They call it ‘the voyage of the damned’. But thousands still want to try it

A new beginning
Australia and Canada are the preferred destination of the Sri Lankan refugees

Photo: AFP

Sri Lankan refugees in India are ready to do anything to escape their camps. Sai Manish finds out why

IN THE 1980s, Sri Lankan Tamils escaped to India from the ravages of a bitter war in the island nation. Now they are fleeing India for a better life in the West, undertaking a mindnumbing 3,000 nautical mile journey into a watery void so perilous that many call it the “voyage of the damned”.

“I was hoping to get on the last ship but the agent says the seas are rough and I can go only after the rains are over,” says Manikandan, 28, who stays with his father in one of the largest refugee camps at Mandapam in the coastal district of Ramanthapuram. “I have already paid Rs 20,000 and will pay another Rs 80,000 when I reach Australia. My brother and his wife are there on Christmas Island at the special camp and he will soon be given asylum. I came from Trincomalee four years ago but I can’t spend the rest of my life living on doles and doing odd jobs. I’m a graduate and I deserve better.”

Hundreds of youth like Manikandan are putting their life in jeopardy to make a precarious journey across the Indian and Pacific Oceans to Australia and Canada in search of a better life. Given the desperation to rebuild lives, many nefarious agents, some with the backing of Tamil Nadu’s fringe political groups, are luring gullible refugees with the promise of paradise across the seas.

TEHELKA spoke to a Chennai-based agent and a few refugees who have already paid a part of the Rs1.5 lakh fee to be shipped illegally. The agents, most of whom are Sri Lankan nationals settled in India as refugees, have easy access to the 73,000 refugees living in 115 camps.

The agents say that they always impose some conditions before the journey. “Rule No. 1 is that there should be no old men and women on board the ship. No. 2 is that no transit to Australia and Canada is made without infants on board. No. 3 is that if someone dies on board, his/her body should be promptly disposed of at sea. No. 4 is when they reach the destination, they should maintain that they fled from Jaffna and not Tamil Nadu.”

An infant on board ensures preferential treatment from western authorities to asylum-seekers when they are detained. “In Australia, it takes just two months for women with babies to be released and given asylum after detention. I have friends who had an arrangement with girls in the camps to bear their children. It makes it a lot easier,” says Edward Kumar, a refugee in Chennai.

The agents buy dilapidated fishing boats, some barely sea-worthy, known among the refugees as ‘rollers’ after tales of such boats rolling over mid-sea killing everybody onboard. There are no crew members or safety jackets. Five youth are chosen to steer the ship. The voyage takes 14 and 45 days each to reach Australia and Canada respectively.

“Food is scarce and we have to ration it. Usually just bread, jam and pickle that don’t get spoilt. Some agents are generous enough to provide milk powder and baby food. But the food barely lasts the trip. Everybody sleeps huddled together below the deck,” says Edward.

The boarding points can be anywhere along the coast of Tamil Nadu or Kerala and is usually a well-kept secret until the day of the journey. However, due to heavy patrolling, many agents are putting people on fishing boats in the dead of the night before transferring them mid-sea on to a waiting ‘roller’.

“The modus operandi of the agents has changed after intense patrolling by the Coast Guard and Indian Navy off the Palk Straits during and after the war in Sri Lanka,” says a senior officer of the Q Branch CID, a special cell of the Tamil Nadu Police that keeps a tab on the activities of Lankan refugees in the state.

“It is difficult to determine the boarding points. Now many are trying to leave from Kerala to avoid detection,” says the Q Branch officer. “Last year, we received information that 38 refugees were to set sail from Kollam. They were detained and it was revealed that they had paid nearly Rs 5 lakh to agents to ferry them to Australia. Since then we have clamped down on such human traffickers.”

In 2010, the Q Branch busted close to eight networks that were planning to smuggle out nearly 1,000 refugees. On 26 January, after intercepting a car in Ramanathapuram suspected to be carrying human smugglers, officers were stunned to find 500 g of heroin, 22 carbines of .9 mm calibre and a satellite phone.

Agents tutor the refugees to claim that they fled from Jaffna and not Tamil Nadu

“Most of the agents are dangerous and they are duping the refugees. Many refugees are dumped at godforsaken islands. We are making refugees aware of such unscrupulous people and to avoid them at any cost,” says SC Chandrahasan, director of the Chennai-based Refugee Rehabilitation Organisation.

