Protracted Displacement in Asia: No Place to Call Home (Law, Ethics and Governance) by Howard Adelman

Author:Howard Adelman
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2013-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

The vivid unknown: Human insecurity

Civilians are not collateral damage in this war, but are often deliberately targeted as part of the military strategy of parties to the conflict (state, armed non-state and paramilitary actors). The scale and intensity of military operations in 2006, including aerial bombing and shelling (use of ‘multi-barrels’) targeting civilian areas, has compounded returnees’ sense of insecurity in this phase. The shift in military–political balance to the government in return areas formerly controlled by the LTTE has also shaped civilians’ perceptions of their ability to flee: ‘we are surrounded in this place’.26 Also, as noted by the ICRC,27 military structures (such as army camps and buffer zones) in Sri Lanka are in close proximity to civilians. The militarization of return areas as well as past experiences of retaliatory attacks undermine prospects for sustainable return, ‘when we get back [return] the military will look at us. If something happens the military will shoot’.28 People’s sense of security is also influenced by specific local factors such as the behaviour of local military authorities, the proximity of their homes to contested areas (for example, jungle, sea coast, etc.), and events occurring in neighbouring villages.

People expressed a pervasive sense of insecurity in their lives and prospects for their future, ‘we don’t have hope [for the security of our future] at all. We don’t dare to develop hope’.29 Active hostilities may have ceased for the time being and people have returned home, but people do not feel secure. They are not sure when the conflict might reignite and when they will need to run again. An imminent sense of a renewed conflict marks their return.

For those who have returned, they prefer to be back in their own villages but noted that political divisions and mistrust are being played out at the community level – ‘before one and two were there, now there is one, two, three and four’.30 Political factionalism is producing and reproducing threats and vulnerabilities. Political factions in the Tamil community, for example, have led to a breakdown in the collective coping mechanisms used by communities in the past, so that now, ‘We can’t even trust the next door neighbour. We don’t know who’s coming and for what reason’.31 Political violence is played out at the personal and family level, such as with abductions out of personal vengeance.32 Returnees from the 2006 conflict expressed renewed and intensified forms of suspicion, mistrust and divisions resulting from their experiences of violence and displacement.33 The present political violence is described by a local commentator as the most serious she has known. The next section explores implications for agencies working in this intractable conflict environment, with multiple cycles of displacement and continuing insecurity.

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