Colombo-based UN agencies collaborate with SL military programme in Vali North

The UN agencies based in Colombo are trying to force local NGO networks in Jaffna by promising big sums of assistance if they promote the uprooted people from Valikaamam North in Jaffna to accept the ‘solutions’ conceived by the occupying military. The SL military and the so-called Resettlement Ministry in Colombo have been working together. But the officials attached to the UN development agency based in Colombo are also taking a similar direction by rushing through a superficial ‘investment’ without laying out a comprehensive plan for the resettlement of the uprooted people to ensure the delivery of their basic needs, security and livelihood. The result is compartmentalization of people and permanent enslavement under Sinhala military-led demographic and structural genocide.

In October 2016, a group of Sinhala officials of the so-called ‘Peacebuilding Fund’ (PBF) attached to the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) based in Colombo, went to the extent of threatening ‘resettled’ Tamil families, who have been dumped at Vaazhalaay into Sinhala-military constructed housing scheme.

Now, the same approach is being deployed while the SL military is trying to dump a section of Tamils into a housing scheme in the limestone quarry lands belonging to the cement factory in KKS.

Even the collaborating sections of ITAK, particularly Mavai Senathirajah who hails from Valikaamam North, have openly stated at the presence of SL President Maithiripala Sirisena that the SL State has gravely failed to address the key issues promised during the elections of the regime change two years ago. The Resettlement ministry was operating against the interests of Tamil people, Mr Senathirajah said while addressing the SL President openly.

None of the key matters taken up by Senathirajah in direct meetings with SL President have been delivered. It is the SL military which is running the show.

In the meantime, the owners of the lands seized for quarrying limestone three decades ago, have not received compensation for their losses. They had given up seeking compensation from the SL State as the entire villages were subjected to military occupation.

The UN operations in the Tamil homeland have to be independently monitored by the Tamil civil society organisations and exposed how they are being manipulated to fit the designs of the occupying Sinhala military that spearheads protracted genocide through militarization, compartmentalisation and Gazafication of civilian resettlement, Tamil activists in Valikaamam North said urging Tamil journalists to study in detail how cultural and religious transformation of the coastal strip has taken place coupled with the paradigm of military corporatism that has been exploiting the natural resources while encouraging Sinhala visitors from South to use the occupied houses and civilian facilities as resorts.

De-militarisation has to start with de-militarising the collaboration between the development agencies and the SL military, they said.