Sri Lanka: Displaced in north long for home

[By Charles Haviland BBC News, Jaffna district, Sri Lanka]

“Would you like to go home?” The men chorus “Yes!” as my question is translated into Tamil. “We’re waiting for that date. There’s enough land. We’ll farm it. We’ll fish.”

They cannot do that here in the Konapalam camp, the cramped home to 240 displaced families where children play in the dust.

There are 31,524 people still in camps around Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka because their land is held by the military.

Saharayani Thangarajah, a 42-year-old mother of two, wants to return to her birthplace at Kankesanthurai on the northernmost coast. “Some officials have told us we’ll be resettled by mid-April,” she says. “Is that true, do you know?”

She longs for normality because she has been through trauma – forced from her home in 1990 and then losing her father, brother and sister in the war that ended in 2009 with the final defeat of the Tamil Tiger rebels.

Continue reading >>

Source: BBC