From bullets to ballots: The face of Sri Lanka’s former war zone
Thursday, 22 January 2015 00:00
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IPS: In four months’ time, Sri Lanka will mark the sixth anniversary of the end of its bloody civil conflict. Ever since Government armed forces declared victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) on 19 May 2009, the country has savoured peace after a generation of war.
Suffocating security measures have given way to a sense of normalcy in most parts of the country, while steady growth has replaced patchy economic progress – averaging above 6% since 2009.
But these changes have largely eluded the area where the war was at its worst: the Vanni, a vast swath of land in the Northern Province that the LTTE ruled as a de facto state, together with the Jaffna Peninsula, for over a quarter of a century.
Home to over a million people, one-fourth of whom are war returnees, the Vanni has been in the doldrums since ballots replaced bullets.
“Peace should mean prosperity, but that is what we don’t have. What we have is a struggle to survive from one day to another,” Kajitha Shanmugadasan, an 18-year-old girl from the northern town of Pooneryn, told IPS.
She said youth her age were frustrated that multi-billion dollar infrastructure projects have failed to deliver decent jobs. “Look around, we have new highways, new railway lines, but no jobs, for five years people have been suffering, and it should not be [so] when there is peace,” she asserted.
Youth from the Northern Province have historically performed well at national exams, even during conflict times. That trend has held true: at the 2013 university entrance exam, 63.8% of those who sat their papers gained the scores required to enter the country’s top universities, a national high.
But with unemployment also at record levels here, and hardly any jobs for university graduates, those like Shanmugadasan are either staying out of universities or leaving the province in search of better prospects.
A new government, the result of presidential elections just a week into the New Year, and the Papal visit to the heart of the former battle zone on 14 January, have given rise to new hopes in the Vanni that life will improve for the ordinary people, who suffered during the war and have had little respite since the guns fell silent.
The 72% voter turnout in the Northern Province at the 8 January presidential poll – an all-time high for the region – is a reminder to the new regime how desperate the people here are for real change.
Pix by Amantha Perera/IPS
