The Sri Lanka Army occupying Jaffna will take over the islands off Jaffna from the occupying SL Navy, an Army spokesman announced in Jaffna Thursday. Since 1990s the control of the islands off the Jaffna Peninsula was vested with the occupying Navy of colonial Sri Lanka. Extensive new bases are now being built for the army next to the establishments of the SL Navy in the islands. Fear engulfs the people of the islands as the Army is insisting on fresh registration of people in addition to earlier registration of them with the SL Navy. Pungkudutheevu Island has become the new centre for the Army’s extensive establishment.
Many of the civilians of Vanni released from the internment camps of Colombo after the war were resettled in the islands off Jaffna.
The island of Kaarainakar, opposite to Kayts harbour has a major naval base of occupying Sri Lanka for many decades now. The island of Delft, cut off from the other islands, is a unit by itself completely under the control of the SL military that has several stations around the island. All the other islands, including Kachchatheevu, have military detachments.
The escalating militarization of the islands aims at depopulating the islands of its inhabitants, intimidating the trading community of Jaffna that mainly comes from the islands, cutting off the people of the peninsula from the outside world, ruining the fisheries of Eezham Tamils and above all twisting arms with Tamil Nadu that lies just a few km across the Palk Bay, political observers in Jaffna said.
Extensive new military camps are also planned in several places in the densely populated Jaffna peninsula such as the ones being built at Koappaay/ Urumpiraay and at Puththoor/ Vaatharavaththai.
Eezham Tamils do not perceive the ongoing militarization as a matter of mere military camps. They perceive them as armed colonies of the Sri Lankan state, demonstrating a new model in the extermination of an unarmed and unguarded nation. State sovereignty to have military establishments in its territory is effectively misused by the Sri Lankan state.
In such a scenario, Eezham Tamil circles are disappointed at the outlook of some Western diplomats, who tell them to desist from talking of genocide and ask them for evidence on colonisation.
Sometimes back Colombo’s president Mahinda Rajapaksa told a section of visiting Tamil politicians that he would not stop ‘military families’ settling in the Tamil land and instead, he was talking about providing ‘incentives’ to military families.
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