[2] This resulted in a significant demographic shift, with the resettled farmers contributing to an increase in the Sinhalese population in the northeast dry zone, thus promoting Sinhala-Buddhist hegemony in the area.
[8] Following the end of war in 2009, Sinhalese officials and settlers in Weli Oya have expressed their desire to take more land further north in order to “make the Sinhala man the most present in all parts of the country”.
[18][24] In the 1980s, funded by aid received from the European Community, a colonisation scheme was started at Periya Vilankulam (Mahadiulwewa) tank, 30 km north-west of Trincomalee town.
[27] This anger boiled over into violence when the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam attacked the Kent and Dollar Farm settlement at Weli Oya, killing 62.
[27] In 1985, a Sri Lankan government appointed study group recommended using Sinhala colonisation to break the link between the Tamil majority regions of the north and east.
[29] Pro-LTTE news site TamilNet reported that when the Indian Peace Keeping Forces were withdrawn in 1990, Tamils homes in the suburbs of Trincomalee were occupied by Sinhalese settlers.
Tens of thousands of landless Sinhala peasants were reported to have been brought in by the advancing government forces and made to occupy local villages and lands, denying resettlement to its original inhabitants who had earlier fled to the jungles due to the "murder" of Tamil civilians at the hands of the Army.
Tamils in Barathypuram were evicted and a Muslim settlement is being created in the area due to the large economic opportunities provided by an apparels factory being built there.
The Mahaweli Authority and the military resumed activities to bring in landless Sinhalese settlers from the southern parts of the country to settle in and around Weli Oya.
[2] Pro-LTTE news site TamilNet reported that Tamils were being ethnically cleansed in the Jaffna peninsula and Mullativu districts, and that this was being supplemented with the construction of Buddhist stupas and Sinhalisation of names of streets and places.
Tamil locals also complained of the state waging an accelerated campaign of Sinhala Buddhist colonisation by destroying historic Hindu shrines in the East.
[39] Another incident of state colonization before the Final Eelam War was reported by Muslim residents of the Pulmoddai village who claimed that several acres of their traditional land had been annexed by the Government for settlements from South on the pretext of industrial development.