Drastic reduction of funds hampers resettlement of uprooted Tamils in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Friday, 14 September 2018, 22:25 GMT]
The uprooted people from SL military occupied Valikaamam North in Jaffna are still languishing in 34 camps. However, the occupying unitary state of genocidal Sri Lanka has allocated barely 250 million rupees (USD 1.5 million) for resettlement of the internally displaced people in Jaffna district in 2018, Tamil civil sources in Jaffna said. For comparison, 5,500 million rupees (USD 32.7 million) was allocated in 2016 - 2017, the sources said. Mr S. Muralitharan, the additional District Secretary who deals with land affairs, has admitted the figures on the expenditure on resettlement.

Although many of the uprooted people after 2006 have been resettled in the district, those living for decades as displaced are being systematically neglected, the sources further said.

The District Secretary of Jaffna N. Vethanayagan has however admitted that 5,250 acres of lands belonging to private landowners, who have been uprooted since 1990 in the former ‘High-Security Zone’ in Valikaamam North, are yet to be released.

At the same time, the District Secretariat, which is controlled by the unitary state system in Colombo, has been under increased pressure from the Colombo hierarchy, not to update the figures revealing the real extent of military-held public lands in the district, Tamil civil sources at the District Secretariat said.

The occupying state of genocidal Sri Lanka is trying to distort the figures on lands remain seized by the SL military and downplay the statistics on the number of people who stay uprooted as ‘internally displaced’ people within the Jaffna district. No-one talks about the people who are ‘externally displaced’ to Tamil Nadu from the district, they said.