COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS (CFR) - FEATURE
Post-war land
grabs in Sri Lanka
A
woman tends to her carrot farm in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, where many local women
subsidize their husband's income by renting small plots of land to grow
vegetables. Ensuring land rights is a necessary step in the restoration and
reconciliation process in post-war Sri Lanka.Photo
by: Johanan Ottensooser /CC BY-NC-SA
EDITOR’S NOTE: Securing property rights is crucial to
prevent abuse on land ownership in post-conflict situations. Fulbright fellow
Ruth Canagarajah from Sri Lanka analyzes the impact of military land grabs on
her country’s post-war recovery process for the Council on Foreign Relations.
Weak
and ineffective property rights pose many problems in post-conflict situations.
Secure property rights are needed to
revitalize an economy after a volatile period. For many workers, especially farmers
and fishermen, their very livelihoods are dependent on secure rights and access
to land. In addition, reliable property rights encourage investors to take more
financial risks and invest in a post-conflict country. Unfortunately, the
impacts of a conflict — including displacement
and resettlement of people; secondary occupation of land by state and non-state
actors; and loss or invalidation of property and other legal documents, such as
death certificates, which affect succession — make land issues difficult
to resolve.
In
the Sri Lankan civil war, which lasted almost 26 years and was only recently
resolved in 2009, land was a central issue. Over the past three decades, the
country — in particular the northern and eastern provinces — has been wrecked
by man-made and natural disasters, leading to innumerable deaths and displaced
people. The Sri Lankan government’s Commission of Inquiry on Lessons Learnt and
Reconciliation declared in 2011 that ensuring land
rights is a necessary step in the restoration and reconciliation process.
However this finding has not been acted on.
Although
the government claims that managing the resettlement process has been one of
their strengths in the post-war period, there are currently more than one
thousand court cases filed by landowners who lost their land due to formalized land-grabbing policies. These government
practices could result in a renewal of grievances and reemergence of civil
unrest if the needs of original landholders are not met soon.
Since
the civil war, the Sri Lankan military has seized land under the pretenses of
security and development. Acircular released in January 2013 declares that land
lost during conflict will be used for security purposes and vaguely-defined
“development activities.” The act claims that the original land claimants are
not traceable.Inhabitants of the Valikamam North region of the Jaffna
Peninsula, a hotbed of conflict during the civil war, have been greatly
affected by these policies. The region’s Myliddy Harbor, said to be one of the
highest yielding and most important fish harbors in the country, is now under
military control as part of the ad-hoc High Security Zone: A swath of land that
takes up 15 percent of the peninsula and was established 24 years ago to secure
restricted, strategic military bases and industries. Meanwhile, the harbor’s
original fishermen have struggled to resettle in areas such as Point Pedro and
Valikamam East.
Farmers
in the Valikamam North province, who once grew cash crops such as red onions,
chilies, and tobacco, in addition to bananas and tomatoes, were forced to
abandon their fields and cultivable land when the HSZ was established. They
once hoped to return after the war, but this seems increasingly unlikely as the
military, which has now taken over farming activities within the zone, is
legalizing its ownership of the land through the 2013Land Acquisition Act.
Farmers
that I spoke with in the small northern town of Tellippalai note that ever
since they were forcibly displaced by the military, their lives have been in a
constant state of flux: moving around the countryside, interrupting their
children’s schooling; cultivating small plots offered by nearby neighbors; and
remaining unable to accumulate physical assets due to numerous relocations.
Decreases in relief funds over the last three years and inadequate to
nonexistent government compensation have made matters worse.
The
government plans to turn the land it has grabbed into economic zones for the
military and navy by constructing coal power stations, factories and
hotels,
in addition to using the land for typical agricultural and fishing activities,
but conducted by government workers instead of by the region’s original labor
force. In areas neighboring the HSZ, government surveyors are assessing where military barracks might be constructed.
These ”land alienation” policies are meant
to boost investment, tourism, and production, but in reality they hinder
poverty-reduction measures and post-conflict reconstruction.
To
be sure, the military may have the resources and technology to make more
optimal use of the land, but their actions undermine the post-war
demilitarization and recovery process and threaten already unstable livelihoods
that depend on restoration of private and public lands. In order for Sri
Lanka’s development and peace-building process to succeed, property rights must be protected and
local populations should be consulted in order to resolve land disputes and
move the country forward.
Edited for style and republished with permission from
the Council on Foreign Relations. Read the original article.
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