Muthumari Nagar seeks help

This is one of two villages I am trying to raise funds for whilst I am in Sri Lanka.

The Final Days of Nonviolent Peaceforce Presence in Sri Lanka

The Closing of the Batticaloa Office

Chika Onah is NP's Head of Field Office in BAtticaloa. Here he talks about what will happen after NP leaves the District.

What is going to happen here is NP’s former staff in Batticaloa (the National staff) have came together to start a new organization. The new organization has been registered and they want to continue most of NP’s work. They want to equally add additional responsibility to that, like “livelihood and education”, so that is what is going to happen here as from Monday. (24th October) 

There are still needs for protection though you cannot compare the need now to two years ago or three years ago. But there’s still a need for protection and am very very happy that a local organization, like the one being formed by the old staff, is going to take up that.


Equally other networks are being rekindled. I heard from Murthi (a local partner) that they are forming a Provincial Peace Committee now. This will take care of the Eastern Province rather than before when they have a peace committee only within Batticaloa; maybe they have within Trincomalee and Ampara but now they are coming together to form one on a Provincial level.


There are equally other organizations that are really into human rights and protection issues too so they are really coming together to continue the work but I must confess protection needs here is not the same as two years ago it has really really improved. I think our best legacy is seeing that any civilian is protected, whether this is direct protection like the accompaniment we give or the assistance with the process. 

I know it will be very very difficult for anybody to do such a thing but I believe our old staff can. They already know what the meaning of ‘accompaniment’ is, the meaning of presence. I believe they can carry on with this and this is something we saw in our MSC (Most Significant Change) impact study.


During the MSC workshop in Vavuniya one person has said how ‘accompaniment’ achieve a lot of things. They had brought stakeholders together and locally important people agreed to start accompanying civilians who needed particular things, such as Character References, from a Grama.Nildari. (GN - local Government Official) The GN had said he would give but rarely did. But since they had organised ‘accompaniments’, the applicants had started getting their G.N’s certificates. I think that is a very very big legacy.


Another legacy we are living is the capacity building training. Really! anytime we have given the training most participants said, they’ve attended a lot of training but this is one is very very different, in terms of the curriculum, in terms of what they are hearing. You know, they are used to the 'normal training', may be livelihood training, or some business training but they’d never really think that they can protect themselves. All they were thinking is that ‘protection’ is only the responsibility of governments, police.


So these are some of the legacies that NP left behind and you could see even as we are closing we have a lot of training requests for this particular training, 'Basic Negotiations Skills and Threat Mitigation'.


The new organization, 'Yours and Mine - Vision for Community', will continue, together with Human Rights Centre for Social Justice and Community Development and with two other local partners. Now they will really have a lot of trainers who will know the work, together with the ex-NP staff. They will  continue delivering these trainings specially to the Mediation Boards; they really saw the importance of the training.

Equally that was why even the Mediation Board, in Kaththankudi has liaised with the police to see how they can extend the training to the civil protection committee which is a committee between the civilians and the police force

Earl Barthelot was NPO's Programme Coordinator in Batticaloa and has now established a new agency, with former NP staff, to continue to deliver the trainings in protection and negotiations skills they've been doing. so successfully, with NP.


"So for us, and the community, the most important thing was as far as protection is concerned; protecting persons and their accompaniments in Sri Lanka.


I would say there is no-one doing this type of work and without international staff being here no one would have done this type of work.


The way the internationals were trained and the way they behaved with the community was very good because people, the community, felt very friendly with NP’s Internationals. Especially they thought usually in Sri lanka that if you’re international you’re unbiased or you won’t take any sides.


You are a neutral person so they tend to believe you and they will come asking for help. If it is a national or local person they wouldn’t trust you because of the different dynamics, different groups involved in the conflict. So that is what was special with NP.


To all our stakeholders overseas I say ‘Help us as much as you can and we will do our best’."

Human Rights Centre for Social Justice - in Batticaloa

One of Nonviolent Peaceforce's close partners in Batticaloa talks about their work and the assistance they have had from NP. Human Rights Centre for Social Justice is predominantly a network of youth working for the promotion and protection of human rights. It is proof that despite the difficulties many civil society groups face they are still active and working for peace and reconciliation.