By Thulasi Muttulingam “So… so… so…,” everyone wants to know from me these days: “Are you thrilled about the developments in Jaffna?” What developments in Jaffna? “Why, the airport of course!” Ah. Of course. Well, I am sure it’ll come in handy if I ever want to go to India. Meanwhile, my regular three-wheeler driver is devastated. He’s unlikely to get his ancestral land in Palaly back; he had held out hope all this while, while eking out a living to pay for his rented house by Jaffna town. Some of you regular readers of my writing here might even remember this three-wheeler driver from a piece I wrote a few weeks ago, on the Eluga Tamil issue. Then, he was quoted criticising Tamil nationalists who sought to impose an economic blockade in the North for the Eluga Tamil rally. Such a blockade would hit non-salaried breadwinners like him smack on their guts. No work, no pay. Go hungry that day. This poor elderly man has already been through so much in the war years, and he still doesn’t see retirement in sight. He still has to work hard to support his family; his children are all grown up now and some of them operate their own three-wheelers too. But without land or homes of their own, survival is precarious at best. And so, he ferries people in his trusty three-wheeler from early morning till late night to earn his keep. A gentle, mild-mannered man, he doesn’t like to talk much, especially of his past. They bring back too many traumatic memories for him. “What’s the point of thinking of all that? It’s best to move on,” he says. Yet, I occasionally prod him for his stories. Among the many things I managed to ferret out of him was: He once spent several years in jail, watching as many young men and women around him were brought in, tortured, and “disappeared”. He was sure he was going to end up with the same fate, but for unknown reasons was eventually released without charge. How did he end up in jail? Was he a part of the LTTE? Far from it, actually. He had been a driver of a private bus. A passenger one day had got into an argument with the conductor of the bus – he didn’t even remember what their original tussle was about, it must have been something minor – who unceremoniously offloaded the passenger from the bus. The next thing they knew was that they were both arrested – the passenger had complained to the Army that these two men were LTTE aides. In those days, circa 1990s, that was enough to get one arrested without any kind of due procedure or investigation. Wait a minute. Isn’t the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) still operational? I was too hasty in saying “those days” then; it still could happen these days too. Such was the malevolent spectre of the PTA then. I have seen it used as a threat among Tamils themselves: “Just you wait, I am going to report to the CID that you are LTTE.” Needless to say, Tamils lived in fear of their non-Tamil fellow citizens at the time as even minor arguments could lead to spurious charges where one would easily vanish under the PTA, and many scores were settled exactly like that. His young family had had to depend on relations’ goodwill to survive while he was incarcerated – something he still tears up about. He made it out eventually, and prefers to keep quiet about his experiences. There’s something missing in all these gushing reports about the newly opened airport – were the private landowners of Palaly compensated or not? I called my three-wheeler driver to check. He said: “They called us for a meeting recently, where they offered us alternatives of land or money. Some took the alternatives offered, but others like us are holding out, waiting for our own lands back,” he said. Did the compensation offered actually compare to the value of the land taken? The Government is famous for offering peanuts as compensation in these parts. “I don’t know, since we didn’t take that option; we didn’t ask how much was being given. Anyway, even those who agreed to receive compensation have not actually received anything yet. We’ll have to wait and see,” was his response. “My land is not directly in the airport’s way. I still hope for it back.” Crown Prince in Town MP Namal Rajapaksa was touring Jaffna recently. I was invited to attend his campaign meeting at The Thinnai Hotel. He didn’t have much to say about political prisoners or the fate of the disappeared; he gave a short speech where he said that education and development were the two main drivers of his uncle Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s campaign, and this was crucially relevant to Jaffna too. Fair enough, it certainly is crucially relevant, but just a day earlier, his uncle had claimed to The Hindu’s correspondent that no people had gone missing from among the Tamils after handing themselves over to the Army. The mothers of the disappeared still camping along the roads of Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu, and Jaffna in hopes of news of their children are all mistaken apparently, if not outright liars. It looked as if Namal was going to leave this elephant in the room unaddressed, but after he opened the floor to questions, Jaffna District Parliamentarian Angajan Ramanathan, sitting to Namal’s right, whispered in his ear – it seems that was why Namal reluctantly took up the issue. “Ah…and also…I think one of the political topics in the North is about the missing people and the political prisoners...Actually, that’s one of the topics President Rajapaksa tried to address in his time, after the end of the war. That’s why we formed the LLRC (Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission) – to have a domestic mechanism for a permanent solution.” He also said that he had spent over a week in jail with the political prisoners, and had gotten to know them “like a family”; that he was very happy about spending the week with them in a jail cell because 30 years earlier, while his mother had been pregnant with him, his father Mahinda Rajapaksa had served time in the same cell, and that while he sympathised with the prisoners and had formed a bond with them, it was not possible to go beyond the judicial process to procure presidential pardons for them, especially if they had indeed engaged in terrorist activity. Couldn’t fault him on what he said – he certainly possesses good PR skills. It was more what he didn’t say. Among all the pretty promises of economic development, pain still languishes. As does fear. Namal, however, maintained that Tamils did not appear to fear either him or his family because we were highly critical of the entire family without fear, while simply claiming that we feared them. Whom we actually feared he said, appeared to be the Tamil politicians, whom many of us never dared publicly criticise. As for land, he said that his father’s Government had released 17,000 acres out of 24,000, while the current Government had released only 4,000 thus far. “Even with all the demining we had to do after the war’s end, we released more lands than this current Government; keep that in mind.” Okay, but then they held pretty much all of the North and East after the war ended. So they had to eventually release the lands for people to settle, once they started trickling out of Menik Farm. While some prime properties in central locations were held as “high security zones” where their family built private mansions and hotels, when the government changed, construction work on those massive buildings construction was abandoned and they are lying vacant today. In the meantime, while most people’s houses in these parts had been destroyed during the war, others found theirs standing – such as in Palaly. Many Palaly residents thought they would be able to resettle fairly easily because their houses were still standing after the war had ended, but then sometime in 2012-13, the Rajapaksa Government razed them, and never returned the land. Neither has this Government, which has at this last minute delivered an airport to show something for it. Is this a good development? I don’t know. You tell me. (The writer is a freelance journalist based in Jaffna. All views expressed are her own and not of any organisations affiliated to her) Photo Ishara S. Kodikara (AFP)