Trying To Understand Keppapilavu: Resistance, Solidarities & Politics

By Mahendran Thiruvarangan –February 28, 2017

Mahendran Thiruvarangan

For the past twenty-eight days, Tamil people of Keppapilavu and Puthukkudiyiruppu in Mullaitivu district including women and children have been protesting against the authoritarian occupation of their homelands by the Sri Lankan military and Air Force. These people who were displaced during the civil war wish to go back to their homes and lands. To return to and resettle in places where they had been living for decades is not just these people’s wish but it is their right too. The state and the military cannot encroach on this right and deny the people their homes, lands and the environment that had been an integral part of their lives prior to their displacement. Eighty-four families, of which thirty are women-headed, have been denied entry into their lands in Keppapilavu by the military.

At the protest, a woman, one of the dwellers says (through a video film): “the leader fought for a separate state but gave our country to the Sinhalese. Now the Sinhalese are ruling our country and we are wandering the streets.” The landlessness that the people are facing today is also an outcome of the LTTE’s ill-conceived insurgency against the state that put the lives and livelihood of these people under great risk. The LTTE dragged the people down the road to doom and destruction during the last stages of the war in 2008/2009. Lacking strategy and concern for the thousands of lives trapped in the war zone, the LTTE continued its assault on a rapidly advancing military. In the absence of any alternative routes to save their lives from the military onslaught, the people including those in Keppapilavu and Puthukkudiyiruppu left their homes and lands and moved out further east towards the coast. Later the military to brought these lands under their control and prevented the displaced people from resettling in them. The LTTE leadership’s suicidal politics and mindless militarism also contributed to the plight of these people today.

The displaced people were transferred to various IDP camps and later given alternative lands where the military built houses for them. But the people find these houses unsuitable and unhygienic. Above all, the people like to go back to their village where the community, as one of the protestors describes, “had lived happily like one extended family till 2008” (people’s narratives about their displacement, resettlement and the struggle to reclaim their lands appear in a recent Tamil publication by the Vithai Group).

Freed from the totalitarian and militarized culture that had dominated Tamil politics till May 2009, the Tamil community today is able to choose modes of resistance that are constructive and creative. The relatively freer civic space opened up post-2015 also facilitated the people to launch their protests fearlessly. The classes conducted at the protest venue for the school children mark a resistance that is cognizant of the needs and aspirations of the future generations, forming a sharp contrast to the land reclamation struggle waged by the LTTE where many child recruits from the rural North and East were given guns and cyanide capsules against their wish and despite their parents’ opposition. At the forefront of the struggle are women from the community. The songs of solidarity sung by women of different ethnic communities outside the tents where the women and children are living and the paintings by the children depicting their present predicament have breathed fresh air into the culture of people’s resistance in post-war North.

The Sri Lankan state has confiscated lands belonging to its polity in the name of national security, development, urban planning and environmentalism in various parts of the country. In the North and East, many areas including parts of Valikamam North, Sampur and Musali and Morakotanchenai, Keppapilavu and Puthukkudiyiruppu continue to be occupied by the military. The moves to build a coal power plant in the land expropriated in this manner in Sampur in the East and the attempts by the state to alienate land for development initiatives including tourism and urban development in places like Panama in Ampara district and Slave Island in Colombo in the past confirm that land alienation in the country is also linked to the class-based interests of powerful national and international forces.

The continuing presence of the military in the North and East indicates that the different regimes that have ruled Sri Lanka for the past three decades have treated this Tamil-majority region as their internal colony. Militarization keeps the people of this region under constant surveillance and fear curtailing their movement and activism. The confiscation of the lands in the North and East that belong to the people should therefore be seen as a part of the ongoing militarization. Giving protection to a majoritarian state that conquers the lands belonging to and used by the predominantly minority communities and constructing Buddhist structures and symbols in some of those lands, the military is actively involved in a certain form of Buddhisization in the North and East.

The state’s attempt to declare lands belonging to Musali in Mannar district as an environmental protection zone when the people evicted by the LTTE in 1990 were trying to resettle in those lands after the war demonstrates that land alienation in the North and East is a problem that affects the Muslim community too. In Panama, the lands acquired by the military and later used for tourism purposes had belonged to a community of mixed ethnic origins in the region. The lack of interest on the part of the Tamil bureaucrats and politicians in the North in supporting the resettlement of the Muslims suggests that the Tamil elite are hardly any different from the Sinhala-Buddhist state in their treatment of the minorities and their problems related to resettlement and landlessness.

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