Rebellion or mass suicide only outcome if this continues’

This is an eyewitness report from someone who had personal exposure to the suffering of Tamils in the Manik Farm concentration camp.
With all the people from Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu and Mannar districts crammed into the camps in Vavuniya, space is a premium. Rather than being ‘internally displaced persons’ these people are in reality ‘internally displaced prisoners’.
The camps are large open prisons where suspicion is encouraged, all rights denied and human rights abuses occur in the open, with no indication that any attempts are being made to change the circumstances in which these people are constrained.
The Manik Farm complex is the second largest city on the island of Sri Lanka, after the capital Colombo. Locally the story is that more camps are to be built, and more people are still being transported into the camps from outside.
The estimated 280,000 inmates of Manik Farm camp – and there are no accurate figures of how many people are in each camp or who they are – are housed in six zones, three on either side of a central passage. The names of the people detained are not recorded, and thus there is no accountability for the people detained.
The zones are named after Tamil politicians of the past – Kadirgamar, Arunachalam, Ramanathan, etc. One zone remains unnamed as the name of a sixth Tamil politician deemed suitable enough could not be found.
Each zone is self-contained and all inmates are prevented from leaving their zone or interacting with relatives in another zone unless they have the permission of the Sri Lankan Ministry of Defence.
Inside the zones, 2-3 families are housed in each temporary dwelling. This is ten to fifteen individuals, many of them adults, crammed into a small tent. There is absolutely no privacy and solitude is only a dream.
Food and water
Visitors to the camps get simple meals of rice and dhal or rice and beetroot. The residents get even less, and at times are lucky if they get one meal a day. At other times, they get three meals, leading to a complete lack of certainty about what sustenance the people will have at any given time.
Certainly no effort is made to provide nutritious or balanced meals. Some people are attempting to grow their own plants outside their tents, but these disappear quickly and are not sufficient for their needs.
But if the food is restricted, the water is atrocious. There is never enough water for people to drink and many have been forced to drink from the bathing pools. The lack of sanitation however means that these are basically breading grounds for bacteria and this is one of the major causes of the rampant spread of diseases through the camps. Malnutrition, chicken pox, diarrhoea, malaria, respiratory infections and skin diseases are common, spreading rapidly through the tight swarm of people. Deaths are common.
Toilets consist of large open pits with planks across to squat on and removal of waste is nonexistent. Children have been known to fall into the toilet pits – the scene from the movie ‘Slum Dog Millionaire’ has new significance in these camps. Many of these children die, for there is no way out of these pits, unlike in the movie.
Suspicion and fear
The Tamils are suspicious of each other. Divides between Tamils from various regions, religion or castes are being encouraged so as to break down the sense of Tamil unity. People are distrustful of everyone they don’t know, as everyone is a potential whistle-blower, passing on true – or false – information in order to advance their cause, or because they don’t like an individual.
Anyone attempting to cross from one camp to another – for example to see relatives – is shot. One example was a mother and father who attempted to see their children who were being held in another zone. They were shot and the bodies allowed to lie where they lay, exposed to the children looking on from the neighbouring zone.
The dominant feeling in the camp is one of despair.
Rampant rape
Rape is common in the camps, and is carried out by the soldiers ‘guarding’ the camps. With toilets at the periphery, women who go to use the facilities are easily dragged away and raped.
Women and girls identified as having had a connection with the Liberation Tigers are held separately at Ponmedu (the men and boys are held at the Tamil Mahavidyalayam in Chettikulam, also separated from the rest of the population). Every night a bus arrives at Ponmedu and about ten women are taken out and returned in a ruffled state the next day.
This is done quite openly, and is common knowledge among those in the camps and those who have had access.
Lack of access
The International Red Cross has been asked to reduce their operations in Sri Lanka while non-governmental organisations are still not allowed in to camps.
only people allowed into the camps are local religious organisations and aid groups from what are considered ‘friendly countries’ – countries that militarily or economically supported the Sri Lankan government in its war against the Liberation Tigers. For example, visitors from India have been allowed inside the camps.
Religious groups are encouraged to visit the camps, but they are often ill equipped to deal with the practicalities of large scale displacement and the psychological impacts of this on the people.
The only local doctors working in the camps are from the Independent Medical Practitioners Association. Accommodation is provided in tents for clinics, but there is no privacy for individual patients. All patients have organic medical problems and mental illnesses have been reported, but no records of this are available.
There is no shortage of medicines, donated by agencies or drug firms, but often these include drugs not commonly used, which can do harm or cause death if used inappropriately. There is no pharmacy so patients are reliant on what drugs the local doctors can provide.
There are no facilities in the local hospital. An ill patient who needed surgery was delayed for six hours in the camp and then disappeared, with no news of his progress brought back to the people in the camp.
Locals feel the camps are likely to continue indefinitely with foreign financial help – they were certainly built with international aid. But they also warn that if the situation continues, the people are bound to either rebel or kill themselves.

