Vanni District Member of Parliament, Thurairasa Ravikaran, has accused key Sri Lankan state institutions of unlawfully seizing ancestral Tamil lands in the North-East and obstructing efforts to return them, despite repeated appeals from local communities and elected representatives.
Speaking in Parliament this week, Ravikaran condemned the Department of Forest Conservation, the Department of Archaeology, and the Department of Wildlife Conservation for what he described as a calculated and deceitful campaign of land appropriation. He alleged that these agencies were operating with impunity in the Mullaitivu District, systematically depriving Tamil residents of their legally held lands.
“What is most distressing in these times,” he added, “is that officials from departments such as Forest Conservation and Wildlife — institutions now synonymous with plunder — have begun to assume the role of judges, arbitrating over the very lands they’ve stolen.”
During a recent field visit to the Oddusuddan Divisional Secretariat, the MP said he witnessed first-hand how state authorities were illegally issuing Gazette notifications that reclassified long-inhabited residential and agricultural lands as forest reserves or archaeological zones. These lands, he noted, had been cultivated and lived on by Tamil families for generations.
The result has been devastating. People are being evicted from their ancestral lands and denied the right to farm their traditional paddy fields, said Ravikaran, warning of widespread economic disruption. This has led to the systematic destruction of livelihoods, disruption of daily sustenance, and a direct blow to children’s education, he claimed.
He also raised serious concerns over military-led land grabs. In particular, Ravikaran pointed to the Ambagamam area in Oddusuddan, where he claimed that around 8,000 acres of forest land were cleared to facilitate the construction of a Sri Lanka Air Force base. This was allegedly done without formal approval from the Department of Forest Conservation and involved the illegal sale of valuable timber, implying a broader scheme of corruption and profiteering.
Ravikaran called on the government, which came to power on a platform of anti-corruption, to launch a transparent investigation into the alleged abuses. These are not isolated incidents but part of a systematic pattern of land expropriation targeting Tamils, he warned.
His remarks echo longstanding concerns over the state-led Sinhalisation of the Tamil homeland, where land appropriation by military, archaeological, and conservation authorities has served to displace Tamils and entrench Sinhala-Buddhist hegemony in the North-East.
