Shreen Saroor, working with relief and rehabilitation groups in Sri Lanka, analyzes what went wrong with the government policies and the rehab plans.

With so much international focus on Sri Lanka after the tsunami, many expected it would generate the political will and heaps of resources to help rebuild the nation, particularly the war affected and now tsunami devastated north and east. But what has actually happened is that, despite the billions of dollars in aid pledges and hundreds of naïve aid workers on the ground, many thousands of survivors still sit idly in their temporary huts. It is hard to believe that there is any genuine development work in these areas. One local activist fears that the survivors will not get permanent houses for another two more years, and that too if the war does not start. So they might have to make their temporary shelters permanent, as happened with our war affected internally displaced persons (IDPs).

Different figures are given by different agencies and government bodies with regard to the numbers of permanent houses built, but what can be seen on the ground in the north and east was appalling. All the temporary huts are cramped and small (ranging from 120 square feet to 180 sq ft) with one room and a corner to cook. They are plagued by flies and mosquitoes, extremely hot with a tin sheet roof and are leaking now that it is monsoon season. In Mullaitivu –Ramasamy Thotum IDP camp, Ms. Jayaprahasam had this to say: “we have been fleeing since 1989 and this is my 11th displacement. But this time there is a difference and it is the nature that has made us refugees not the war. I have two teenage girls and I don’t want them to grow up the way we did in the last 20 years. As long as we don’t have our houses back, there is nothing on which we can build our children’s lives and if the war starts again we have to think where to run next. It is not safe here”.

Ms. Jayaprahasam is right. The war drums are beating heavy as ever for yet another round of civil war in Sri Lanka. People who survived the tsunami in the north and east are now wondering about the next round of war and where to run next from their fragile temporary shelters. In the begining of 2005, a joint relief mechanism was signed between the government and the Tiger rebels to share the tsunami aid. This was put into limbo by a Supreme Court decision, which held that the Tiger rebels (LTTE) are a non-state player and therefore cannot play a formal part in the structure. The case was brought by a Sinhalese nationalist political party, which saw this joint mechanism, also known as the Post-Tsunami Operational Management Structure (P-TOMS) would give the Tigers de facto recognition. President Mahinda Rajapakse, elected in November last year, promised to come up with a plan to distribute aid to rebel controlled areas, but so far has provided nothing. The recent government tsunami aniversary report barely touches on the political dimension of aid distribution.

These diminutions further complicate the continuity of humanitarian assistance and development work in the rebel held areas. Currently there are only few international humanitarian organisations, a handful of local non profit organisations and the Tigers themselves, who are involved in tsunami reconstruction work. At a discussion on the failure of P-TOMS, the Planning and Development Secretariat of the LTTE in Killinochchi complained that the Sinhala majority government does not care about Tamil people and that this is a clear indication that the government is not willing to share any power with them.

The tsunami also happened at a time when Sri Lanka was struggling with its delicate peace process that has been deadlocked since April 2003, although a truce signed between the then government and the LTTE with the mediation of Norway in Feb 2002 was holding, if barely. The civil war claimed the lives of an estimated 64,000 people and uprooted more than 1 million civilians. Some 200,000 people fled overseas, while the large majority remained internally displaced on the island. Many had to flee several times and ended up living permanently (over 15 years) in shabby welfare centers and temporary huts.

The government’s two main post tsunami actions, creating a task force to rehabilitate the nation and enacting a buffer zone, seem a total fiasco. For example, the government’s initial need assessment report was derived from part of already existing development plan which mostly excluded north and east and did not focus much on disaster management. The buffer zone is yet another major folly that is hampering the progress of permanent housing projects given the scarcity of land in the east. Initially the then President Ms. Chandrika Bandaranayake declared a 100 meter zone in the south and 200 meter zone in north and east from the sea, in which no houses could be built.

Despite this order, while affected people (mainly poor fisher folks) were shutout from rebuilding their houses within this zone, many hoteliers were allowed and even given incentives to rebuild. There were many protests by affected people against the buffer zone, but the government did not budge on this limit until the UN special envoy for tsunami visited Kalmunai (the worst hit town in the east) after five months and put pressure on the Sri Lankan government. Thereafter the government announced that the zone would be adjusted based on availability of land. However nothing has been made official. Even the high ranking government officers we met in the north and east seem to have no definite answer to our questions and one of them even complained that these revisions have delayed the government’s permanent housing projects.

Many perceived the tsunami as an opportunity to strike a deal with LTTE on the prolonged civil war but the failure of the P-TOMS has already aggravated the existing suspicions of the Sinhala majority government considering any political solution to the ethnic conflict. Even the government’s first anniversary report on tsunami clearly indicates that there have been aid inequities and more aid was distributed more quickly to the south than to the north and east. In some southern areas, donors have even pledged to build more houses for tsunami victims than there were homes destroyed. This discriminatory aid distribution clearly played a key role in creating tensions in the fragile peace process. As a result there have been a series of violent attacks in the last couple of months, mainly rebel attacks on government forces, which has already brought the ceasefire to an effective end.

If Sri Lanka slips into a full scale war there won’t be any development even in the south and all that tsunami aid money would be directed towards destruction and killing. This can only be prevented if the current government takes some concrete steps to revive the peace talks. May be President Rajapakse and his team needs to visit Indonesia to see how things were worked out in Aceh.
Shreen Saroor may be contacted at qadrishreen@hotmail.com
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