No rights, now no lands

By Feizal Samath and Kumudini Hettiarachchi 

No rations for three months, a child refugee says. 

Community workers say the refugees have not only to worry about their land but also basic rights like voting and access to education, health and maternity needs. Rohan Edirisinha, Director at the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), says they are supporting a petition before the Human Rights Commission (HRC) to address all these issues.

"The HRC is trying to formulate some amendments to exempt internally displaced persons (IDPs) from the prescriptive law which allows non-owner users of land, possession on the grounds of continued, uninterrupted occupation," he said. The CPA is supporting a petition filed by a group called the Citizens Committee for Forcibly Evicted People (CCFEP). Officials from this group were not immediately available for comment.

Thousands of Muslims fled their homes in October and November 1990 from Mannar following a deadline set by the Tigers to leave the area or face death, which some saw as a form of ethnic cleansing. Mannar has a mixed population of Tamils, Muslims and a few Sinhalese. 

"Can we go back with the situation like this? We are worried that we'll lose everything we have back home," says Habib Mullah, 47, a community leader at the Kandakuli refugee camp at Kalpitiya.

The rebel deadline was October 28, 1990 and the families in his village of Erakulampitiya in Mannar left the area and landed in Kalpitiya after paying boatmen a lot of money. Mullah ran a tea boutique back home but survives on odd jobs now. 

S.M. Mubarak, a local development worker from Puttalam, says the refugees lost everything they had after being chased away by the LTTE. "They lost all their belongings, their rights and now are in danger of losing their lands," he said. 

While he feels most won't return because less than 10 percent of the refugees owned land in Mannar, Mubarak says these victims are discriminated against by the government in voting rights. 

"The constitution guarantees the right of residents to vote from wherever they are but these refugees haven't had voting rights for the past 10 years," said Mubarak, who works for a non-government organization involved in rehabilitation, education and environment. The immediate concern however, amongst some refugees is that of losing their land as the tenth year of their existence as refugees nears. According to the law, if landowners don't occupy or use the land for a continuous period of 10 years it can be claimed by anyone else who has occupied the land and made economic or commercial use of it. CPA's Mr. Edirisinha says the land problem affects internally displaced people across the island and that includes even Tamils who have been displaced by fighting. "The HRC is trying to evolve a situation where the land-loss issue will cover IDPs across the island," he said.

Other officials noted that the land problem immediately affects the Kalpitiya refugees more than other refugees. "Except for the Kalpitiya refugees, others have not been displaced for periods of more than five years, so they don't have this problem right now," one official explained. 

Mr. Edirisinha noted that apart from the land issue, the CCFEP and CPA were also fighting for the rights of these displaced people to vote and have access to basic human needs like the rest of the population. 

Mohamed Careem owns 10 acres of coconut land in Kalpitiya on which refugee camps have been set up temporarily. He knows the chances of the refugees returning to their original homes are remote. He too is worried about the land he has given to these refugees and wonders whether he would ever get it back.

When the refugees arrived in large numbers in Kalpitya, 10 years ago, the Divisional Secretary had appealed to residents to provide land to house these people. Careem felt sorry for them and gave his land on which he was told only 50 families would be accommodated. Next morning when he visited his property, he was shocked to find 400 families under the shelter of tents. 

The Kalpitiya refugees live in cadjan huts with their clothes hung on a rope strung across the hut or stacked in worn out suitcases. The huts have cardboard partitions. The only light that comes into the huts is through the open doorways and gaping holes in the roofs. Plastic sheets are kept handy to cover the roofs against the rain.

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