Tamils Seek A Return To Normalcy

CNN.com

March 29, 2006

Sri Lanka's fragile peace allows mine clearing to intensify

MANKULAM, Sri Lanka (AP) -- The shiny round object half buried in her garden aroused Nixon Kousi's curiosity -- and could have cost her life.

Kousi, a 23-year-old mother of two, is one of thousands of ethnic Tamils who have returned to their native villages in Sri Lanka's northeast during the past four years, hoping to start a normal life after spending years in refugee camps while fighting raged between government troops and Tamil Tiger rebels.

Now the fighting is largely over -- halted by a shaky 2002 cease-fire -- but hundreds of thousands of land mines remain from the 19-year civil war, as Kousi discovered in front of her mud-wall home in this small town once the scene of fierce fighting.

"I was cleaning the pans here when I saw something round. I thought it was a five-rupee coin," she said, pointing at where she noticed the shiny object. "When I could not pull it out, I called in my brother-in law. He removed the soil around and it was no coin, but a land mine."

Life was desperate for her family during five years in refugee camps, but home also proved to be perilous, Kousi said. "It is only after finding the mine in front of our home that we understood the real threat," she said.

There are an estimated 1 million land mines -- buried by both government troops and the Tiger rebels -- spread across about 200 square kilometers (125 square miles) of Sri Lanka's Tamil-majority northeast, officials say.

The region was the heart of the civil war, and mines were often sown in populated and fertile areas. The Tigers began fighting in 1983 to create a separate state for the country's 3.2 million Tamils, alleging discrimination by the country's 14 million Sinhalese.

More than 65,000 people from both sides were killed, tens of thousands were maimed and many more fled the country.

Since 1985, land mine explosions have killed 191 civilians and injured 1,099 others, according to government officials.

Kanniappan Govindarasan, 64, was among the wounded. A fisherman who gave up his boat when the navy imposed heavy security restrictions, he stepped on a land mine as he chopped firewood in a forested area. He now moves about in a hand-operated tricycle in Jaffna, the main city in the north.

"I am ashamed but I have to say this, I now beg for money in the Jaffna bus stand," Govindarasan recounted.

The number of land mine casualties has fallen since 2002, the year the cease-fire was signed, when more than a dozen people were injured or killed every month by land mines. Since 2003, when de-mining operations began in force, that number has dropped to about 2 per month, officials say.

In Kousi's neighborhood, all 300 families fled in 1997 as government troops advanced along the main highway that connects Sri Lanka's troubled northern Jaffna peninsula with the rest of the island. Her village of Mankulam has been controlled by the rebels since 2000.

The village's once-fortified garrison is now covered with bushes, and only a careful observer notices the rusted barbed wire and half-empty sandbags of bunkers. Hidden among the bushes are mines.

A de-mining group that started work here in December 2004 has unearthed 289 mines, said C. Thiraviyanathan, a member of the team. The Tamil Tigers originally recruited de-miners, but later Norwegian People's Aid trained team members and provided safety equipment.

Thirty-eight families have resettled in the village in recent months. But more than 260 families are still waiting to return to the village -- their homes in areas marked by the team with yellow tape to show mines still are hidden there just beneath the surface.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press.