Residents of Valikamam North staged their twelfth consecutive weekly protest on Friday outside the Sri Lankan military commander's bungalow at Myliddy, demanding the release of the privately owned ancestral land that remains occupied under the High Security Zone (HSZ).
The demonstration was organised by landowners from the Grama Sevaka divisions 256, 248, 251 and 255, who were forcibly displaced from their homes in June 1990 when the area was designated a High Security Zone during the armed conflict.
Seventeen years after the end of the armed conflict, they say, their land remains under military control, the zone still in force, and years of appeals for its return have gone unanswered. They have resolved to protest every Friday until it is released.
What the landowners are demanding is not state land or a government grant, but the return of their own hereditary property, the houses, fields and structures they built and lived in before the military took them.
Though a few portions of the High Security Zone have been released over the years, large areas of Valikamam North, Myliddy among them, remain occupied, and with them the schools, temples, churches and community buildings that stand on the seized land.
Increasingly, residents argue, land taken on the stated grounds of "security" is being put to purposes that have nothing to do with security.
Across Valikamam North the military runs farms, welfare shops, holiday and tourist facilities and accommodation for senior officers on occupied Tamil land, turning a wartime seizure into a standing commercial enterprise. The revenue from these ventures, critics say, flows through military structures rather than local businesses, draining income from the surrounding Tamil economy and leaving civilian traders at a permanent disadvantage.
The pattern is visible along the district's main roads, where military-run shops and outlets occupy prominent sites and draw custom from beyond the region, diverting trade from Tamil-owned enterprises and stifling the area's post-war recovery. On some of the most fertile agricultural land in the peninsula, continued military cultivation denies displaced owners both their property and their livelihoods while the army profits from fields it took in the war.
The military's management of tourist sites, among them Kankesanthurai beach, the Point Pedro jetty and the Point Pedro lighthouse, extends the same logic to the coast, entrenching its economic footprint while shutting local communities out of the benefits of tourism.
The prolonged denial of access to their homes and fields, nearly two decades after the guns fell silent, forms part of what they describe as the Sri Lankan state's ongoing structural displacement of Tamils across the North-East, a slow reshaping of who owns, works and profits from the land of the Tamil homeland.
Their weekly protests at Myliddy, now three months old, are a refusal to let that reshaping pass unremarked, one Friday at a time. The military occupation of Valikamam North has been among the most sustained land struggles in the North-East, with landowners rejecting alternative plots and holding out for their own.