Displacement of Tamils as Refugees

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Apart from those killed – the government admitted to a death toll of 350, but the suspected numbers are larger, the Tamil estimates nearing 2,000—the largest immediate tragedy was the number of refugees who had abandoned their homes and their jobs and were crowded in the terrified disarray into some fifteen refugee camps in Colombo (called “care and welfare centers”). The estimates of the refugees in the Colombo camps alone ranged from 80,000 to 1000,000. In The Guardian (9 August 1983) David Beresford wrote: “The Sri Lanka Government told foreign diplomats last night that about 100,000 people needed homes, clothes, household goods, and food for between three and six months, following last month’s communal violence.” The government also estimated that some 18,000 households were affected.

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It will be some time before the full toll of these weeks of fire and brimstone is known, partly because so many Tamils have fled their homes. The refugee camp population had reached 76,000 by the end of the first week, according to official figures released by diplomats. On July 29th the first boatload of displaced Tamils set off for the relative safety of Jaffna. Other boats, including three lent by India, will continue the sea-lift.

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Colombo’s refugee camps, which once housed 90,000, had dwindled in number last fortnight, and the 13,000 Tamils left behind had nowhere to go — descendants of estate workers brought over from India by the British, they had missed the repatriation bus, holding neither Indian nor Sri Lankan citizenship, were stateless and unwanted. Not for them the options available to the indigenous Jaffna Tamils, 40,000 of whom had fled north by ship, train or bus, or to the lucky ones who owned Indian passports and could expect refuge beyond the Palk Strait.

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Just before dawn on August 22 the vessel Bharat Seema slipped out of Colombo’s harbour, on an 11-hour journey to Tuticorin. The ship carried 340 so-called India-Sri Lankan passport holders, people who had been fortunate to have beaten the October 31, 1981, deadline for obtaining Indian citizenship. There were 540 such refugees in the St Thomas Prep School camp next to the American Embassy on Galle Road. ‘Most of these refugees are estate workers who have managed to get here from places near Colombo,’ says Nirupama Rao, first secretary in the Indian High Commission, who is in charge of repatriation. The refugees who didn’t make the ship lacked travel documents, or family cards issued by the Sri Lanka Government. All the estate workers had fled to Colombo because their lines ‚ quarters ‚ had been burnt down on the estates.

One of those who failed to board the Bharat Seema is a frightened, dumpy man, grey stubble framing unkempt spectacles. Mahalingam Acharya, 64, came to Sri Lanka in 1948 from Madurai in Tamil Nadu. A goldsmith by training, his shop in Urugodawatte was burnt down by maddened Sinhala neighbours in 1958. Since then Acharya had been eking out an existence by reading horoscopes. He could not forsee his own fate. On July 25 his house was set upon by a howling gang of Sinhala youths and his wife was killed before his eyes. Acharya wanders around the St Thomas camp, waiting for his papers to be issued, wistfully watching the refugees who are preparing to leave for India, their passports being stamped by a harassed Sri Lankan immigration officer at a rickety school desk in the playground.

Each family leaving for India has been promised a compensation of 1,000 Sri Lankan rupees (Rs 400). But that amount will be paid into an Indian bank at a later date. Manel Abeysekara, the bustling Foreign Office coordinator of the camp, claims that the food, supplied by the Ceylon Hotels Corporation, is not bad at all. ‘Nobody’s assessed the damage to these refugees’ property,’ she says, ‘and so we are not paying any compensation, except the 1,000 rupees.’

In every camp last fortnight the authorities were busy trying to get people to leave, either giving them dry rations of rice, flour and sugar and asking them to go home or to the friendly north, or cutting down on food rations in the hope that more would leave. Hundreds of refugees who trickled in late from around Colombo or from the estates around Nuwara Eliya and Hatton were turned away.

M.S. Croose, 29, is the eldest of four brothers and three sisters, and all of them have somehow got into the St Thomas camp for Indian passport holders, although they are stateless. ‘I have been trying since 1976 for an Indian passport,’ says Croose, who trained as an electrician, ‘but I wasn’t lucky. I couldn’t take a job in the Middle East because I was stateless.’