The Tamils of Sri Lanka are still stuck between a bloody past and hope

Tomasz Augustyniak-March 28, 2016

On Friday evenings, vans and tuk-tuks usually form long queues before Jaffna’s only shopping mall. There’s a hint of exquisite perfume in the air. Mothers in kurtas mind their colourfully attired children. Single young men sporting oversized wrist watches zip around on motorcycles. Though rare, one can even sight a few women in high heels.

Multiplexes screen the latest Indian blockbusters. Pizzas, hot chicken wings and ice cream sell like, well, hot cakes.

Even as the boisterous crowd inside the mall swells, hundreds of tradesmen and shopkeepers around the city perform a peculiar ritual: they kindle little bonfires in front of their stores, symbolically seeking the good by burning the bad.

This bruised and battered city of 88,000 (2012 figures) does have a lot of bad to burn, forget and let go of.

Located on the northern tip of Sri Lanka, Jaffna was once the bastion of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)—the dreaded terrorist group wiped out in 2009.

The nearly three-decade civil war between the LTTE-led ethnic Tamil minority and the government led to between 80,000 and 100,000 deaths and estimated economic losses of $200 billion–roughly five times the size of Sri Lanka’s GDP in 2009.

Its land once riddled with landmines and air constantly pierced by bullets, the capital of the country’s Northern Province has over the past few years been fighting a new battle: rebuilding itself.
A sudden turnaround story

Conflict taught Jaffna the virtues of thrift; for decades, it was on survival mode. “War-time economy was about producing one’s own food, using bicycles instead of cars and kerosene lamps instead of electric ones,” N. Vithyatharan, a senior journalist, recalls. There were no goods to spend on, so the locals accumulated wealth.

This saving habit, along with transfers from families abroad, gave Jaffna’s Tamils relative prosperity over those in the mainland’s Vanni region to the south. So, in recent years, many Hindu temples in Jaffna have been renovated. Several high profile restaurants have sprung up. Billboards of money transfer companies are found everywhere.

The city railway station was rebuilt with government funds and train connections with Colombo restored in 2014.

Tourism, though still anaemic, is growing. The city’s cultural institutions are expanding. Houses are getting rebuilt and new vehicles bought.

People, in general, are on a spending spree. The average monthly household expenditure in Jaffna district grew from Sri Lankan Rs22,725 ($158) in 2009 to Rs35,405 ($246) in 2013. The provincial GDP has doubled.

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