| Sri Lanka continues to hoodwink the international community - Says AFTA |
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The Australasian Federation of Tamil Associations (AFTA), the umbrella body of the peak Tamil Associations in Australia and New Zealand would like to inform the international community including the Australian and New Zealand Governments and the international media some facts about the plight of the Internally Displaced People (IDP) who are interned in camps in the Northern town of Vavuniya.
Sri Lanka started announcing recently that several thousands of IDPs are being released from the Manik Farm camp and sent to Jaffna peninsula and Eastern province for resettlement. However, AFTA reliably learns that the inmates of the IDP camps in Vavuniya are being moved from barbed-wire ringed camps in Vavuniya to similar overcrowded enclosures without adequate facilities run by the military in other districts. “There is no resettlement. This is like being sent from one prison to another prison," Mavai Senathiraja, a parliamentarian representing the people in the Jaffna District from the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) has told. Mr. Senathiraja has told the Associated Press that 6,000 of those promised to have been released last week by the government were from his constituency in northern Jaffna, but only 580 arrived in the area and all the others were immediately sent to another camp, where they continue to be detained. Despite the government’s removal of people from Vavuniya, ostensibly in response to international pressure to resettle IDPs and their concerns over the imminent monsoon, Sri Lanka instead of resettling them, have been relocating them to military run camps which too are erected in low lying terrain, surrounded by earthen bunds built during the war by the military for their defences, thus facing the risk of heavy flooding. NGO workers say that the Government officials are actively identifying persons from Jaffna district among the IDPs detained in Vavuniya camps to be relocated to military run camps in the Jaffna peninsula which is already known to be an ‘open prison’ – under army and para-military occupation. Sri Lanka also recently announced that relatives of the detained IDPs who can provide accommodation to them could fill in an application form to get their relatives released after a security check. However after receiving 2000 such applications, Sri Lanka has suddenly stopped issuing these forms last Friday without giving any reasons. This led to a mass protest in front of the Government Agent’s office in Vavuniya by the relatives of the IDPs, without any success. Realising the seriousness of the IDP situation in the internment camps as monsoon season approaches, UN Secretary General dispatched his political chief Lynn Pascoe to Sri Lanka last Wednesday. He visited these camps on Thursday and met the President on Friday before leaving the island. On Friday Lynn Pascoe said the government had not lived up to its pledges on resettlement given to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in May. "We have not seen the progress we expected from that agreement," he said of a deal between Colombo and Ban in May, just after the government declared the decades-long war was over. "Clearly, the government is making a lot of effort, but we have some strong concerns -- particularly the 'closed' nature of the camps," Pascoe was quoted by AFP as saying after touring camps where Tamil civilians are held in what international human rights groups say are prison-like conditions. "We picked up great frustrations. I was told by many that they just wanted to go home. I urged the government to allow people who were screened to be allowed to leave" Pascoe has added. AFTA appeals to the Australian and New Zealand governments not to be carried away by Sri Lanka’s deliberately misleading announcements about the release of detained IDPs but to verify the truth from the TNA parliamentarians who represent their interests. AFTA urges the free media to let the Australian and New Zealand public know the real situation of the detained IDPs in these camps. Media Enquiries: Sydney: Dr. Victor Rajakulendran 0402 484 209 Melbourne: Mr. Siva Sivakumar 0404 894 591 Canberra: Dr. Raga Ragavan 0402 387 920 Auckland: Dr. Siva Vasanthan 021 023 51 007 Wellington: Mr. Mani Maniparathy 027 448 0340 |
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