Outside forces abet genocidal Colombo, deceive uprooted Tamils in North

The Foreign Ministry and Resettlement Ministry of occupying Colombo are working together with a number of Colombo-based foreign ‘diplomats’ and ‘development’ conquistadors in silencing the opinion of uprooted Eezham Tamils languishing in 34 ‘welfare’ camps in the Jaffna peninsula, Tamil development workers in Jaffna say. The main agenda of outside funders is targeting on sustaining the UNP-SLFP regime of Maithiripala Sirisena and Ranil Wickramasinghe rather than adhering to their own principles and procedures of development assistance. In the meantime, representatives of uprooted people from Valikaamam North said public civil servants were being actively deployed by the SL State with the offer of finding ‘alternative lands’ abandoning their 25-year-old struggle of regaining their villages in Valikaamam North.

The people are told to find alternative lands outside or accept military-built slums. Development funds coming from outside are to being deployed to the same purpose through different fronts.

“Whatever you do, just complete the project by finding a way to make the people in well-fare camps to accept the fixed-houses and the plans coming through the UNDP without making any complaints,” a local implementation partner was told recently by the ‘development’ conquistadors, who brand themselves as ‘independent’ development workers.

The next agenda of the conquistadors is trapping a defeatist section of Tami diaspora activists through advancing the ‘development’ agenda through Colombo centric discourses.

The Geneva-based human-rights discourse is being replaced by Colombo-based development discourse, the informed Tamil development workers in Jaffna commented.

Until Eezham Tamils have their own development agenda, synchronized with Tamil diaspora, the grassroots in the North and East and the local mechanisms at provincial level, the danger of becoming cannon fodders to the choices of outside forces will be destroying them.

The trend becomes very clear while witnessing what the UNDP and the USAID are doing in tandem, the Tamil development workers in Jaffna further said. One is targeting the victim population and the other is targeting the middle-class business elite in the North-East.

The uprooted Eezham Tamils from Valikaamam North are being repeatedly told these days to get their 200,000 rupees per family allocation by opting to buy lands outside the former High Security Zone area to put the fixture houses of development conquistadors. The allocation is for 20 perches of lands per family. 20 perches of land cost at least 6 times the amount of the allocation. The uprooted people residing in 34 different ‘welfare’ camps in Jaffna are being told that once they secure 20 perches of lands, they would ‘qualify’ as beneficiaries of the controversial ‘fixed-houses’. In recent days, public sector officials have also come under increased pressure from Colombo to find available ‘public lands’ and transfer these lands to housing schemes.

In the meantime, SL military is trying to get the people in Valikaamam North to sell their ‘released’ lands back to military.

It is under these circumstances, SL President Maithiripala Sirisena who was scheduled to visit Valikaamam North with another deceptive offer of releasing 261 acres of lands, has postponed his last visit.