Deputy Minister of Defence Major General (Retd) Aruna Jayasekara conducted a field inspection across the Jaffna Peninsula on Tuesday, reviewing national security, anti-drug enforcement, illegal fishing and the progress of returning state-held land to its original owners, Newswire reported.
Jayasekara was accompanied by Minister of Fisheries, Aquatic and Ocean Resources Ramalingam Chandrasekar, the Jaffna District Secretary and other government officials. During the tour, the deputy minister received briefings on ongoing efforts to dismantle drug-trafficking networks operating in the peninsula and on enforcement against illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, which has been a long-running friction point with Indian trawler fleets crossing the maritime boundary.
A separate strand of the inspection focused on civilian land issues, with discussions held on the pace of releasing state-held lands back to original owners to support community resettlement. The Commander of the Army, the Commander of Security Forces Headquarters - Jaffna, regional Divisional Secretaries and other government officials joined the inspection party.
The visit is the highest-profile defence outreach to the Northern Province in recent weeks, layering security, fisheries and post-war land restoration into a single ministerial-level field review. It comes after the Navy’s first-quarter crackdown on illegal fishing logged 41 arrests, and as Sri Lanka and India continue to wrangle over cross-border fishermen detentions and the Tamil Nadu government’s pressure for the release of arrested boats and crew. The land-release element threads back into the slow, district-by-district process of returning military-held parcels in the Northern Province to families displaced during the war.
