The Return Of Tamil Refugees To Sri Lanka

As the ethnic war ended in Sri Lanka, the promise of a peaceful future beckoned refugees who had fled the country decades ago. Many have returned home, many more are on their way. But is it the homecoming they hoped for?

- Lakshmi Subramanian

Cut cloth pieces strewn on the floor add colour to Kavithamathi Jayamurthy’s monochrome life; the whirring sound of the two sewing machines helps drown the cacophony inside her head. Her smile, warm and welcoming, blinds you to her past, momentarily. Kavithamathi, clad in a faded maroon salwar suit, looks calm. But her life as a Sri Lankan living in Kilinochchi—the erstwhile bastion of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the northern province—and later as a refugee in Tamil Nadu, India, was anything but that.

Six years after the ethnic war broke out in 1983, owing to tensions between the Sinhalese Buddhist majority and the Tamil minority, 7-year-old Kavithamathi left home with her parents and siblings for India. Her life as a refugee began at a camp in Ottanchathiram in Tamil Nadu, where she married Jayamurthy (now 42) and had two children. A year after the cease fire in 2002, she returned with her husband and children, hoping the war would end soon. But it only got worse, and the family was forced to move to the Kathirkamam detention camp in Sri Lanka. When her mother asked her to return to the Ottanchathiram camp, she refused as she wanted to build a house on her property in Rathinapuram in Kilinochchi. It took her seven more years to return to Kilinochchi. She was finally home, years after living in exile, getting displaced in her own country, walking several miles with her family and boarding the army vehicle during war in search of a haven that turned out to be a hellhole.