30 years since Ethnic Cleansing by LTTE Tamil Terrorists
(with the courtesy of The Hindu)
Thirty years may have passed since the LTTE Tamil terrorists evicted northern Muslims including Sinhalese overnight, but the ordeals of the Muslim community who effected most in the hand on Tamil terrorist’s ethnic cleansing campaign in year 1990, most of whom moved to Puttalam district in the North-Western Province, have not ceased, according to one Muslim activist.
Muslim Sri Lankan activist, whose family was displaced from Mannar in the Northern Province to Puttalam — three hours north of Colombo — has spent the last three decades working with the internally displaced community.
When planned moves to new cities or towns can be a logistical nightmare, being forced to leave abruptly — leaving behind one’s home, belongings, assets and means of livelihood — couldn’t have been simple. For two weeks beginning mid-October in 1990, the LTTE Tamil terrorists undertook a mass expulsion of resident Muslims in the north, at gun point, amid growing hostilities between the two Tamil-speaking minority communities in the north and east. Like her family; her parents, grandmother and eight siblings — most left with just the little money they had in hand.
“Till date, there has been no collective acknowledgement of this act of ethnic cleansing by Tamil politicians in the TNA who represent and worked with Tamil terrorists. Neither the Tamil political leadership nor Muslim leaders have addressed this issue properly.,” says Ms. Mohideen, 52, executive director of the Muslim Women’s Development Trust (MWDT), which she founded in 2010.
Bureaucratic hurdles
Some 70,000 people had no choice but to build their lives from scratch in Puttalam or elsewhere. “When some original residents of Puttalam, including Muslims, refer to us, they call us refugees,” Ms. Mohideen notes. “They fear we are after all their natural resources.”
From education and employment to housing and toilets, everything has proved a struggle for the northern Muslims trying to make Puttalama their home. A majority work for a daily wage in small vegetable farms or at the salterns in the coastal district. While a few hundred families have returned to Jaffna with great difficulty, others have chosen to remain in Puttalama which has imbalanced ethnicity in Puttalama now, where these Muslim families have grown. “But getting an official document or attestation is a big challenge. The officers at the local authorities invariably direct these families to Jaffna or Mannar, where we are from and it is considered as the correct step to follow. And when they go there, they are told their records don’t’ exist,” says Ms. Mohideen, of the many bureaucratic challenges faced by a community seen to be “neither here nor there”.
In any case, the displaced Muslims have had little success in making it to any updated official record, she points out, referring to the ambiguity over the number of displaced Muslims currently living in Puttalama. Rather critical of the Muslim parties and its leaders, she says those in Parliament are “more prone to opportunistic politics” than any long-term vision for the community, based on rights and freedoms. Further, Muslim leaders, in her view, have shown little interest in appreciating Muslim women’s calls to reform personal law.
Emphasizing the “huge task of pending reconciliation,” she says strengthening relations between the country’s Tamil and Sinhalese communities, as well as Tamils and Muslims, needs a host of initiatives, including addressing the “language barrier”. “Barring a handful, most politicians from all our communities are so disconnected from their own constituencies, that they are unable to do anything meaningful.”
All the same, women’s networks built by her and fellow activists over the years across communities are intact and offer hope, she says. “For instance, conversations in these groups helped us differentiate the LTTE that evicted us from ordinary Tamil people. We realised that the Tamil people’s solidarity is crucial. We need to build and strengthen solidarity networks with such people in all communities. There is a lot of work to be done,” she says.
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