news:tamilguardian.com/article.asp?articleid=2460

Three doctors accused of helping Tamil rebels released on bail

Colombo - Three of five doctors accused of spreading Tamil rebel propaganda about civilian casualties during the army's final offensive against the separatists in May were released Monday on bail in Sri Lanka, court officials said.
The doctors were captured after they fled rebel-held areas in north-eastern Sri Lanka a few days before the army defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). They were interrogated and charged with spreading false information.
The physicians treated civilians during the last few months of the conflict and provided details of the offensive and war casualties.
They were a main source of information for journalists and were also quoted in reports by international organizations, including the United Nations
and human rights groups, such as Amnesty International.
Soon after their capture, the medics said at a government-arranged press conference that they were forced to provide false information by the rebels. The doctors released on bail were identified as Kanapathipillai Shanmugaraja, Illancheliyan Vallavan and Thurairaja Varatharaja.
The security forces were questioning a large number of people, including government officials and civilians, about possible links with the LTTE, which had fought for 26 years for an independent homeland for Sri Lanka's Tamil ethnic minority.
According to UN figures, more than 7,500 civilians perished from January until May 18 when the conflict ended with the deaths of the top rebel leadership.

In Sri Lanka, Death Threats Over Speaking on EU's GSP Plus Tariff Treatment, Silence at UN

A Sri Lankan academic and human rights activist faces death threats for allegedly providing information about the situation in Sri Lanka which might force the European Union not to continue its tariff free treatment of Sri Lankan textiles under the so called GSP Plus program. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu of the Centre for Policy Alternatives received the death threat, reproduced below, last week. The UN Security Council, which despite the UK's claim to have had the votes to put Sri Lanka on the agenda didn't, has not spoken on the death threat, nor on the worsening conditions in the internment camps for Tamils which the UN is funding.

news:www.innercitypress.com/untrip6may8srilanka082309.html

Eelam and the new 'super power' Sri Lanka

In their petty geopolitical and corporate interests, India and the West have created a Frankenstein monster of a state in Sri Lanka that disgraces the whole world. What fears them now is this monster in its frenzies making their labours lost in the island. This is what impels them to tell the victims to reconcile, not to anger the monster and not to say genocide even when it takes place for decades. A general excuse they come out with is that the present world has no appetite for new nation states. Colombo makes the best use of this weakness. No justifiable norm of polity could be seen in why India and the West should labour so hard to uphold a united Sri Lanka and to appease it beyond all limits, writes TamilNet political commentator in Colombo.

A prominent diplomat of a power that invented and indiscriminately pursued the paradigm ‘war on terror’ in the entire world, after around two thousand of its people got killed in a single attack, is privately advising some members of the Tamil diaspora to avoid highly charged terms like ‘genocide’ and ‘Nazi-style conditions' in Sri Lanka to advocate constructively with the Sri Lanka government and the UN. “People in the government and the UN will assume there is no point in engaging you as your mind is already made up,” he says.

