Point of View

Eppawala: don't change this way of life

Professor Jonathan Walters

'Pospet Kanda,' Phosphate Hill looms over the northeast corner of Eppawala. Until 1971, it was just one among many such large rock-outcroppings which dot the otherwise flat jungle scapes of one of the island's ancient agricultural and civilizational heartlands, the North Central Province.

Even after the 1971 discovery that it contains a large load of phosphate, and the subsequent, (1977- present) development of a government phosphate industry, the hill garnered recognition primarily as a result of its proximity to Eppawala, a city of central importance in this district.

Villages surrounding it rely upon Eppawala for medicine, upper-level education, banking, groceries and other basic necessities, agricultural supplies, luxury goods, post and communications, gasoline and other fuels and public transportation.

But today, Phosphate Hill looms larger and darker, than it has ever been before. Today everyone knows that an American company wants to take that phosphate by strip-mining the 56 square miles of which it constitutes the centre. Little wonder that in June 1997, February 1998 and August 1998 tens of thousands demonstrated against the plans of Freeport-McMoRan/I.M.C- Agrico by marching to the Sacred Bodhi Tree in Anuradhapura, twelve miles north and visible from the top of Pospet Kanda.

The destruction that would result from the proposed mining operation goes beyond the dislocation which will be suffered by these people if they are driven from their homes, fields, schools, and temples by American bulldozers.

Even if individuals can survive relocation, the destruction of this region, its ancient and complex, civilization, and of its fragile traditional ecosystem, would be permanent. Eppawala's centrality is centuries old, and the dry, thorny jungles of the surrounding countryside preserve flora (including rare medicinal plants and ingredients) and fauna (including wild elephants) either threatened or nonexistent elsewhere.

The proposal also calls for the destruction of the Jaya Ganga. Six miles of it would disappear into the massive 56 square mile, hundred foot deep crater of dead land that Freeport-McMoRan/I.M.C- Agrico wants to create in the North Central Province. If anything remains of Jaya Ganga once this has been done, it will be water poisoned by run-off from the mountains of radioactive waste products which extracting the phosphate will simultaneously produce.

And this is to say nothing of the damage which will be done to the East and the ocean, when the company's proposed processing plant in Trincomalee dumps hundreds of tons of mill-tailings into the harbour.

Eppawala and the villages which surround it are ancient settlements, as is clear in the numerous stone inscriptions, Buddhist monuments and irrigation works, dating back to Sri Lanka's ancient Anuradhapura Period (3rd c B.C to 11th c A.D.), which are found here.

Many of the estimated 54 villages which will be destroyed if the proposed mining agreement is reached are classified as Sinhala " ancient villages" (Purana gam).

These tight-knit residential centres located beside ancient irrigation tanks, were surrounded by lush coconut groves and vegetable gardens. The gardens were in turn encompassed by collectively maintained and more-or-less equally divided stretches of paddy land, followed by strips of slash-and-burn fields carved out of the edge of the open jungle.

Travelling outward from any village in any direction along an ancient system of roads, which still connects tank bunds all the way from Dambulla to Vavuniya, one crosses three or four miles of open jungle before reaching another slash-and-burn area, followed by a stretch of paddy fields, village gardens, a residential centre and another irrigation tank.

As Eppawala has been transformed into a modern city, the farmers in the "ancient villages" have adopted technological innovations (e.g. the tractors, fertilizers, pesticides and hybrid seed introduced during Sri Lanka's version of the Green Revolution) and new housing patterns (traditional wattle-and-daub-are quickly disappearing as brick structures with tile roofs have become the norm). Most of the ancient residential centres have dissipated into lines of houses (along more-or-less motorable roads) and other cultural trends (e.g TV) as far as their own rice based economics have allowed.

Simultaneously, new populations within the city itself and in some villages, have dramatically changed the region's demography over the last several decades.

Eppawala now boasts significant populations of Christians, Muslims and Hindus, drawn to the city primarily for trade who peacefully co-exist with the still predominant Buddhists of the region.

Thousands of people dislocated by hydro-electric schemes in southern Sri Lanka and by the war in northern Sri Lanka have been relocated here, especially in new villages constructed to the west and south of Pospet Kanda, which are laid out along large-scale irrigation works and numbered and named according to the order of tracts. They have enriched the region not only with diverse religions, but also with the dialects, cultural practices and beliefs peculiar to the regions from which they came.

The residents of these new villages, and those residents of the older villages which happened to lie along the path of the new irrigation canals, are comparatively comfortable farmers. With water, the land here is almost unbelievably fertile, containing as it does high levels of natural phosphate fertilizer.

The settlement and irrigation schemes also produced some unintended negative consequences which represent matters of great concern to all the villages of the region. On the one hand, agricultural output has not been sufficient to keep up with the simultaneous inflation and influx of luxury goods which has attended the rise of Eppawala.

Even farmers with irrigation water feel the crunch of poverty and recognize their comparative lack of access to the material culture enjoyed in the larger cities. And those villagers who did not receive irrigation water have felt this crunch acutely; in some instances the residents of one time wanga(traditional) centres have become wage-labourers for their wetter, wealthier cousins.

The residents of Eppawala proper have business and and access to schools and hospitals serving the thriving society that Freeport- McMoRan/I.M.C- Agrico wants to change. More than five hundred Buddhist monks have petitioned the Government of Sri Lanka to oppose these plans.

The Gandhi-inspired Committee to Protect Eppawala Phosphate, led by the charismatic chief monk of an ancient Buddhist temple in the shadow of Phosphate Hill, had attracted enormous local support. The demonstrations and hunger fasts which attended the June 1997 February 1998 and August 1998 protests clearly indicate the strong sentiment that despite poverty and even wild elephants this, and no place else, is home

How can there even be a question of selling it to Americans? This sentiment is more forcefully apparent in the comments being made in Eppawala since this was first proposed, to the effect that no holds will be barred in resisting this senseless eradication of the very ways of life that have been in existence for so long.

Professor Jonathan Walters BA (Bodwin 1983), AM (Chicago 1986), PhD Chicago 1992) is an American Scholar who specialises in Theravada Buddhist and Sri Lankan history. He is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion, Whitman College, in Walla Walla, Washington. He taught comparative religion at the University of Peradeniya in 1991-92

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