Sri Lankan state sponsored colonisation schemes

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Sri Lankan state sponsored colonisation schemes of majority Sinhalese in the northern or eastern parts of the island, traditionally considered^{[citation needed]} to be minority Sri Lankan Tamil regions, has been perhaps the most immediate cause of inter-communal violence.[1]

1 Situation of Trincomalee district
2 Projects in 1980s
3 Projects in 1990s
4 See also

[edit] Situation of Trincomalee district

The policy of all governments in Sri Lanka has been to alter the demographics of the Trincomalee District in favour of the Sinhalese [2]. With the gaining of independence in 1948, the government began the Kanthalai colonization scheme where Sinhalese from outside the district were settled. This was followed by the Allai scheme in the early 1950s and the Morawewa scheme in the 1960s. The Kanthalai tank originally irrigated the paddy fields belonging to the Thamplakamam and Kinniya farmers. This was augmented to bring in thousands of Sinhalese from outside the district. The magnitude of the impact of this colonization could be seen from the fact that it is estimated that about 40,000 of the present Sinhalalese population of 86,000 in the district came in as a result of the Kanthalai colonization scheme. It accounts for about 46% of the Sinhalese population [3]

[edit] Projects in 1980s

There was, for example, an official plan in the mid-1980s to settle 30,000 Sinhalese in the dry zone of Northern Province, giving each settler land and funds to build a house and each community armed protection in the form of rifles and machine guns. Tamil spokesmen accused the government of promoting a new form of colonialism, but the Jayewardene government asserted that no part of the island could legitimately be considered an ethnic homeland and thus closed to settlement from outside. Settlement schemes were popular with the poorer and less fortunate classes of Sinhalese.[4]

[edit] Projects in 1990s

In 1990s In the Northern province, Weli Oya or Manal Aru is another colonization scheme in which local Tamil people were driven out and Sinhalese settled and security provided by the Special Task Force[5]