Security Can Coexist With Human Rights
Somapala Gunadheera
I felt sad to learn from the media that thousands who were displaced by the civil war were still roughing it out in refugee camps, waiting for their native lands to be released by the Army. According to the newspapers thirty one welfare camps are situated in seven Divisional Secretariats of the Jaffna District, housing 936 families, comprising 3,260 people.
The news took my memory back to 1997, when I visited the Poonthottam Camp in Vavuniya, as the first chairman of the Resettlement and Rehabilitation Authority of the North. It was a pitiable sight with thousands of refugees from the Peninsula cramped in dingy enclosures. Moved by their sad plight, I started transferring them back to Jaffna by boat first through Trincomalee and then through Mannar as the west coast became accessible. But some of the transferees could not be settled in their own lands for security reasons, as neighbouring army camps were exposed to attack by the LTTE. It is this residue that is reported to be still suffering in makeshift digs that were then expected to last only a few months. It is painful to reflect that toddlers that I transported twenty years ago, have now grown up to adulthood but are still living without a roof of their own over their heads.
To my mind this stagnation is a result of the clash of two interests. One relates to security and the other to human rights. Understandably, with bitter memories of the ravages caused by the LTTE insurrection, the South gets worked up at the thought of reducing security camps in the North, imagining from their armchairs that such a move would jeopardize security, exposing the North to recapture by terrorist forces. In the first place, terrorism in the North has been so much controlled on the ground that its resurgence has become a far cry, as the Northern Commander has declared recently. Secondly, there is enough crown lands in the Peninsula to accommodate a perfect security regime without compromising its legitimate objectives. On a recent trip through the Peninsula, I noticed large stretches of abandoned land that was in use when I was a Cadet in the Jaffna Kachcheri in 1957.
