living conditions.
Lecturer at the University of Jaffna and activist Dr. Ahilan Kadirgamar said from the 8,000 Muslim families who were forced to leave 2,000 registered to come back. Out of them only 600 families were resettled.
“The Muslim villages are historic regions. They reflect another part of Jaffna,” he said adding that therefore, the Government has a responsibility to rebuild the once lost villages. Also, bringing the Jaffna Muslims back home the J is not easy because the Tamil communities were not as welcoming.
To bridge this gap, Dr. Kadirgamar and several others introduced the Tamil/ Muslim Relations Forum in 2012 that later transformed into the Jaffna Peoples’ Forum for Co-Existence after the Easter Attacks when anti-Muslim rhetoric’s were heard across Jaffna.
Platforms such as Dr. Kadirgamar’s offer an opportunity for the Tamils and Muslims to come together and solve their issues.
Project Management Unit for Resettlement of Protracted IDPs, Ministry of Resettlement of Protracted Displaced Persons, Project Director S. M. Yaseen said, that there are several major constraints the ministry has identified when resettling the IDPs. Most of them are concern land such as landless families, land identification issues and land ownership issues.
The community is affected by the non-availability of job opportunities and delays in providing basic facilities such as water and sanitation followed by electricity supply, health care and education.
Despite the Lessons Learned Reconciliation Commission recommending that durable solutions need to be found to address the long-standing IDP issue the Governments, led by Mahinda Rajapaksa and Maithripala Sirisena, have been sluggish in taking action.
“As a result this community is struggling to get even the basic facilities offered by the Government,” Yaseen said.
He further explained most undergo difficulties in getting them registered in the place of displacement, and as a result they struggle to obtain birth certificates, death certificates, and certification for school admission. This was because the Government Agent (GA) in their place of origin does not identify them as residents of that place anymore, and the GA in the host area has the same issue.This has snowballed into a new crisis. About 5,900 internally displaced Muslims have not obtained their voting rights for 2020 because they were not registered this year. The affected people have written to the Election Commission on September 16 regarding the matter. They are still awaiting a response.
“Still the Sri Lankan state has not recognised the Northern Muslim expulsion as a crime committed against an ethnic minority who lived under their control and protection, leave alone the international community recognising it,” Saroor said echoing the grim state the IDPs are in.She added, it took 10 years since the eviction of the northern Muslim for the UNHCR to set up a local office in Puttalam, while current United Nation’s reports claim there are no IDPs in Sri Lanka. The same issues were echoed by Lecturer of the Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Colombo, Dr. Mohamed Shareef Asees who said providing housing will not simply solve an IDP’s issues. Dr. Asees said a proper mechanism should be in place to alleviate the living standards of IDPs.
Dr. Asees is also an IDP himself, having had to leave his village in Vavuniya on October 21, 1990 when he was 13 years old, He had to work hard against all odds.
“I think the case of the Muslim IDPs is not properly addressed because the issues are not internationalized as the issues of the Tamils. Then the governments have played-up other issues and not those of the marginalized groups leaving them mostly forgotten,” he explained.
Dr. Asees had the opportunity of returning to his village in Vavuniya. But it has transformed in to a ghost land. The Sinhalese and Tamils who lived in adjourning villages have abandoned the land. Weeds grow where children played. Nearly three decades after they left their villages the IDPs are still not home.
The Tamil/Muslim Relations Forum is set to remember the Muslim evacuations in an event scheduled to be held at St. John’s Church Parish Hall on November 2.