Sri Lanka refugees plead for freedom

Rapidly built up for the Tamil refugee influx last spring, Menik Farm has pylons, banks, even cash machines – and thousands upon thousands of tents in the cleared arid lands west of Vavuniya in northern Sri Lanka.

Since my earlier visit in April, the camp has swollen to cover some 10 zones, the number of camp-dwellers has ballooned to a quarter of a million, while over 20,000 have been resettled or more informally released, the government says.

This was the BBC’s first chance to view all this infrastructure close-up.

Distressing conversations

A government intensely sensitive to outside criticism or suggestions, and wary of any outsider’s intentions in wanting to visit the camps, was now giving the BBC admittance, alongside the UK’s Development Minister, Mike Foster. That in itself seemed like notable progress.

And yet, just five minutes of conversation with the camp-dwellers was deeply distressing.

Starting by talking to us through our car-window, women, one after the other, piled on tales of hopelessness in the Tamil language.

Click here for full artice

This article appeared in Sri Lankan media. Please note we cannot verify the independence of the information in this report.

Lanka News Web – Tamils make history at the UK Labour Party Conference

UK to cut Sri Lanka camp funding

The UK says it will soon withdraw all but emergency funding for the camps where about 250,000 displaced Tamils are confined in northern Sri Lanka.

The announcement came after the UK Development Minister Mike Foster visited the biggest camp at Menik Farm.

He said 70% of people should be able to leave and stay with host families.

Click here to view full article

Britain tells Sri Lanka to free Tamil prisoners before disease kills them

Britain urged Sri Lanka yesterday to free 250,000 Tamils detained in camps since the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in May, warning that an outbreak of disease triggered by imminent monsoon rains could claim dozens of lives.

Mike Foster, the Minister for International Development who is visiting Sri Lanka, also said that Britain would no longer provide any funding for the controversial barbed wire enclosures once the monsoon was over in two months.

He added that many other donor countries were taking a similar position to put pressure on the Government to release the 250,000 Tamils who were detained after fleeing the frontline in the last stages of the 26-year-civil war.

Click here to read full article

Vatican Radio – Calls for Sri Lankan Government to release Tamil refugees

Religious leaders in Sri Lanka committed to helping Tamil refugees have demanded that President Mahinda Rajapaksa release the over 200 thousand internally displaced people from refugee camps where they continue to suffer hardship and isolation.

Bishop Thomas Savandaryanagam of the Jaffna Diocese says that the government’s efforts are slow, but priests and sisters are able to offer some hope to refugees living in the camps suffering from a isolation and idleness.

‘Winds destroy shelters for S.Lanka war-displaced’

More than 2,000 temporary shelters for civilians displaced in Sri Lanka’s recently-ended ethnic war were destroyed by gale force winds, a press report said Sunday.

The damaged shelters were part of camps where 250,000 people remain detained after government troops defeated the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels in May, the Sunday Times here said.

The storm damage increased concern for the welfare of the Tamil civilians who have endured primitive conditions in the state-run camps, the newspaper said.

Click here to read full article

In Sri Lanka, local media are reporting that more than 2,000 temporary shelters for civilians displaced in Sri Lanka’s ethnic war have been destroyed by gale force winds.

Sri Lankan army spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara says however, there’s no evidence of widespread destruction to temporary shelters, he says the reports emerged as a result of exaggerations and lies.

The reports are difficult to verify, because reporters have been barred from entering the camps and the army has granted only limited access to aid organisations. An estimated 250-thousand people have been living in government-run camps and not allowed to leave, since Sri Lanka’s army defeated the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels in May.

A quarter of million displaced Tamils are in dire humanitarian need of being allowed out of internment camps which face flash floods in Sri Lanka’s monsoons, a British minister said after visiting refugees.

Mike Foster, a British international development minister, said he had been allowed unfettered access to the Manik Farm camp in the country’s northern Vavuniya district, which Tamil war refugees cannot freely leave.

“There’s a pressing humanitarian need for the civilians to be allowed to leave the camps,” said Foster. “Although conditions have improved the tents are basically disintegrating. With the monsoons we will have sewage floating around – water-borne diseases will be rife.

“We will not be prepared to fund closed camps after the monsoons.”

