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Sri Lankan refugees yearn to return home from India

KOT

TAPATTU CAMP, India, Thursday (Reuters) The "whoosh" and "thump" of mortar bombs landing near his home in war-torn northern Sri Lanka still ring in Nidhi Kumar's ears, six years after he fled the island nation's civil war.

Kumar, then a 22-year-old gardener, dodged Tamil Tiger rebel recruiters and trigger-happy Sri Lankan navy patrols in 1996 to hitch a ride on an overloaded boat to nearby India.

"I only had a bundle of clothes and a few thousand rupees my parents borrowed from some neighbours. And once I finished paying the boatman for the journey, I was left with just the clothes and dreams of a better life," he said.

But the vision of a bright future in India has faded for Kumar, one of some 65,000 refugees crammed into dozens of dingy camps in India's southern state of Tamil Nadu, as he struggles to fend off hunger.

The refugees fled a wave of fighting that erupted after an Indian-brokered peace deal collapsed in the early 1990s, reigniting a bloody guerrilla war that pits Sri Lanka's Tamil minority against the Sinhalese majority.

The fight by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam since 1983 to carve out an independent Tamil homeland in the country's north and east has devastated Sri Lanka's economy and killed more than 64,000 people.

With a ceasefire in force and peace talks set to be held this month or next, Kumar now sees a glimmer of hope that he can return to his home town of Mullaitivu in Sri Lanka's north.

"I think a solution may finally come this time, though till a deal is actually made it's hard to say. I really long to see my elderly parents who are still there in Mullaitivu and if peace returns, we'll rush back," Kumar said, smiling nervously.

Kumar is looking forward to taking home a refugee camp bride and their one-year-old daughter.

"Life will be hard there too but at least she can grow up running in fields instead of inside a camp's four walls," he said, as he kissed the forehead of his little girl.

Some 1.3 million of Sri Lanka's 19 million people were forced from their homes by the fighting. Most went to live with relatives or in Sri Lankan government camps. So far, the United Nations estimates over 100,000 have returned home.

WHIFF OF HOPE

The refugees in India feel some hope for an early return home across the Palk Strait, but few are willing to go until a formal peace deal is struck.

"About a dozen youngsters have quietly slipped out in the past couple of weeks and gone back by boat," said Mariadoss, an inmate at a transit camp inland from the refugees' main landing point at Rameswaram in India.

A former school sports instructor, 50-year-old Mariadoss said the optimism was sparked by the lull in firing that has followed the Norwegian-brokered truce.

But others like Yogendra, a transport operator from Jaffna and a recently converted rebel sympathiser, said the peacemakers had yet to resolve the demands of two powerful women -- the tough-talking chief of India's state of Tamil Nadu, Jayaram Jayalalitha and Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga.

Former actress Jayalalitha, whose mainly Tamil state hosts the refugee camps, insists on the extradition to India of the rebel Tigers' chief, Velupillai Prabhakaran.

India accuses Prabhakaran of masterminding the 1991 assassination of its former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, in retaliation for his ordering troops into Tamil rebel areas of Sri Lanka in 1987 to disarm the guerrillas.

Kumaratunga has a deep suspicion of Prabhakaran, having lost an eye from an attempt on her life by a suspected Tamil tiger suicide bomber a few years ago.

She has voiced concern over the peace attempt initiated by political rival Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

TIRED OF CAMP LIFE

The refugees living in Indian camps, such as Kottapattu and neighbouring Valavandan Kottai, just want an end to their seemingly never-ending wait to return to homes and loved ones.

Clad in a traditional waist-cloth and bare-chested in searing summer heat, Kumar sits on a rusting steel cot outside his tiled-roof tenement room at Kottapattu and says rations distributed at the camp barely feed his family.

"The rice and kerosene which the government gives is hardly enough and I have to depend on odd jobs at the nearby railway yard to feed them," he says.

Life for residents in rows of thatched huts at Valavandan Kottai camp is even more arduous. The refugees scratch out a dangerous livelihood by chipping up granite blocks for gravel.

Nageswari -- whose husband is struggling to recover after a lump of rock blasted by dynamite from a nearby cliff shattered his skull two months ago -- says she is tired and longs to return home to her family's rice paddies and banana trees.

It is a dearly-held desire among the refugees.

Dhanasuya, a skinny 12-year-old girl, tosses her plaits as she straightens up from a game of marbles in a dusty yard and flashes a shy smile at mention of her home in Jaffna.

"I've heard so many stories about my green, beautiful village that I dream all the time of returning there," she says.

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Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
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