Despite the hostility to these ‘boat people’ in countries like Australia and Canada, most still think the risk is worth it. For instance, Australia stopped processing claims of Sri Lankans and detains them at a notorious camp called Christmas Island, even packing off people under naval escorts to Malaysia under a refugee-swapping agreement. This hardline stand has forced many to undertake journeys to France where Rule No. 4 assumes utmost importance for being granted asylum. Meanwhile, Canada is rethinking its strategy after a suspected LTTE renegade was found aboard a ship that landed at Canadian shores last year.

SINCE MOST asylum-seekers destroy their ID papers, in the absence of inter-state information sharing, it becomes impossible to ascertain whether the refugees are from India or Sri Lanka. Even the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHCR), which is facilitating the return of Tamil refugees to Sri Lanka, is surprised that many are choosing to undertake this journey of death.

The UNHCR says that conditions in Jaffna and other Tamil-dominated areas that bore the brunt of war “are returning to normal and there is no need for groupbased protection and presumption of eligibility as asylum-seekers for Sri Lankan Tamils”. However, many who fled for their lives during the war feel the need to escape for their livelihoods now.

“I can get good education in India but my refugee status does not allow me to take up a job commensurate with my education,” says Kutty, a refugee from Mandapam. “Most of us work as coolies or daily-wage labourers and have to report back for a headcount by sunset. What is the point in continuing this existence if I can’t even gift a gramme of gold to my sister for her marriage? And I don’t trust Mahinda Rajpaksa enough to take the risk of going back to Sri Lanka. I would rather die trying to secure a better life for my family than go back to my homeland.”

For many of the young and restless, tales of the good life stream in from those who managed to get asylum. And for those waiting in the wings, tales of watery graves are no deterrent before they sign up for the “voyage of the damned”.

sai.manish@tehelka.com

Sweeping changes as women sign up for mine-clearing jobs in Sri Lanka

Ben Doherty
May 11, 2011


SINNAPANDIVIRICHCHAN: The women are taking back war-torn northern Sri Lanka, one square metre at a time.

In some parts of the Tamil-dominated north, women are said to outnumber men by 10 to one. In the aftermath of the brutal civil war that cruelled this part of the country for the best part of three decades, the men are dead, held by the army in isolated internment camps, or have simply disappeared.
The war is over, but with as many as 40,000 civilians killed, the UN estimates, much of the north is still barely populated and hardly rebuilt.

An important reason is a land still blighted by mines. Both sides of the Sri Lankan conflict laid mines, but the number is unknown. The best estimates suggest it is in the hundreds of thousands.

For decades during its separatist war against the government, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam - known to the world as the Tamil Tigers - had jungle factories turning out thousands of landmines a week. The army laid its own fields.
Now the fighting is over, young women are the sole breadwinners in thousands of families and they are taking up one of the few jobs going: the difficult and dangerous task of clearing their scarred land, mine by mine.

Yogalingam Rubaganthy, 29, a mine clearer for a year, is helping train the second all-woman clearance team being run by the British Mines Advisory Group (MAG), funded by AusAID.

''It's difficult work. It's hot and it's dry and it is difficult to be in the field all day [and to] concentrate,'' she said. ''But [it] is possible for women to do the work; they have the ability.''

Rubaganthy lost her father, a sister and two brothers when her home in Killinochchi was shelled. She has one younger brother left, who is now back at school. ''That's the main reason we are all here,'' she says. ''We have responsibilities for our families. I must look after my family now.''

She sees benefit for the country, too. Fleeing the fighting, Rubaganthy spent months in an internment camp.

''The camps are not a nice place to live, and many people are still there,'' she says. ''They need their lands free from mines so they can come home; come back to [their] livelihoods.''

Clearing Sri Lanka's mines is especially difficult because of the way the war was fought.

The Tamil Tigers spent years laying vast minefields in an attempt to build a physical barrier that would separate the Tamil-dominated north from the Sinhalese south. But in the final weeks of the conflict, as they fled the advancing Sri Lankan Army, the Tigers took to so-called nuisance mining - laying mines without a pattern.

They deliberately laid mines around trees, near houses and wells, or on paths - any place where troops and people would be likely to tread.

MAG's technical operations manager, Magnus Rundstrom, says clearance teams scour villages first. The next priority is farmlands. Most people here rely for a living, to some degree, on what they can grow on their land. There are mines laid deep in the jungle too, but these are a lower priority. .

Rundstrom says that in conservative Sri Lanka it would be inappropriate for female mine clearers to work alongside men, ''but the training they receive is exactly the same, and the work they do is exactly the same''.

At 24, Egambaram Renathani is head of her household. She is being taught how to check for tripwires; to gently scrape beneath the earth, checking for mines. ''I am learning for one week,'' she says. ''It is difficult but it is important for my country. I am proud to do this job.''