Sri Lanka’s foreign secretary and permanent representative to UN, Palitha Kohona explicitly explained the point saying “there isn’t one instance where a winner of a war has been tried before a Tribunal. They have always been set up for losers.”
A few days ago, an article appeared in Tamil in a literary journal of Tamil Nadu substantiated at length, Kohona’s stand. What is conspicuous about the article, apart from the fact that it made abetters of Colombo ‘vindicated’, is its vantage and thrust aimed at capturing the political course of the diaspora. Inferences in the article indicate its origins in the diaspora and not in Vanni.
When there was a long standing demand that the Tamil Nadu state assembly should inspire the world by recognising the national aspirations of Eezham Tamils, and when there should have been no ‘obstacles’ to it as the LTTE excuse was crushed, Karunanidhi government not only chose to openly nullify Eezham Tamil nation, but has gone to the extent of even erasing the word ‘Eezham’ in public places.

Mr. Karunanidhi reportedly told someone who met him that erasing the word Eezham had been the work of ‘central’ agencies. But people believe that Centre has now assigned the task of political subjugation of the question of Eezham Tamils to Karunanidhi. Some obsolete laws of the state have been re-asserted now, aiming against voices supporting the national cause of Eezham Tamils in Tamil Nadu.

Mahinda Rajapaksa set the orchestration sometime back by a draft legislation banning ethnic-orientated political parties in the island and by compelling to EPDP to abandon its identity in the municipal elections in Jaffna.
What is clearly and repeatedly demonstrated by all the Establishments is that the war they commonly waged for varying reasons was not against the LTTE, but against the national aspirations of Eezham Tamils in the island. If not so, their responses should have been different now.
In a negative way they all have recognised the validity of Eezham Tamil nationalism and the global significance of the question. War on terror was a camouflage as there was no moral justification to reject a long-due liberation.
All their intense and aggressive current manoeuvres only show that the war has not been 'won'.

But there is no camouflage for the aggressors and abetters now. So the war of the guilty ones now, shielding behind states and the tag of ‘winners,’ is to use all possible ways - coaxing, lure, money, divide, pressure, coercion and subjugation, to make Tamils on their own give up national aspirations and accept all blame onto themselves.
Colombo is never ashamed of its ‘naked’ chauvinism and will not be at rest until all traces of Tamil identity are erased from the island. Already it has started saying political solution is unnecessary as it is successful in 'emptying' Tamil homeland. In its incurable paranoia this self-proclaimed ‘super power’ is not going to stop with the island. Tamil Nadu and India are the immediate ones going to reap the consequences for the policies followed by them.

Drunk with diplomatic and military victories, Palitha Kohona has formally declared war on Eezham Tamil diaspora, last week. This is going to be waged by diplomatic missions being militarized now. Besides all kinds of acts of subversion by these missions, no diaspora member may able to visit kith and kin in the prisons and open prisons in the island without first getting screened by these missions and for that purpose sacrificing freedom of expression or playing stooges.
In their petty geopolitical and corporate interests, India and the West have created a Frankenstein monster of a state in Sri Lanka that disgraces the whole world. China and Pakistan have only made use of the situation.
What fears them now is this monster in its frenzies making their labours lost in the island. This is what impels them to tell the victims to reconcile, not to anger the monster and not to say genocide even when it takes place for decades. A general excuse they come out with is that the present world has no appetite for new nation states. Had it been some other context the song would have been different.
Colombo makes the best use of this weakness.
No justifiable norm of polity could be seen in why India and the West should labour so hard to uphold a united Sri Lanka and to appease it beyond all limits.

