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# She Wanted to Die in Her Own House. She Died at 83, Still Kept Out of It by the Army.
- URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/featured/she-wanted-to-die-in-her-own-house-she-died-at-83-still-kept-out-of-it-by-the-army/
- Published: 2026-11-08T17:32:39.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-08T17:32:39.000Z
- Author: Our Reporter
- Tags: November 2026

**JAFFNA, November 8, 2026**

The funeral procession of Thambithurai Ilayakutty stopped on Sunday at Palaly Junction, where displaced landowners were protesting for the 21st consecutive week to demand that the military return their land. Ilayakutty, 83, had protested there with them. The protesters paid their respects to her body at the site.

She died of old age on Saturday, November 7\. For years she had told those close to her that she wanted to die in her own house in Palaly and have her funeral rites performed there. The house is on land the Sri Lankan Army has held since 1990\. Her rites were held in the house where her family has been living temporarily.

Ilayakutty was about 47 when Palaly's residents were forced from their homes in June 1990, during the war between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the separatist militant organisation that fought for an independent Tamil state. She was about 65 when the army defeated the LTTE in May 2009\. She lived another 17 years and was never allowed to return. She spent 36 of her 83 years away from her land.

Palaly, on the northern edge of the Jaffna peninsula, is home to the peninsula's main military complex and to Jaffna International Airport. In the early 1990s the military took over close to 10,000 acres in the surrounding Valikamam North division and declared it a High Security Zone. Civilians were shut out of their houses, farmland, schools, and temples inside it.

Sunday was Deepavali. The protesters carried placards calling it a "Black Deepavali." They said they could celebrate the festival happily only in their own homes, after being resettled on their own land. "We have lost our land and lost our houses," they said. "We cannot celebrate Deepavali with joy."

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/11/she-wanted-to-die-in-her-own-h-6007f2-1-1.jpg)

Displaced landowners at Palaly Junction on November 8, 2026, the 21st week of their protest for the return of land held by the military. Their banner calls the day a “Black Deepavali” and reads: “The day we resettle on our own land is our Deepavali.”

Residents say the army has used land in the area since the war ended for its own purposes, including farming and running commercial outlets.

"Why does the military need our land, 17 years after it finished the LTTE?" asked Kanapathy, one of the protesters.

Many of the displaced see the continued occupation as peacetime militarisation and a breach of the law.

Successive governments have said some of the land is still needed for security. In June 2016, the then Defence Secretary, Karunasena Hettiarachchi, said the government could not release all the land held by the security forces in the North and East, citing security reasons, and that owners whose land could not be returned would be compensated under a scheme run by the Ministry of Resettlement.

In April 2018 the army released 683 acres of the Palaly High Security Zone in a single day. It said the release had not required the removal or shifting of any security formation in the area. The present government says a phased programme is under way to return privately owned land in Valikamam North.

The army originally held the High Security Zones under emergency regulations, which lapsed on August 30, 2011\. The government replaced them with new regulations under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which reports at the time said covered the continuation of the zones. Civil society groups argued then that restrictions on land declared a High Security Zone under the lapsed regulations had no continuing legal basis.

In April 2013, the government moved to acquire the land outright under the Land Acquisition Act of 1950\. Notices under Section 2 of the Act listed 6,381 acres and 38.97 perches for a "Defence Battalion Headquarters Jaffna" and for regularising the handover of the area the High Security Zone stood on. The government also published an order under proviso (a) to Section 38 of the Act, which allows the state to take immediate possession of land "on the ground of any urgency." The army had by then held much of that land for more than 20 years.

Within weeks, 2,176 landowners filed writ applications in the Court of Appeal, 1,474 in one case and 702 in another. Others filed fundamental rights petitions in the Supreme Court alleging that the army's occupation of the land was unlawful.

The end of the war did not by itself oblige the state to return the land. Sri Lanka's Constitution does not recognise the right to own land as a fundamental right, and the Land Acquisition Act allows the state to acquire private land for a public purpose in peacetime as well as in war.

The courts have limited that power. They have held that a Section 38 urgency order can be made only where there is real urgency, and that such orders are open to judicial review. The Supreme Court has ruled that an acquisition driven by a collateral purpose falls outside the meaning of "public purpose," and that an acquisition can be challenged when the land is not used for the purpose it was taken for.

The 2013 notices named a battalion headquarters as the purpose. Residents describe army farms and shops on the land the military holds. Whether those activities sit on the parcels listed in the notices has not been publicly established.

Since 2018, the government has handed over 108 acres in Valikamam North to 197 families, in February 2023\. Deputy Minister of Defence Aruna Jayasekara has told Parliament that about 672 acres held by the military across the North and East were released, of which 86.24 acres was private land.

In July, ITAK MP Shanakiyan Rasamanickam said occupied land in Palaly affected about 300 families. He said voters in a Palaly ward had backed National People's Power candidates at the recent local government election largely because the government had promised to release civilian land.

From the junction, Ilayakutty's funeral procession went on to the Palaly Hindu cemetery. The house she had wanted to die in remains on land held by the army.