Friday, April 13, 2007

Shacking up in Sri Lanka

A disagreement with Sri Lankan villagers over the ownership of beachside land has Eric Ellis desperate for a resolution.
 

Twenty years reporting in and around Asia has taught me that investing in the region can have its rewards and its pitfalls. And in those same two decades, I like to think I've been around the regional block. But there are still things that can floor me.

Take Sri Lanka, which after having met a fair few of its leaders over the years, I'm not alone in regarding as one of the world's worst-governed countries. It's also one of its loveliest; a tropical gem in the Indian Ocean, though one tragically riven by civil war, ethnic strife, terrorism and extremism.

As frequent visitors to Sri Lanka, my wife and I bought a beachside property there in 2003, at a better time than now, when the 20-year conflict between the Sinhalese of the south and the Tamils of the north-east at last seemed consigned to history in a ceasefire. It's a beautiful spot, in Sri Lanka's deep south, where the beaches are beyond perfect. The locals were friendly and welcoming and we approached the transaction with anything but a neo-colonial hauteur of noblesse oblige that so many foreigners in Lanka adopt. The plan was to build a modest beach shack, no gin palace, but something tasteful and sympathetic, employing local tradesmen and techniques, spending some money in a place that's never really seen much.

We weren't alone. The area went through a minor boom, as Sri Lanka's ceasefire ushered in long-overdue economic reform. After years laboring in a 1950s style economy, at last Lankans were free to do what they wanted with their assets, incuding sell them or develop them for an expanding tourist market. There was talk of big Japanese carmakers building factories for the huge Indian market to the north. The future at last looked bright. Reform meant one could get actual title over property, basic rule-of-law stuff in developed countries like Australia, but not in developing countries where nationalist politicians don't mind stirring up xenophobia to get into office. Sri Lanka was different. It was going through a long overdue period of economic enlightenment and was joining the world. There was foreign investment, but more importantly, there was hope for the future. It played out in funny ways. Strolling the beach in Bali or Thailand, foreigners regarded as walking dollar notes would be offered trinkets and massages. In Sri Lanka you'd be offered property. Locals were getting rich and they seemed to like it.

Then came the tsunami on Boxing Day 2004. Our place faces south-east, facing Sumatra 2000km away, on a headland overlooking a charming fishing village of about 500 people. The 10m high waters came in from Sumatra and, thanks to the area's unique topography, hit our headland, welled up and like water in a funnel, had nowhere to go except down the creek below along which the village sat. I was called to Lanka to report the devastation and of the 100-odd villages I passed through en route from Colombo, Mawela village was among the most devastated - 75% of its houses disappeared, about a third of the villagers dead.

I arrived on the beach a few days after the waters to discover utter human desperation on a scale I'd never seen, and never want to see again. "Your land, your land, the waves hit your land," the villagers wailed as they buried their many dead. We felt as if we were somehow responsible. I stayed for two months, representing a group of foreigners who had land in the area in a 'foreign friends fund', one of many such efforts that sprung up along the coast on those difficult days. We raised $US50,000, enough to buy Mawela villagers 60 new fishing boats, re-fitting another 30, delivering them all two months to the day after the waves. We funded a learn-to-swim campaign, and donated to the local hospital. We also began moves to start an annual scholarship for a local girl and boy to go to a good school in the capital. We were bit players but truth be told, it felt good to do something for a community we'd come to cherish. All of us felt like the foreigners were accepted as good neighbours, that out of tragedy comes humility and understanding. We postponed plans to build our beach hideaway, thinking that scarce resources were better employed, for the moment at least, in re-building Lankans' houses.

So, two years on, and with the civil war again raging and the 2002 ceasefire a distant memory, it comes as something of a shock that two of the fishermen we gave boats to have decided to make a claim on our property. Now there's gratitude for you. Its got to be a hangover from the tsunami, where livelihoods and assets were literally washed away. They are not squatting; apparently they claim to own part of the property. They can't have any paperwork because we've got it; official titles, stamped, ratified and officially surveyed by the Sri Lankan state with all its pomp and circumstance. No matter, there'll be a court case on April 23 in a nearby town which I have to attend. I will, with titles prominently in hand. I'm assuming the claimants will paddle up to the bench, in the boats we donated to them.

I'm told by my laid-back lawyer, suddenly banking fees I never imagined we'd have to pay, that it's apparently quite common. Indeed, he says that about 60% of property cases in Lankan courts concern erroneous land claims. It raises some cheeky thoughts. My wife and I have admired a few other properties in the area and, given that it seems possible to simply say you own a place to do so, we reckon we'll lay claim to our friend's resort, which would save building costs at the very least.

While I'm inclined to accept the courts' verdict, experience also tells me it may not go our way, regardless of the legitimacy of our state-sanctioned paperwork. So what to do?

A few ideas have been bandied around. We have photos of the boat recipients, which we took at the time of the boat handover so as not to duplicate donations, to give the handover a quasi-official air. Do we print a few out, get someone to write in Sinhala that these people got boats from the foreign friends and now they are stealing their land and then stick it up on palms around the village? The name and shame approach? Bad idea, said one of the other now-nervous foreigners in the area, that might encourage other locals to go on a land-seizing free-for-all. So do I pompously complain in court that this is unacceptable behaviour and sets a bad precedent for the very basis of the Lankan economy? I'm not sure anyone would care.

What about a local press campaign? Many locals are illiterate and I'm reckoning that in Colombo there' d be very little sympathy anyway for the (relatively) rich foreigner versus the (presumably) impoverished locals. There never is.

I've thought about sitting down with them and talking it through, not to intimidate, just to find out what it's all about. But maybe that's too touchy-feely.

Paying them off? But that would be rewarding them for their outrageous behaviour. And paying off the courts, as is a fashion across Asia and apparently in Lanka too, would be encouraging corruption, not a good look for a journalist.

So we wait and see, somewhat powerless in the lap of the many gods that Lankans worship. But two weeks away from our joust with Lankan justice, I'm open to suggestions.