The election of a new president in Sri Lanka in January ushered in renewed hopes for the return of thousands of ethnic Tamils displaced by war – and uncertainty for their children born abroad during decades of bloody conflict.
Many of the children are in their twenties now and have spent their entire lives in refugee camps in southern India. Their parents tried to shield them from the worst stories of their terrifying exodus during Sri Lanka’s civil war. And so they have lived their heritage in fragments: the snatches of slang their elders use. Matches of kilithattu, Sri Lanka’s tag-like game. Breakfasts of steamed rice flour and coconut curry.
“Sri Lanka for me, to be honest, is more than anything else, just a distant island,” said Prasanth Sekar, 21, an engineering student. “My mum and dad say that it was a great place and that it was much better than where we are now. Snake gourd, any vegetable that you can think of, was richer there. But that’s just what they say; I myself don’t really know.”
In recent weeks, as news unfolded on Facebook and through WhatsApp messages, Sekar and the other young adults at Keezhpudhupattu camp have come to realize that, after years of living in limbo, their lives could change dramatically in the coming months.
Sri Lanka’s new president, Maithripala Sirisena, has pledged greater reconciliation with the Tamils from the country’s war-torn northeast. Last month, his administration began talks with the Indian government about a formal plan for repatriating the 100,000 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees still in India, who began coming in waves as violence rocked their homeland in 1983. About 64,000 still live in more than 100 camps in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
The Keezhpudhupattu camp was built in 1990 as a temporary shelter. It now looks like a typical Indian village — dusty lanes, small shops and bougainvillea trailing the walls of tiny cement houses, where occupants have built additions to make room for refrigerators and televisions. Its 800 families receive a small monthly stipend, free rice, free housing, free electricity and free education for their children from the Indian government. But, for now, they have little hope of becoming Indian citizens.
Sri Lanka — the lush, tropical island that hangs like a teardrop off India’s southern tip — has suffered ethnic tension between Buddhist majority Sinhalese and Hindu-minority Tamils for decades, strife that deepened into civil war in the 1980s.
India’s history in the conflict is fraught. Indian soldiers led a peacekeeping mission to the country in the late 1980s, which angered the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who carried out a suicide attack that killed India’s former prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991. During the tense years that followed, some Sri Lankan refugees felt pressured to return home until India adopted a policy of voluntary return in 1996. The LTTE was designated as a foreign terror group by the United States in 1997.
After years of civil war and alleged atrocities by both sides, the government of Sri Lanka’s former president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, defeated separatist forces in 2009. (Washington Post)
