Roar.lk: Sri Lanka: Friday, February
24, 2017.
Hundreds of
displaced families lined up outside the Vavuniya Divisional Secretariat (DS)
yesterday (February 22), precious documents in hand, hoping to find answers
about the legal status of lands they were resettled on by paramilitary groups
during the war.
Perhaps the
most stunningly organised use of the Right To Information Act yet, the entity
responsible for this is a little-known youth organisation called Association
for Friendship and Love (AFRIEL), which was founded in 2013.
According to
AFRIEL co-founder and chairman Ravindra De Silva (32), the youth organisation
has been cooking up a campaign to help war-affected families in the north and
east utilise the RTI for months now.
“We have
documented thousands of cases of human rights violations but the government has
rarely provided information. We struggled over how to move past this and
thought that the RTI might be a good solution so we started organising forums
at the village level,” says De Silva.
Yesterday
alone, AFRIEL assisted 270 families form Nelukkulam, Thaskoddam, Easankoddam,
Kathankoddam, and Ampikaipalankoddam in filing inquires into the ownership of
lands given to them by paramilitary groups like the LTTE.
Since the
enactment of the RTI, AFRIEL has assisted families in making around 700
applications usually relating to issues of military occupied land or
disappeared loved ones. De Silva says they hope to facilitate 3,000
applications by the end of the month.
Aside from
facilitating applications from families, AFRIEL has also launched some of its
own, having visited every DS office in the Northern Province.
Says De
Silva, “We asked about how much land is being occupied by the military, and how
much of this is state-owned and privately-owned. We have also asked for the
names of the original owners of the private lands.”
“We asked for
details of disappeared people in the area. Some families have made complaints
to the Human Rights Commission about such issues and not heard back for over 15
years. We want to use the RTI to follow up on these cases.”
Local
government officers have been, for the most part, extremely forthcoming,
according to De Silva. All of AFRIEL’s RTI applications have so far been
accepted and acknowledged without charge. Already, two DS offices have promised
to provide the information requested.
But AFRIEL’s
plans don’t stop at northern government offices. The youth organisation hopes
to make a trip south to Colombo with around 300 victims by the end of the month
to file RTI applications at the Resettlement Ministry, Land Ministry, and
Defence Ministry among other authorities.
Human rights
activist and adviser to INFORM, Ruki Fernando, expresses cautious optimism
about AFRIEL’s campaign. Fernando himself has been involved in helping
war-affected families look for disappeared loved ones and military occupied
land long before the enactment of the RTI.
“It is too
early to tell what the results will be from these applications. Public
authorities tend to be very choosy when it comes to political issues. Requests
regarding military occupied land or disappeared people are very contentious and
come with a lot of local and international lobbying,” says Fernando.
Given the
recent resurgence of protests in the north, Fernando says the RTI can work in
tandem with popular demonstrations to appeal to not only the government, but
also media and civil society in Colombo to play a role in resolving conflict
issues.
“In
principle, I want to use the RTI in my own work with war-affected families. But
I will wait a little until the results start trickling in. For too long I’ve
been banging my head against statutory institutions, wasting money and taking
risks with little achieved in the end.”
An unusual
side-effect of AFRIEL’s volley of RTI applications is a supposed improvement in
the efficiency of bureaucratic processes at local government offices, as De
Silva claims that the slew of RTI applications has forced them to up their
game.
“One government worker told me that he didn’t
realise just how many people in the region don’t even have birth certificates
or national IDs. So I think we can expect some systematic changes as DS offices
are forced to coordinate more with Grama Niladharis, collect more information,
and learn new processes,” says De Silva.
But it’s not
just government workers who are learning through this process. Citizens, too,
are familiarising themselves with local government mechanisms and the various
tools at their disposal to seek redress for grievances.
“We found
that people’s knowledge about legal procedures was very low,” explains De
Silva. “Because of the conflict, many people are more familiar with the LTTE’s
civil administration, so it is a challenge to educate youngsters about legal
procedures.”
Originally
from Galle, De Silva found himself in Vavuniya when helping monitor the 2013
Northern Provincial Council elections as the regional coordinator for Peoples
Action for Free and Fair Elections (PAFFREL). During this time, he befriended
several local youth, with whom he discussed issues pertaining to freedom of
expression and post-war traumas.
“We just
started as friends and discussed how we can help each other. Eventually, we
decided to mobilise more youth to get involved in organising and coordinating
with local government to solve long-standing issues,” says De Silva.
Today, AFRIEL
has a growing network of ‘citizen watchers’ throughout the north. De Silva says
that the intention is to recruit two youths from every village and train them
to identify community grievances and facilitate solutions through the
island-wide network.
(Editor’s note: The opening lines of this article
previously stated that families were looking for answers regarding lands
occupied by the military. This has been amended to read “answers about the
legal status of lands they were resettled on by paramilitary groups during the
war.”)