BATTICALOA, Sri Lanka - Three years ago, Vairamuttu Bavani left her home in eastern Sri Lanka to attend her cousin’s wedding in the north.
She did not make it back until September.
Trapped by the civil war, Bavani, a Tamil, lost six members of her family and both her legs to a bomb. She spent months detained in an overcrowded refugee camp. And she remains under tight scrutiny by local authorities, who have visited her almost every day since her return from the northern Vanni region, she said.
“They ask me where I went in the Vanni and what I was doing there,’’ said Bavani, 25, who spends her days seated on the floor of her sister’s house, fighting boredom.
Bavani is one of tens of thousands of refugees who are struggling to rebuild their lives in postwar Sri Lanka, often under tight control from the government. During the final months of the war, nearly 300,000 mostly Tamil civilians were trapped between rebels and advancing government troops, and these refugees are now in various stages of limbo.
The quarter-century war cost 80,000 to 100,000 their lives, as the Tamil Tiger rebels fought for a separate state for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority. After the rebels lost in May, the government herded the remaining civilians, along with straggling rebel fighters, to overcrowded camps.
Rights groups and Western governments decried conditions in the camps, saying they amounted to an illegal form of collective punishment.
Faced with mounting international pressure and advancing monsoon rains that would have caused havoc at the low-lying camps, the government recently unlocked the camps, saying most of the remaining 127,000 refugees are free to go home once they register with authorities. The government has vowed to close the camps by the end of January.
Even those who have returned from the camps say they have been told not to travel without police permission, and security officers visit their homes to question them regularly. Many wait, painfully, for news of loved ones who vanished or were taken by the military for questioning.
Rights groups worry that the government’s surveillance of refugees and its failure to provide them with better livelihoods will exacerbate the ethnic tensions that fueled the conflict.
“It’s alienating the 300,000 displaced and their relatives,’’ said Meenakshi Ganguly, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. “They’re all going to feel like they’re living in a state where they are not trusted and don’t belong. That’s a highly dangerous situation.’’