Click here to read full article

World Agenda: West finally gets tough over Sri Lankan camps

Western governments have finally discovered what remains of their backbone over Sri Lanka.

Britain told the Sri Lankan Government today that it would no longer fund routine services inside the camps where more than a quarter of a million ethnic Tamils have been detained since the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in May.

Mike Foster, the Minister for International Development, who is visiting Sri Lanka, said that many other donor nations were taking a similar stand to put pressure on the Government to release the inmates before the imminent monsoon rains, which could cause a massive outbreak of disease in the overcrowded conditions.

Click here to read more

GMB joins call for openness in Sri Lanka

GMB union leader Paul Kenny has urged the government to help the Tamil people as the humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka continues to grow.

Moving a motion in support of the National Union of Journalists’ call for reporters to be allowed to enter Sri Lanka, Mr Kenny said that following the end of the war it was now time “to bring the peace.”

“Men, women and children have been placed in camps and nobody has seen them,” he said.

“The Sri Lankan government has turned away foreign journalists and the camps are tightly guarded.

“They call the camps villages but history has a different name.”

Mr Kenny added: “Open your doors, let the journalists in – what have you got to hide?

“Let these people free. Let the message go out from Labour that you can trust us to help the Tamil people.”

Conference welcomed the recent EU decision to reconsider Sri Lanka’s favoured trading status but agreed the status should now be withdrawn until Sri Lanka’s government allows aid charities and journalists in.

Reuters: Sri Lanka unlikely to lose EU trade scheme yet-diplomats

The European Union is likely to let Sri Lanka keep a trade concession crucial to its apparel industry, while recommending it be revoked if the country does not improve its human rights record, diplomats said on Tuesday. The European Commission by mid-October is due to decide whether to recommend the Indian Ocean island nation retain the Generalised System of Preferences Plus (GSP Plus) trade concession, which would then be voted upon by the EU Council.

“It is likely to be extended with a negative recommendation,” a diplomat briefed on the EU’s internal discussions told Reuters on condition of anonymity. “There would then be some targets for Sri Lanka to meet.”

GSP Plus gives Sri Lanka the right to export more than 7,200 products duty-free to the EU, which last year accounted for 36 percent of Sri Lanka’s $8.1 billion in total exports.

Lat year, Sri Lanka’s garment and textile industry earned $3.5 billion in total, 43 percent of which came from EU markets.

The EU decision will be the culmination of a year-long rights probe launched in October, when the government was fighting to crush the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and win a 25-year war. Sri Lanka declared total victory in mid-May.

The government refused to cooperate with the probe or let the EU-contracted investigators enter the country, and said doing so was tantamount to betraying its sovereignty.

Since July 2008, the EU has warned Sri Lanka may not meet the human rights standards required to retain GSP Plus, mainly because of allegations security forces either carried out or failed to crack down on abductions and killings during the war.

Sri Lanka has been wary of criticism from Western nations, particularly those with large Tamil populations that supported the LTTE, and flatly rejected any interference or criticism as it battled to finish off the Tigers over the past year.

Read full article here

Times Online: EU sanctions on Sri Lanka to hit ‘cheap’ clothing over human rights abuses

They were billed as “garments without guilt” — cheap, good-quality lingerie, casual clothes and sportswear made in Sri Lanka and sold in stores such as Next, Tesco and Marks & Spencer.

For the past four years, such clothes worth billions of pounds have been imported, tax-free, to the European Union under a trade scheme intended to help Sri Lanka’s recovery from the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.

Within months, however, clothes from the country could disappear from British shops.

Although conditions in Sri Lanka’s factories are beyond reproach, the EU looks set to punish the Government’s alleged human rights abuses in the recent civil war by withdrawing the trade benefits.

Read full article here

Sri Lankan war: the disappeared

Parliament Square, London, 30-31 May 2009: UK-based relatives of war victims with pictures of their dead and missing family members. Photographs by Robin Hammond

Click here to view all pictures.

Channel 4 : Tamil medic describes camp conditions

Watch video here.

Read article from source here.

British medic Damilvany Gnanakumar, detained for four months in one of Sri Lanka’s Tamil internment camps, describes to Jonathan Miller the bleakness of the conditions she found there.

