| Fears for Tamil refugees in Sri Lanka fighting - The situation around Vakarai is dreadful," said UN |
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 By Peter Foster in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka - UK Telegraph Vijaya and her injured son Vidushan Vijaya, 19, was just setting up her cooking pots outside her house in the town of Vakarai on Sri Lanka's east coast when a shell landed in the garden next door, killing three of her neighbour's children and injuring her own son, Vidushan. They were the latest victims of more than three weeks of intense artillery exchanges between Sri Lanka's armed forces and separatist Tamil Tiger guerrillas. The United Nations and international aid agencies have expressed "deep concern" about the growing refugee crisis precipitated by fighting which has seen more than 20,000 flee the conflict and 25,000 trapped under almost constant shellfire. Vijaya was one of the lucky ones, being evacuated with her son to Batticaloa's teaching hospital last week along with 27 seriously wounded. However the remainder of the refugees remained trapped. "The situation around Vakarai is dreadful," said Orla Clinton, the UN spokesman in Colombo. "We currently don't have the access to these areas which we need to protect the refugees, otherwise we will certainly see more deaths." With reporters and aid workers barred from the conflict zone, first-hand accounts from refugees like Vijaya are the only source of information about conditions. "There is no food in the shops and the shells have been coming down every day. We don't know where they will land so we are just running here and there, trying to find a bunker to take shelter," she said. "We went to the Vakarai hospital but they don't have enough medicines there. Then the Red Cross brought us to Batticaloa. My husband is still in Vakarai, but I don't know if he is safe." Doctors at Batticaloa hospital said that they were unsure whether Vidushan would get full use of his leg. His mother keeps the piece of shrapnel — a twist of metal two inches long — which was removed from his thigh wrapped in gauze. advertisement An international aid worker who entered Vakarai this week to evacuate wounded said that the refugees were stuck on a five-mile stretch of coast, shuttling between five main refugees camps in an attempt to dodge the shelling. Iqbal Athas, a Janes Defence Week correspondent and Sri Lanka's foremost independent military analyst, said the civilians were pawns in a strategic game in which the Sri Lankan army was seeking a decisive victory in the east. "The LTTE [Tamil Tigers] want to keep the civilians around Vakarai to protect them from a full-on assault by the Sri Lankan army. However the military appear to be getting bogged down in the fight," he said. International aid workers privately accuse the Sri Lankan army of trying to "starve" people out of Vakarai by halting aid convoys. The government accuses the Tamil Tiger rebels of using the people as "human shields", making it almost impossible for the army to avoid civilian casualties. More than 65,000 people have died in the civil war since 1983 in which the minority Tamil population is fighting the majority Sinhalese for an independent homeland in the north and east.
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