The Mullaitivu fishing community went through tremendous devastation during the last phase of the war, the tsunami before that and decades of displacement. Almost every family has lost one or more persons, most of their homes were razed to the ground and their fishing livelihoods brought to a standstill for years. Yet the post-war period has not brought them respite.
During the course of the war, the number of able-bodied fishermen in Mullaitivu had perished. After the war, the Rajapaksa regime further humiliated this population by interning them in camps, undermined their economic revival with militarized restrictions on fishing and intimidated them for years with surveillance.
Sadly, even after regime change two years ago, their economic situation has become worse. Their fishing livelihoods have been undermined by the arrival of hordes of fishing enterprises from other regions. Ironically, it is the Fisheries Ministry responsible for developing sustainable local fisheries that is at the centre of the current controversy. Excessive licences are granted to hundreds of gill-net fishermen and companies that send divers to collect sea cucumber for exports. The large inflow of licensed fishermen has also provided cover for unlicensed fishermen and illegal fishing practices including the use of light course and dynamite, which are all draining the ability of the Mullaitivu fishing community to recover.
Mullaitivu has a long history of migrant fishers from the South who fish between March and August, particularly during the south-west monsoon, and had amicable relations with the local fishing communities. After the war in 2012, the military facilitated the return of some of these migrant fishers. Problematic as the role of the military might have been in such fisheries management, the Mullaitivu fisher co-operatives agreed initially to 30 and then eventually accepted 78 such migrant fishermen who claimed to have fished in the Mullaitivu waters before the war.
After regime change in 2015, the number of outside fishers suddenly increased to a few hundred. Worryingly, it was with the active return of the civil administration, particularly the Fisheries Department, that excessive licences were issued, particularly to new mudalalis from the South who wanted to exploit the marine resources and sought tens of licences each to bring in fishermen who worked for them. The Mullaitivu fishing communities, which had been confronting the Indian trawlers ravaging their waters for shrimp during the early months of the year, suddenly faced excessive number of powerful fishing enterprises from the South. These developments led to drastically low fish harvest, declining fishing income and rising indebtedness for the coastal Mullaitivu communities.
2004 Wijeya Newspapers Ltd.