Abstract

The northern Muslims together with all protracted IDPs displaced prior to 2008 became a low priority caseload for return and resettlement assistance in the aftermath of the ‘end’ of the war in Sri Lanka in 2009. Framed in terms of an ethics of ‘greatest need’ connected only to funding availability, all old IDPs lost out in the resettlement process. This paper attempts to decentre this idea of economic limits and humanitarian need by discussing the manner in which such ideas of ‘greatest need’ actually emerge from discourses about victimhood that are part of an ethical humanitarian project to which local politics are irrelevant. This paper will show, however, that these initiatives consistently intersect with local power hierarchies and local ideas of legitimacy and belonging. Therefore, this paper will look at the manner in which the war related victim discourse of international humanitarianism, helped to exacerbate northern Muslim’s own marginality and continued exclusion from the north. This paper will also look at the manner in which victimhood narratives are mobilized in Sri Lanka by electoral politics and displaced IDP activists themselves, and will speculate about the efficacy of the victim identity for political and social transformation during this time of transition in Sri Lanka.

Highlights

  • In October 1990, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam1 (LTTE) expelled the entire Muslim population of five districts in the North of Sri Lanka

  • Despite substantial evidence3 regarding the ambivalent relationship of most northern Muslims internally displaced persons (IDPs) to the areas they were compelled to live in for over 20 years and the fraught and difficult relations between them and the local Muslim community, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) insisted that ‘local integration’ must have occurred owing to years of assistance and aid delivery

  • Northern Muslim IDPs and The Sri Lankan Context Since their expulsion from the Northern Province by the LTTE in 1990, northern Muslims have constituted a community in protracted displacement with large numbers concentrated in the economically depressed areas of Puttalam District in north-western Sri Lanka

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Summary

Farzana Haniffa*

The northern Muslims together with all protracted IDPs displaced prior to 2008 became a low priority caseload for return and resettlement assistance in the aftermath of the ‘end’ of the war in Sri Lanka in 2009. This paper attempts to decentre this idea of economic limits and humanitarian need by discussing the manner in which such ideas of ‘greatest need’ emerge from discourses about victimhood that are part of an ethical humanitarian project to which local politics are irrelevant. This paper will look at the manner in which the war related victim discourse of international humanitarianism, helped to exacerbate northern Muslim’s own marginality and continued exclusion from the north. This paper will look at the manner in which victimhood narratives are mobilized in Sri Lanka by electoral politics and displaced IDP activists themselves, and will speculate about the efficacy of the victim identity for political and social transformation during this time of transition in Sri Lanka

Introduction
Background
Findings
Conclusion
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