That's an important question. The exact extent of territory taken by the military or for other government functions or by politically connected businesses is impossible to know—well, it's not impossible, but it's not known. But it's sizeable. The numbers displaced are in the tens of thousands. Whether that's 25 or 30 or 80 or 90 is very hard to know, partly because the government makes it very hard to know, not allowing the UN to conduct a full survey of displaced that they used to do, for instance.
But I think there's clearly a lot of land that has been taken. It's important for the record to state that some has been given back. So the government has released some land it previously used or claimed, generally without compensation, during the war. But still there's much more that has not been released, and there's more that has been taken since.
I think there is a lot of reason to believe that this is part of a more general strategy to deny, to slowly change the ethnic and cultural identity of the north. This is extremely worrisome, both from a standpoint of justice but also from a standpoint of conflict prevention, which is the mandate of my organization.
While the government is not officially saying it's aiming to change the demography or the cultural makeup of the north, I think there are enough indicators that the first steps, the necessary infrastructure, and the necessary policies for that to happen are there. I would just cite one very disturbing interview that the secretary to the ministry of defence, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the president's brother, gave in July of last year, which has not been given very much publicity. In it he stated that it was unnatural for the Northern province to be majority Tamil, and that if the natural course of events had been allowed to proceed, it, like the rest of the country, would be majority Sinhala.
He's not explicitly stating that this is the course that he will push forward. Certainly the implication of his statement would lend credence to worries that the north is targeted for Sinhalization and ultimate demographic change.