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JAFFNA, SRI LANKA, January 28, 2005: While the world’s heart and money go out to tsunami victims who lost their homes, another group of refugees looks on in despair. Muthuthampy Joganathan has been in temporary shelters for 15 years since he was evicted by the Sri Lankan army from his house near Sri Lanka’s northern coast, an area then engulfed in civil war. Though a peace effort collapsed in 2003, the guns have remained silent. But that doesn’t help Joganathan much. A fisherman accustomed to the sea air, he lives in a one-room hut down a narrow, muddy lane, separated from his neighbor by a thin wall of woven palm leaves. More than 200 similar huts pack the compound near the city of Jaffna, a welfare center for some of the 85,000 war refugees still living in camps and now joined by an influx of tsunami victims. Few men have regular jobs. Food is bought with government ration cards, cooked over open fires. Latrines on the edges of the camp serve all. So it has been, year after year.



The Sri Lankan government has promised people whose homes were shattered by the tsunami they will either be helped to rebuild or will be relocated to new communities built for them. Even in the conflict zones of the north and east, where the Tamil Tigers have been fighting for independence from the Sinhalese-dominated government since 1983, the rebels and the government are talking about how to help those who lost everything in the crushing flood. As pledges of billions of dollars flow in for the tsunami victims, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees believes people displaced by the civil war also should receive more aid, and that attempts to resolve their problem could be “re-energized” by the newfound international enthusiasm.



“The northern people affected by the tsunami say they want to go home immediately. Well, so do we,” said Joganathan, a rugged looking man in his 40s, sitting in his small dirt courtyard. But that depends on whether the rebels and the government can make peace. Right now, there’s little indication that post-tsunami good will is going to revive negotiations. By the time the rebels and the government signed a cease-fire three years ago, 65,000 people had been killed and 731,000 dislodged by fighting or military requisitions. Since then, about half have either returned home, been relocated or have built new lives where they had found shelter, says the UNHCR. What’s left, Neill Wright, the UNHCR coordinator, said in an interview, is the “hard core” whose cases are unlikely to be resolved “until some political decisions are taken, until some progress is made in the peace process.”



Jaffna, the biggest prize of the war, bears many scars. After three years of truce, a few new buildings are rising beside the bombed-out shells of others. On the heavily contested road into town, shells blasted the tops off tall coconut trees, leaving a small forest of spindly trunks. Joganathan’s camp receives help from the UNHCR and USAID, the American aid agency which last year donated tin sheets for roofs and other home improvements. France built a community hall. Children now have a small playground of old tires and crude jungle gyms. Older kids wielding hoes are clearing a field for a volleyball net.



A. Kannmani shares a house with 54 other people, 35 of them children, just a few miles from Joganathan’s camp. She lived in a school for three years after she was bundled into a Sri Lankan army truck and driven away from her home in 1990. Then her group sheltered in a church for another three years. Nine years ago, the Tamil Tigers moved them into a house owned by a Tamil living abroad. The Tigers, who during 19 years of war earned a reputation for ruthlessness, simply told the owner he was donating his home to the cause, neighbors said. The house once must have been considered grand: a large living room and four other rooms under a red-tiled roof. Now, washing lines are strung across every room and outdoors. A string bed is the only piece of furniture. Both Kannmani and Joganathan came from Palali, a region important to the Sri Lankan military and bitterly disputed during the 15 months of ill-fated peace negotiations. When the military evicted them, “we left without anything,” said Kannmani, a wiry, unmarried woman with a streaks of ash and vermillion on her forehead. “Before, we had a cow, a goat, chickens, paddy fields. Now, nothing,” she said. “We want to go back. We want to have our old life.”

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