Search goes on for Aussies in Sri Lanka

AAP June 17, 2009, 6:30 pm




Australia is continuing the search for three NSW residents thought to be in refugee camps in northern Sri Lanka, where Tamils are being kept following the end of the civil war.



Human rights groups have labelled the camps a disgrace, urging Sri Lanka to free the 300,000 displaced people being held there.



Foreign Minister Stephen Smith put Sri Lanka on notice that it would be judged according to how it dealt with those in the camps.



"We think the Sri Lankan government and the Sri Lankan authorities will now be judged on two things - how they manage and deal with the vast number of people in the displaced camps," he told reporters.



"And ... how they move to a reform program that enables all of the Sri Lankan community to feel that they have a share in a democracy in Sri Lanka."



About 300,000 people are being held in the government-run camps following Colombo's defeat of the Tamil Tigers' long-running rebel campaign.



The government is keeping people in the camps until they determine whether they are members of the Tamil Tigers.



The three Australians - two women aged 26 and 29, and a 62-year-old man - believed to be in the camps are all from NSW.



Mr Smith said there was nothing to suggest they weren't safe.



"We currently have officials in the north of Sri Lanka to seek to locate the whereabouts of three Australian citizens who we believe are in one of the displaced persons camps," he said.



"We don't have any information that would cause us to believe that the three aren't safe.



"It's just we haven't been able to locate them, either through the UNHCR ... who are working in the displaced camps, nor have we been able to locate them through Sri Lankan authorities, but we are working very hard to do that."



The Tamil community in Australia is continuing to pressure Canberra to speak out about human rights in Sri Lanka.



It held a forum at Parliament House on Wednesday where community leaders spoke of the plight of the Tamils.



John Dowd, president of the Australian section of the International Commission of Jurists, told AAP the federal government needed to do much more to draw attention to the problems in Sri Lanka.



"They should be talking out volubly so that the rest of the world knows that Australia is concerned," he said.



"Its approach has been far too muted. The Australian government has conveniently not made as much of a fuss as it ought."



Paediatrician John Whitehall, an associate professor of public health at James Cook University, said it was a euphemism to call those in the camps displaced people.



"They are inmates of concentration camps and history has few precedents for incarcerating all the people after a civil war indefinitely and isolating them the way that they have," Dr Whitehall said