'We have lived here for a hundred years – from the time of my umamma [mother's mother].' This is what a middle-aged woman told these writers on 12 May, a few days after inhabitants of Mews Street, in Colombo 2, were evicted from their residences. A week earlier, municipal authorities had informed the 20-odd families that they were to be temporarily relocated to Thotalanga, a crowded settlement of homeless people living in the most meagre of conditions, before being given permanent housing. 'They said we would get flats in six months,' said one of the recent evicted. 'Until then we could live in the cardboard houses in Thotalanga. We refused. Then this happened.' The forced removal of these families caught the attention of the media for a brief moment. But in fact, their story is a long and ongoing one, intertwined with the story of Sri Lanka on the make in its post-war era.
The eviction of the residents of Mews Street is part of a larger campaign to 'clean up' the area for development and security purposes. A similar campaign took place in July 2008, when the residents of nearby Glennie Street, familiarly known as Kompannya Veediya, were likewise evicted from their homes, on the grounds that their proximity to the nearby Air Force and Army headquarters represented a threat to national security. Kompannya Veediya is what upper- and middle-class Colombo residents would identify as a slum or shanty. Yet apart from the presence of military establishments, it is also falling prey to other forms of gentrification – for instance, a former warehouse turned into an exclusive restaurant and art gallery.
The people of Kompannya Veediya claim longstanding tenure in the neighbourhood. But on 11 July 2008, the Ministry of Defence served eviction notices on the inhabitants of the 359 houses, asserting that they were on the ministry's land. The Urban Development Authority (UDA) planned to relocate the community to temporary accommodation, on the promise that they could take up residence within a year in a new housing complex being constructed in Dematogoda, a lower-middle-class locality in central Colombo.
The destruction of the Kompannya Veediya houses was also part of the municipal authorities' campaign to spruce up the city in preparation for the SAARC Summit, which Colombo would host in July-August 2008. The eviction was surrounded by political controversy, fuelled in part by the human dimension of working-class citizens attempting to preserve their homes against the Colombo Municipal Council's (CMC) bulldozers. A petition was filed with the Supreme Court on the residents' behalf by some members of the Parliamentary opposition, and the standoff was covered extensively by the media. However, the spectacle of outraged homeowners, visiting politicians, teargas and bulldozers was only the most recent and public chapter in a longstanding negotiation process between the Kompannya Veediya community and urban/national governance structures.