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Refugees in India await
breakthrough
By S P Udayakumar
KANYAKUMARI, India - For the thousands of Tamil
refugees from Sri Lanka living in southern India, the
peace talks in distant Thailand represent the one chance
that they may yet see the homeland in Jaffna that many
left years ago.
While Indians as a whole and
ethnic Tamils in India's southern Tamil Nadu state have
only a general interest in the Thailand talks, the Sri
Lankan inmates of the Pazhavilai camp for Tamil refugees
are eager to return to their country and resume their
lives as teachers, clerks and officials.
"India
is safe, but here we are nothing but coolies [daily
wagers working as laborers]," said one man in the camp,
which is one of four in the Kanyakumari district on the
southern tip of India that since 1990 has housed some 80
families from Sri Lanka, which lies across the Palk
Straits.
Some families took their chances and
returned to Sri Lanka in 1992 and 1995, during previous
peace talks, but at least 65 families have continued
living in Pazhavilai.
Over the years, they have
held uncertain hopes of returning to their homes in
places such as Mannar, Vavuniya and Trincomalee, areas
made famous for the fierce but inconclusive war between
the Sri Lankan army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam (LTTE), who have been fighting for a separate
Tamil homeland for the past 19 years.
Mercy, a
refugee from Vavuniya, thinks that the current talks
will succeed because both sides are sick and tired of
the violence and destruction. "The Sinhalese
nationalists are under a lot of pressure to behave now
and so there won't be any breach of trust," she said.
Most of the men and women in the refugee camps
think that their lives might change in the next few
months. Although they do not have any concrete plans
about their return trip to Sri Lanka, they do foster
that hope.
Jyothi, a 28-year-old youth in
Kottaram, another refugee camp near Kanyakumari, cannot
wait to go back to his country. "In my country, I can
buy a piece of land, or build a house, or do anything
that pleases me if there is peace around me," he muses.
Living as a refugee makes him feel wasted.
There
is a chorus of support for Jyothi's views in the camp.
The state government of Tamil Nadu doles out the
equivalent of US$5 to the head of each family every
month and $3 to other adults and a $1 and 50 cents to
each child under the age of 13. But this is barely
sufficient to keep them going.
Most of them are
grateful for measures of rice and electricity and
drinking water in the camps, but the future is bleak.
Many have died in the harsh living conditions on the sea
front. The able-bodied men and women are allowed to
leave the camps for manual labor in and around the
refugee camps. But jobs are few and irregular. Most men
who work in the banana plantations around Pazhavilai
complain that they are restricted to the camp when
dignitaries visit the area or when the political times
are hard in India or Sri Lanka.
Some of the
refugees who came to India have had children born to
them in exile. These children speak the local dialects
and appear comfortable with their meagre surroundings.
They attend local schools and even excel in their
studies in a district that has the distinction of having
the best rural schools in the whole of India, but they
have no idea about their country of origin or the deadly
conflict that has ravaged the lives of their parents.
Every now and then, following each upsurge in
the fighting between the LTTE and the army, the
refugees' ranks have swelled. The last time that
happened was after the deadly July 24 attack on Colombo
airport by the Tiger rebels last year. Many then made it
across the Palk Straits paying as much as $250 per
person - what it might have cost flying - to be ferried
by fishermen over to India.
On reaching Indian
shores, refugees are herded into a screening camp at
Mandapam, a small rocky island near Rameshwaram, before
being distributed to regular refugee camps. The process
could take over a month. Authorities say that the
process is necessary to ensure that the refugees have no
links with the LTTE, which was banned in India after the
Tigers' involvement in the 1991 assassination of former
premier Rajiv Gandhi. Gandhi had paid with his life for
trying to broker a peace in Sri Lanka through the
tripartite 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka accord between Colombo,
India and the LTTE.
In Tamil Nadu, the refugees
are at least safe from the bombs and bullets of the war
between the Tamil Tigers and Sri Lankan forces, barely
100 kilometers away. An estimated 70,000 Sri Lankan
Tamils are housed in 129 refugee camps across Tamil
Nadu. Another 80,000 live with relatives or on their own
- permitted under Indian law as long as they register
with local police.
The luckier among them
receive support from relatives who live in countries
such as Britain, Canada and France - and telephone
booths that have sprung up outside the camps are
testimony to these connections. But most other Tamil
refugees are poor and depend on back-breaking manual
labor to make ends meet. Many are helpless when the
authorities decide to break up families for
administrative reasons.
At the Perumalpuram
camp, one among the four in Kanyakumari district, living
conditions can be described as abysmal. Most of the
refugees are crowded into hovels, some of which have the
luxury of an asbestos sheet for roofing. Others are
thatched huts that leak when it rains. The other refugee
camps in the district are located at Kozhivilai and
Gnaranvilai and taken together, the four camps house
1,400 people.
(Inter Press Service)
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