Lands in HSZ in North to be released

by Ranil Wijayapala

The Government has decided to release the lands in the High Security Zones in the North and it is now conducting surveys on the lands that can be released to civilians in the future, Defence Ministry sources told the Sunday Observer yesterday.

The sources said 1,000 acres of land will be released immediately in stages to the civilians as approved by the Cabinet recently.

As a first step the Government will release 220 acres in the J 284 Valalai Grama Niladhari Division of the Valikamam East Divisional Secretariat Division to set up a Pilot Village to resettle 1,022 families displaced by the war.

Each family will get 20 perches of land and financial assistance to construct a house under the project.

It is also proposed to establish a school, a pre-school, a hospital, religious places of worship, community centres and build other infrastructure.

The remaining 780 acres of land will also be used in the future to resettle the people displaced by the war.

According to Defence sources, a large extent of land from the 11,639 acres which were under the control of the Security Forces during the war has been already released and 6,152 acres in the Palay area are being maintained by the Sri Lanka Army and the Sri Lanka Air Force as High Security Zones.

The organisation of the Valikamam North War Displaced (VNWD) has expressed its displeasure over releasing a fraction of the land occupied by the military.

“We don’t want other land. We want to go back to our traditional villages,” said VNWD President Shanmugalingam Sajeewan.

Over 10,000 families have been forced to live in camps for the past 25 years due to the HSZ set up by the military. A further 16,000 families live with relatives or friends.

According to a Memorandum handed over to the former President by the Northern Provincial Council in late 2014, the military is occupying nearly 65,000 acres of land in the North. This is almost one-fifth of the land mass in the Jaffna peninsula. The NPC said that 30,000 houses, 30 schools, 30 factories and 40,000 acres of arable land are within the military HSZ.