Muslims -- forgotten victims of S. Lanka's war

By John Chalmers

PUTTALAM, Sri Lanka (Reuters): One evening in October 1990, Ismath Indon was suddenly faced with a choice between life or death.

He had two hours to close his thriving meat shop, and leave Jaffna city with his wife, five children and a few armfuls of belongings -- or be shot by separatist Tamil Tiger guerrillas.

"They came at seven o'clock and said all Muslims must be out by nine o'clock or they would start killing people. They had guns and we were all frightened," said Indon, who joined an exodus of 110,000 Muslims from Sri Lanka's strife-torn northern province.

Ten years on, Indon lives in an open refugee camp in Puttalam, a Muslim-dominated coastal town 120 kilometers (75 miles) north of the capital Colombo.

He has no voting rights, no running water in his rickety hut, no access to proper medical care, no job and -- as fighting rages again in Jaffna -- no real hope of ever returning to his home.

Classified only as "internally displaced people", the exiled Muslims are not eligible for support from the United Nations' refugee arm. And there is concern that the World Food Program may stop providing rations on which so many of them depend.

Before Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict took off in 1983, some 750,000 Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalese lived side by side in the Jaffna peninsula, a flat and arid spur of land at the northern tip of the Indian Ocean island.

But after the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) seized Jaffna from government troops in 1990, the population shrank to around 500,000 as non-Tamils were sent packing.

Few hesitate to dub it ethnic cleansing.

Since then, tension and distrust have replaced the mutual respect that Tamils and Muslims shared as minority communities. Sinhalese make up nearly three-quarters of Sri Lanka's 19 million people, Tamils about 18 percent and Muslims just 7.5 percent.

Muslims have been targeted several times by Tamil Tiger rebels, who have left a trail of death in their quest for a separate state -- or Eelam -- on the northern and eastern rim of the island.

Several months before Indon and his family fled in terror from Jaffna, rebels massacred 140 Muslims as they prayed at a mosque in the eastern coast district of Batticaloa. Nine days later, they struck again in the same area, killing 122.

In 1995, Muslims in Puttalam received photocopies of a letter signed in the name of the LTTE which told them to leave town within 10 days or meet the same fate as their brothers in Batticaloa.

Nothing happened.

But fear of the Tigers is still palpable in Puttalam, which falls inside the homeland that Velupillai Prabhakaran -- the LTTE's ruthlessly single-minded supremo -- is pursuing from his jungle hideout.

M.S. Bazeer, a 55-year-old teacher who also left Jaffna in 1990, appeared anxious not to criticize the LTTE as he told his story, and said it was bombing that forced him out.

"They didn't threaten us. We don't have any problems with the LTTE. They respected us. You must tell the whole story," he said.

Although they have found a temporary home, the Jaffna Muslims feel alienated even in Puttalam. Many local people resent the sudden burst of competition for employment and scarce resources, and critics say the local authorities neglect their basic needs.

Town officials directed Reuters to District Secretary J.R. Dissanayake for information on the Muslim refugees.

But even he was unable to give a ready breakdown of the number of refugees, the number living in camps and the total cost to the government of dishing out food rations.

Typically, a family of three which does not benefit from World Food Program rations receives coupons from the government worth 420 rupees ($5.60) every 15 days.

Rohan Edrisinha, a lawyer who works for a Colombo-based non- governmental organization, the Center for Policy Alternatives, has launched a legal drive to win basic rights for the refugees.

He says that because they don't come under the jurisdiction of the northwestern province to which Puttalam belongs, they are treated as outsiders and not citizens.

Edrisinha wants the waiver of a property law which stipulates that the right of ownership is lost if abandoned for 10 years for those who left rice fields, farms and houses behind in Jaffna. Without this, the refugees would have no incentive to go back, even if peace returned to the peninsula.

He is also pleading for the refugees' right to health services and education, and has also brought a case -- he lost the first round -- to win them voting rights.

"Once they get a right to vote, political parties will start treating them with more respect," he said. "The refugees' dignity and self-respect are at stake ... and we are trying to get the authorities to address some of their basic needs."