Kadatkaraichenai in Trincomalee was a thriving Tamil village less than a year ago. The Sri Lanka military onslaught on 2006 forcefully displaced the Tamils from it and the surrounding areas.
Hundreds of Tamils were killed and injured by deliberate military artillery shelling in 2006 – even as the international community looked on impassively.
Once the area was emptied of Tamils by such ethnic cleansing, the Sri Lanka Government declared the area as a military High Security Zone and prevented the original Tamil residents of the area from returning to their homes in their villages.
However, over the past week, 25 Sinhalese families were settled in Kadatkaraichenai, the so called High Security Zone.
This development has all the hallmark of earlier Sinhala settlements in the east where by a Tamil village is emptied through military violence and then small number of Sinhala settlements is first created with minimal facilities.
This settlement then gradually expands unnoticed to include large numbers of settlers, Buddhist temple and a protecting military encampment.
In the eighties and nineties Tamil people were chased out by large scale massacres carried out by the Sri Lankan military. The massacre of Tamils in the Thiriyai a village in Trincomalee in 1985 and the subsequent conversion of the area in Sinhala settlement exemplifies this tactic of Sri Lanka Government.
On 8 June 1985, Sri Lanka military came in vehicles to Thiriyai and told the people to leave the area before they begin shooting. After the people left, 1100 houses were burnt down. Following this incident, displaced people stayed in schools.
Again on 8.August 1985, the Sri Lankan military attacked the displaced in the schools killing ten civilians. Again on the 14 August six civilians were pulled out of a bus in Thiriyai and hacked to death.
Tamils gradually moved out of the area by the constant threat of violence by the military. The area thus emptied of Tamils was then gradually settled with Sinhalese.
With greater international scrutiny and aversion to ethnic cleansing,
No longer able to carry out such blatant landgrabs, given greater international involvement in Sri Lanka, the Sinhala government is carrying out the ethnic cleansing under the pretext of ‘fighting terrorism’ – even as the world looks on.
