Sri Lanka’s Tamils Trapped Between War and Waste
Sri Lanka's environmental progress depends on its treatment of its minority Tamils, who have suffered for decades under majoritarian rule.
Garbage collection in Ariyalai, Jaffna. Image: streetsoftamileelam
Environmental issues in Sri Lanka have always come with an undertone of ethnic tension. For decades, the island’s minority Tamil population has been disenfranchised under the thumb of the Sinhala-majority central government. Sri Lanka’s northern and eastern provinces, in particular, suffered immense environmental destruction over the course of a 26-year-old civil war that resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties.
“Tamil refugees returning home from the countries in which they sought asylum have found land not already seized by the Sri Lankan government to be either heavily mined and cordoned off with yellow tape or no longer suitable for agriculture.”
Patches of minefields lie between the villages of these provinces, marked off by yellow tape. Shellings from gunfire and landmines by the Sri Lankan Army have severely harmed the soil composition, as the thin oxide films which protect the steel casings of landmines and bullets dissolve over time and corrode soil. Fields once teeming with lush coconut trees are now stark and dead. Tamil refugees returning home from the countries in which they sought asylum have found land not already seized by the Sri Lankan government to be either heavily mined and cordoned off with yellow tape or no longer suitable for agriculture.
According to the 2018 Environmental Performance Index, published by the Yale Centre for Environmental Law and Policy, Sri Lanka ranks 70th for overall environmental health. Remnants of war are but one obstacle in the island’s larger issue of waste management.
A Sri Lankan soldier displaying a mine in the northern town of Kokavil during a clearing operation in April 2011. Image: Ishara S. Kodikara via Yahoo News
Waste Management Infrastructures in Tamil-Majority Cities
Since the deadly conclusion of the war in 2009, hard-hit and Tamil-majority cities in the north and east have gradually begun to rebuild — generating more waste. Approximately 70 metric tons of refuse are produced in the northern city of Jaffna alone by its nearly 170,000 residents. Proper waste management has now become even more urgent.
The city is divided into seven different waste collection zones, from which rubbish is collected and transported via tractors and trucks to 42 different locations throughout the region. This garbage, which also includes medical waste, electronic waste and poultry litter, is either dumped in Jaffna itself, at spots in Kalundai and Vannarpannai, or brought to other areas like Kakkativu, an island part of the northern Kilinochchi district. Often, rubbish is also burned on curbs or in backyards, releasing carcinogens and particulate matter into the air.
“In terms of general waste, nearly twice as many collectors exist in the Sinhala-majority south than in the Tamil-majority north and east.”
In Tamil-majority cities like Jaffna, waste management, a largely a municipal effort, is severely constrained. The Sri Lankan government’s licensed electronic waste collectors, for instance, are mostly concentrated in the commercial capital of Colombo and nearby suburbs like Kelaniya and Kottawa. In terms of general waste, nearly twice as many collectors exist in the Sinhala-majority south than in the Tamil-majority north and east. Of those collectors in Tamil regions, very few offer recycling and composting services.
In March 2019, the Government of Japan granted the Jaffna Municipal Council around 15 million Sri Lankan rupees (SLR) to fund four compact trucks for the purpose of solid waste disposal. Though this has helped to a certain degree, it has not had a large-scale impact due to illiteracy in the region, as signage and notices about the trucks’ routes and purpose are dismissed by those who cannot read and understand them. Prior to the civil war, Jaffna had among the highest literacy rates on the island, yet these statistics decreased notably as a result of a post-war brain drain phenomenon in which many highly educated and skilled Tamil labourers migrated to countries in Europe, North America, and East Asia.
Tamil-majority towns in the Mannar and Mullaitivu districts, which are comparatively less funded than Jaffna, also struggle immensely with the inaccessibility of rubbish bins. Additionally, although the Central Environment Authority's newly-established Solid Waste Management Unit has spearheaded projects to improve and maintain landfills, these have only been in Sinhala-majority cities like Dompe and Gampaha. The government’s Environmental Education Unit has also conducted little to no education sessions in Tamil towns.
