Sovereignty, Space and Civil War in Sri Lanka by Anoma Pieris

Author:Anoma Pieris [Pieris, Anoma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367585129
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Human displacement

At the last stages of the Sri Lankan conflict, the terminology ‘IDPs’ officially replaced the category of ‘refugees’, introduced after its adoption globally in 2007 by the UNHCR (2004) in its Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. This differentiation of transnational displacement from internal displacement expanded the spatial taxonomy to include (in Sinhala): subasadhana kandavuru (welfare camp), sahana gammana (relief village) and avathan kandavuru (displaced camp); terms distinct from anatha (homeless/orphaned) kandavuru, established in South India for Lankan refugees. The Tamil term for refugee camp is ahathi muhaam (Daniel 2002, 274). An ever-expanding taxonomy of camp environments, including military, militant and refugee camps, would serve as spatial accessories to the crimes of the twenty-six-year conflict.

As discussed in Chapter 2, conditions of internment first emerged as urban phenomena in the years after the 1983 pogrom. ‘Refugee camps’ in schools and temples had temporarily accommodated around 100,000 victims of violence, before the most destitute were gathered in aircraft hangars and transported to Jaffna. The escalating scale of camp environments, from homes and local institutions to models more reminiscent of military encampments, occurred in tandem with increasing militancy and reciprocal militarisation of the Northern Province. In an interview with the Indian journal Frontline in 1987, during a period when the Jaffna peninsula was occupied by the IPKF, LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran mentioned 200 SLSF camps in the northeast (Subramaniam 2010). He cited Indian army camps at Achuveli, Kankesanturai Lighthouse, Kodikamam, Palai, Pandatharippu, Thalaiyadi coast, Vanankerni and Yakkachi junction. Their domestication through location in individual houses, schools and co-operative stores, in his view, ‘legitimised’ Sinhala settlements. Eighteen (un-gazetted) HSZs, discussed in Chapter 3, accommodated the major army camps on the Jaffna peninsula, converting the army to an occupying force. Similarly, the LTTE appropriated urban buildings and institutions and established jungle training camps in the Vanni, while dismantling buildings in Jaffna during the forced depopulation of the city in 1995.

The residual victims of military conflict were likewise gathered in purpose-built camp environments. Camps in India accommodated the initial influx of refugees, while the northern Muslims expelled by the LTTE in 1990 populated camps in Puttalam and Mannar on the west coast (Brun 2008; de Alwis 2004; Hasbullah 2004; LST 2011). These facilities expanded exponentially with each new phase in the conflict, with the largest total number of 800,000 Lankan IDPs recorded in 2001 (IDMC 2014, 4). During the final months of 2009, figures were circulated of the detention of around 250,000 persons. The international media equated the terms and conditions of their welfare accommodation to concentration camps (see Rajakarunanayake 2012; Roberts 2012). Preventive detention and screening of civilians by the military for the segregation of 12,000 suspected ex-LTTE combatants produced an ominous environment of surveillance and control within the camps (International Commission of Jurists 2010).

Sri Lanka’s IDP camps are dissimilar to the border environments theorised by Nicholas Mirzoeff (2002) as global strategies for restricting social and political mobility. These camps were being deployed to impose political sovereignty at a dissenting ethnocultural border that had been territorially disputed.

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