What so ever, how the diaspora is going to comprehend the situation and is going to respond are of paramount importance.
In any such situation there will be always a section of collaborators, citing the immediate plight of people or as Kohona has said, citing “job opportunities, children going to school” etc. Even though there is no history that collaboration with aggression ever produced positive results, let there be no qualms if this section could make anything durable. It is for them to prove to the people.
But the vast majority, who wants to be true to their aspirations, have a historic duty in organising themselves politically without playing in the hands of calculated detractors of Eezham Tamil nationalism and in demonstrating their will power for what they want.
International equations are not going to be the same always, but Tamils need the voice strong to negotiate when changes take place. Strength of any form is what always recognised.
What to do and how to do it democratically have been discussed in many articles appeared in TamilNet, even though being democratic in struggle is not going to keep Tamils away from the wrath of the Sri Lankan state.

The diaspora, which was able to draw all the people to streets for demonstrations, can always do it. It will not fit enough to be a nation if it doesn’t achieve it. If the old generation is disillusioned and if they can’t conceive ways to stand upright, let them not deviate the cause, but concentrate on other activities of developing the nation and leave the matter to the younger generation.
It is detractor’s argument that political organisation in the diaspora for Tamil independence in the island would affect the rhetoric ‘resettlement, rehabilitation and reconstruction.’ On the contrary, it is the political challenge that can expedite any meaningful remedy to the present plight of people. Moreover, collaboration is not going to have any say on the Three Rs as they are going to be determined only by the designs and interests of the aggressors and multi national corporations.
There is no need to tell genuine rehabilitation begins from psychological rehabilitation. After all what has happened, it can come to Eezham Tamils only when their national aspirations are recognised and fulfilled.

Government plans to hold Vanni IDPs in camps for longer period

Northern Provincial Council (NPC) has instructed government authorities to set up offices in Vavuniyaa and its surrounding area to carry out the administration of Ki’linochchi and Mullaiththeevu districts in Vanni which had ceased to function due to the war on Vanni, sources in Vavuniyaa said. Though it is said that the above decision has been taken due to Sri Lanka Army (SLA) refusal to resettle Vanni Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in their own villages in the near future, the real intention of the government is to hold the Vanni IDPs in the detention camps permanently, the sources added.

Government has directed high officials of the NPC to take action to set up temporary buildings along with the government offices in Vavuniyaa to house the government administrative structures of Ki’linochchi and Mullaiththeevu districts.

Besides, all government officials who had been serving in Ki’linochchi and Mullaiththeevu districts and given temporary permission to serve in Jaffna district and other areas have been instructed to immediately return to Vavuniyaa to assume duties.
The temporary permission granted to the above government officials has been cancelled with immediate effort, the sources said.
Though some high government officials had visited Ki’linochchi and Mullaiththeevu districts with the intention of reactivating the administrative structures their efforts had been blocked by SLA.
As SLA refuses to allow Vanni IDPs to be resettled in their villages, government is making plans to hold the IDPs in the detention camps permanently by relocating the entire government administrative structures to Vavuniyaa, the sources said.

Plan to resettle IDPs in the midst of Army and Sinhala settlements

A source close to the President said that the release of IDPs has been postponed indefinitely with the government focusing on a plan to resettle them along with the new Sinhala and military settlements that are to be set up in the north.

The source further noted that the plan is to resettle people in areas in Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu, below Mannar and above Vavuniya , where there are currently no people. The plan is said to remove all the old Tamil villages that existed in the respective areas. Although thousands of displaced persons currently living in camps even after completing the security checks, they cannot be released due to the government�s new plan.
According to the Defence Ministry and the Defence Secretary, 10,000 of the 300,000 people living in the displaced camps have been identified to have links with the LTTE. They are currently living in separate camps located within the main IDP camp in Vavuniya.
While former child soldiers of the LTTE are being rehabilitated at the Ambepussa camp, several other LTTE members are held at the Boossa camp.
Half of the government stipulated period of 180 days to resettle the displaced persons has lapsed. The government in order to receive aid from India and other countries said it would resettle the displaced within 180 days.
It is reported that elements opposed to the devolution of power within the government had proposed the above mentioned plan while the others who are supportive of power devolution have objected to it.
Meanwhile, Disaster Management and Human Rights Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe told parliament on the 19th that the displaced would be resettled by December 31st