SL military claims village-level sweeping powers over civil officers in Vanni

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 08 April 2020, 22:09 GMT]
The occupying SL Army, a predominantly Sinhala force, has brought more than two hundred Village (GS/GN) Officers and village-level Samurdhi Development officers, most of them Tamils, under its control citing instructions from SL President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to monitor the delivery of relief measures caused by the COVID-19 lockdown. The SL Army, which convened a meeting on Wednesday, instructed the village-level civil officials to accompany the soldiers on a house-to-house control operation. The public officials are severely disrupted from carrying out their work according to their priorities as they are being forced to accompany the soldiers in their surveillance-style control of civil affairs in Vanni, a group of GS officers told TamilNet.

The Village and Samurdhi officers said they were discussing ways to show their protest without affecting the delivery of relief services.

There are one hundred and thirty-six GN (Village Officer) divisions within the six Divisional Secretary (DS) administrative districts of Mullaith-theevu district.

The district is subjected to Sinhala colonisation after the genocidal war in 2009.

One of the six DS divisions is the Sinhala colony in the traditional Tamil area of occupied Ma'nalaa'ru (Sinhalicised as Weli-Oya), which has nine GN divisions.

The SL military is present at a ratio of one Sinhala soldier per two Tamil civilians in Mullaiththeevu district.

The ethnic colonisation, which has Sinhalicised the Ma'nal-aa'ru region in the interior, also targets the coastal strips that lie sandwiched between the lagoons and the sea at Naayaa'ru and Kokku'laay of Karai-thu'raip-pattu (maritime) DS division.

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