Remembering eviction of northern Muslims and making commitment to coexistence

IT has been 35 years since the Muslim communities of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province were evicted en masse by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

- By Mahendran Thiruvarangan

This incident left a dark blot on the long history of Tamil—Muslim relations in the region and beyond. Many of the evicted Muslims went to Puttalam and the southern parts of the country, where they lived for years in camps for internally displaced persons. They faced severe economic hardship as they rebuilt their lives from scratch in unfamiliar surroundings. They also experienced social isolation, as host communities were not always welcoming of their prolonged presence.

Back in the north, their homes were left to ruin or occupied by displaced Tamils; their mosques fell into disuse; their shops were looted and their schools abandoned; and their lands came under the control of the Sri Lankan military. In their absence, the Northern Province became mono-ethnic. As stated in the Citizens’ Commission report released in 2012, the eviction of the Muslims should be understood as an act of ethnic cleansing. Here is a community that was forcibly uprooted from its homes and lands and rendered refugees. They were severed from the economic resources that had sustained them for centuries and denied access to the schools and mosques that formed the core of their cultural, religious, and social life. The magnitude of the social, cultural, and economic loss and dispossession suffered by the northern Muslims makes the eviction a clear act of ethnic cleansing.

While some tend to frame the eviction of the Muslims as merely another tragedy of the civil war, its roots are deeply ideological. Like many ethno-nationalist movements around the world that imagine land as an ethnic, racial, or cultural homeland, Tamil nationalism too claims Sri Lanka’s northeast as the Tamil homeland, a territory where Tamils, as a nation, have the inalienable right to determine their political future. This articulation is widely seen as a legitimate expression of the Tamil community’s desire for liberation in the face of Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism.