In Jaffna, displaced Tamils are protesting on three fronts. Every Friday for months, families from Valikamam North continue to gather outside the Sri Lankan military commander's bungalow that sits on their land in Myliddy. At Palaly Junction, a separate weekly protest by residents driven from their homes on 15 June 1990 has passed its twentieth week . In Thaiyiddy, Tamils assemble every full moon day outside the Tissa Vihara, a Buddhist temple illegally built on privately owned Tamil land, as busloads of Sinhala pilgrims are brought in from the south. On the other side of the homeland, hundreds of Tamil farmers rallied outside the Batticaloa District Secretariat on Monday, until a court order brought it to an end . For more than three years, these farmers have watched thousands of hectares of traditional grazing land in Mayilathamadu and Madhavanai be swallowed by Sinhala settlers, backed by the state and protected by the Sri Lankan police . Hundreds of miles apart, they are protesting the same occupation.
More than seventeen years after the end of the armed conflict, the Sri Lankan military's stranglehold on the Tamil homeland has not loosened, with tens of thousands of troops still stationed across the North-East. Alongside the network of camps, outposts and police stations, Buddhist viharas rise on sites with no Buddhist population, the Department of Archaeology claims Tamil land as Sinhala heritage, and Forest and Wildlife gazettes fence off land that Tamil villages have farmed for generations. Colonisation schemes continue to plant Sinhala settlers in the homeland, from the Mahaweli project to the Kivul Oya scheme, which one Tamil MP warned this week threatened some 13,000 acres in Vavuniya North.
The state has sought to bluster past each incident on its own, as a minor dispute that needs further mediation, or an administrative oversight that requires more bureaucracy to overcome. Taken together however, they illustrate the true extent of Sinhalisation of the Tamil homeland, carried out by the state through its military and its institutions. The aim is clear: the permanent alteration of the demography of the North-East. This is a project that has been decades in the making, and shows no signs of slowing down under the current regime.
The government's defenders will point out that this administration has released land and speaks of 'reconciliation' in a way its predecessors did not. It was the National People's Power pledge that "people's land belongs to the people" that contributed, at least in part, to its gains in the North-East. Yet, like much else this regime has promised, that pledge has rapidly fallen by the wayside .
The piecemeal releases that have occurred pale in comparison to how much the occupation still holds. In March, for example, just two acres in Vasavilan were handed back after 36 years. Yet more than 2,500 acres of private land in Valikamam North remain occupied. The Myliddy families were promised a release in April, then by the end of September. Neither date was met, and on 14 October a minister asked them for two to three more months. Even as families continued to demonstrate this week, state valuers arrived to inspect their land , which the families recognise as the first step towards acquiring it for the military, with compensation they have said they do not want.
Tamil demands for the occupation to end have not softened. Yet, the frustrating pace of release, whilst the armed forces, Sinhala settlers and Buddhist monks fortify their incursions, demonstrates how little appetite there is for change. Indeed, the small scale releases show that, if willing, the state can end the occupation and allow civilian life to gain some semblance of normality. Every acre still occupied is therefore occupied by choice.
The government's conduct elsewhere confirms the limits of its reform. On Wednesday, protesters marched towards parliament in Colombo against the proposed Protection of the State from Terrorism Act, which would replace the Prevention of Terrorism Act with a law that extends detention before a magistrate from 24 to 72 hours, permits remand of up to a year, broadens the definition of terrorism and widens state surveillance. The UN human rights office has said the bill "reproduces and expands several shortcomings" of the PTA. Eelam Tamils need no briefing on what those shortcomings mean. They have lived under the PTA since 1979, and it is the law under which they have been detained without charge, tortured and disappeared.
For years, diplomats and donors have told Tamils that this government deserves time and space. That grace period has been spent. It has bought continued land loss in the North-East and a new terror law that has been widely condemned. Nothing suggests that more patience will change the direction of travel.
The protesters in Myliddy, Palaly, Thaiyiddy and Batticaloa are not asking for patience. They want their land back. The international community must ask for nothing less.
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