A senior UN official has arrived in Sri Lanka to put pressure on the government over the detention of tens of thousands of Tamil refugees in camps following the 25-year civil war.

The Sri Lankan government says it need to weed out Tamil Tiger fighters at the camps before most of the inmates can be released.

Our foreign affairs correspondent Jonathan Miller has talked to a British Tamil who knows how bleak conditions are in the camps, after being detained in one of them for four months.

“Dead bodies everywhere,” recalls Damilvany Gnanakumar. “Wherever you turn round, it’s dead bodies.”

She estimates that 20,000 civilians may have died in the final five-day onslaught by Sri Lankan government forces – a figure also cited by some relief agencies, but one dismissed as unsubstantiated by Sri Lanka.

And she says many people inside the camps are dismayed that the world has done so little to help. “After all this happened, they lost their trust… They don’t feel safe to speak out.

“They don’t trust the international (community) now because they think OK, all this happened – nothing happened, the international (community) didn’t come and help us.”

Guardian Series : Chingford medic Damilvany Gnanakumar is released from Sri Lanka back to UK

Local Guardian - Hounslow Tamils ‘terrified to speak out’
A Hounslow Tamil is urging the Government to stop leaving his fellow islanders in limbo, after reports of Tamils being deported despite officials accusing Sri Lankan authorities of human rights violations.

Former asylum seeker Rajsh Kumar, now a legal adviser at Hounslow Tamil Community Centre (TCC), said many Hounslow Tamils were still waiting for court dates to claim asylum, while others were terrified they would be deported if they could not prove their life would be in danger if they returned.

He said: “These people are terrified to speak out.

“They are often too scared to even speak to me.

“A Tamil came to see me and he has been sleeping rough as he can not work because of his immigration status. He is drinking and has many social problems – all because he has been waiting for 10 years to find out about his status.

“Many others are scared they will have to return. If they are sent back and arrested for so-called crimes they will just disappear because there is no legal system in Sri Lanka now.

“You must remember there has been 40 years of fighting, they have been living with this for that long.

“How can the Government say on one hand these people can not prove persecution while being critical of the situation in Sri Lanka? People are left in limbo, not knowing if they have to go back or when.

“If the Government gave people a timeline to say you will go back in 2010 or 2015, there would not be such social problems.”

In July, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) called on all governments not to return asylum seekers from the north, as normality had yet to return, despite the end of the war between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan government.

Thavarani Nagulendran, of TCC, claimed the UK authorities deported at least 12 Sri Lankans, most of them Tamils, in July and said she knew of 50 Tamils facing deportation.

The UK has been highly critical of the human rights situation in Sri Lanka as security forces intensified fighting against the rebels before declaring victory in May.

A Home Office spokesman said it would not comment on individual asylum applications and each application was assessed on its individual merits.

He added: “At the moment we are assisting with voluntary returns but we have not enforced the return of any failed asylum seekers.”

• What do you think? Let us know by email (gholt@london.newsquest.co.uk), phone the newsdesk on 020 8744 4271 or leave a comment below.

Britain denies visas for Arjuna Ranatunga and Palitha Kohona

Opinion piece on jpost.com
Britain’s breathtaking double standard
The decision made this week by the British Foreign Office to cancel export licenses for Israeli warship parts is not the first time Her Majesty’s Government has embargoed arms to Israel…But the UK’s concern for how its military equipment will be put to use by the IDF rings rather hollow when considering the list of other countries to whom the UK has recently supplied arms; countries which have not fallen foul of Westminster’s new “ethical” standards for weapons exports.

In 2008, while the civil war in Sri Lanka was raging, Britain sold $22 million worth of armored vehicles, machine gun parts and semi-automatic pistols to the government in Colombo. During the course of the Sri Lankan army’s assault on the last Tamil Tiger strongholds from January to May this year, approximately 20,000 civilians were killed.

The Foreign Office said of the cancelled Israeli contracts “We do not grant export licenses where there is a clear risk that arms will be used for external aggression or internal repression.” The Sri Lankan army appears to have killed more than 40 times the number of civilians in its campaign against the Tamil Tigers than were killed in the IDF’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza earlier this year, but we have yet to hear of any restrictions on British arms exports to Sri Lanka…
Read full article here.