Threatened Marine Diversity in Tamil-Majority Provinces
Sri Lanka has also been a dumping ground for waste from countries like the United Kingdom. Authorized explicitly by Sri Lanka’s central government, hundreds of containers of toxic refuse from Western nations have arrived in Colombo ports since the end of the civil war and sent to other locations on the island. Inevitably, the toxins released from this waste adulterate soil quality and seep into groundwater as effluent discharge, just like unexploded ordnances. One thing especially affected is the country’s biodiversity.
Sri Lanka has an incredibly high rate of endemism – over a quarter of the island's plants and fauna are specific to Sri Lanka. Of the island’s 25 national parks, about a fourth are entirely within the Tamil-majority northern and eastern provinces. The rest of the parks are located further south on the island, yet in terms of aquatic biodiversity, the northern and eastern provinces are significantly more abundant than other provinces, with Sri Lanka’s only two marine national parks – Adam’s Bridge and Pigeon Island – located there.
The Adam's Bridge Marine National Park is home to species like the dugong, a herbivorous mammal designated as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List. Pigeon Island National Park, on the other hand, is located off the coast of Nilaveli, a town in the eastern Trincomalee District, and is dominated by coral reef fauna and critically endangered species like the hawksbill sea turtle. Rising sea temperatures due to irresponsible environmental practices have caused mass coral bleaching and destroyed nearly 90 percent of Sri Lanka’s coral reefs.
Lack of proper waste disposal facilities in Tamil-majority districts is especially evident in coastal villages like Gurunagar, where large amounts of plastic waste comes from fishing and related activities. Image: Waruni Anuruddhika
Additionally, in both the aforementioned national parks, marine life has been threatened by litter on its beaches, left mainly by international and Sinhala tourists and left uncleared largely because of the collapse of the government’s waste management infrastructure in the north and east. Budget allocations have shown time and time again that, while the government considers Tamil areas important for revenue generation, it continues to neglect the livelihoods of the people and wildlife there.
Sinhala Majoritarianism and Sri Lanka’s Waste Problem
From a linguistic standpoint, details surrounding environmentally friendly disposal practices are often only disseminated in Sinhala and English, thereby divesting access of literate Tamils to such information.
Linguistic discrimination is a prominent tactic of the government’s modus operandi, made well-known by the 1956 Sinhala Only Act but leveraged against Tamils and other ethnic minorities since the rule of British Ceylon began in the nineteenth century. Despite the fact that most citizens of the northern and eastern provinces speak little to no Sinhala, and that Tamil is an official language of Sri Lanka, it isn’t uncommon to see governmental ordinances and notices printed only in Sinhala and English. From national parks to highways, signs discouraging littering are seldom in Tamil, a necessary step considering the general lack of ecological cognizance amongst the island’s working class. Instead, such awareness is brought forth mainly by local activist groups.
2015: Protest in Chunnakam, Jaffna against the Uthuru Janani thermal power plant for dumping waste oil and grease deposits in the local well. Image: Tamil Guardian
“Solving Sri Lanka’s rubbish problem will require progressive social policies in general, the upliftment of Tamils in particular, and a concerted commitment to environmentalism.”
Though politicians like Ajantha Perera of the Socialist Party of Sri Lanka, the country’s first female presidential candidate, have been vocal about the need to mitigate the country's environmental problems, they have done so through a lens of majoritarianism, failing to acknowledge the discrimination against Tamils that serves as a foundation to Sri Lanka’s ecological situation. Sri Lanka’s first political party, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, has stood by Tamils in the past, yet hasn’t formulated a clear and direct plan to address the country’s environmental crisis. Similarly, while the four parties of the centre-left Tamil National Alliance prioritize the rights of Tamils, none of them have facilitated much discourse about waste management.
Solving Sri Lanka’s rubbish problem will require progressive social policies in general, the upliftment of Tamils in particular, and a concerted commitment to environmentalism. Given the current regime’s hardliner stance — under Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s recently re-elected President, the persecution of Tamils has increased tenfold — Tamils cannot expect empathy from the central government. Rather, an international mechanism is needed to ensure accountability and help pave the way for egalitarianism and self-determination. The Tamil-majority northern and eastern provinces are rich in history, culture, and biodiversity, and unless Tamils are allowed the space to construct a system of political and environmental justice, Tamils risk losing it to Sinhala despotism and capitalist greed.
Visvajit Sriramrajan is a journalist who reports on ethnopolitical conflicts in South Asia and on the intersection between minority rights and larger societal issues.