India denies visa to Dr Ellyn Shander, US rights activist

The Indian mission in New York cancelled the visa of Dr Ellyn Sue Shander, a US-based humanitarian worker and a strong critic of Sri Lankan government to travel to India.

The American woman activist was scheduled to tour India from September 13 and deliver talks on alleged human rights violations in Sri Lanka. Her Indian host Mr M.Natarajan has organised a series of meetings in Chennai, Bangalore, Coimbatore, Madurai and Delhi till Sept. 20 with Ms Shander as the main speaker.
Ms Shander has vowed to protest against the visa cancellation.
Mr M.Natarajan, Chennai-based political activist and husband of Ms Sasikala, close friend of AIADMK leader Ms Jayalalithaa, has accused both the Central and state governments of curbing free speech in the country.
Mr Natarajan said that the Chennai police had denied permission to conduct an indoor meeting with Ms Shander as the guest on September 16. “We have moved the Madras high court against denial of permission to conduct indoor meetings on the human rights violations in Sri Lanka. The writ petition would be heard on Monday,” he said.

Unsuitable food for malnourished children in Vavuniyaa camps – Indian doctor

Malnourished children in the camps for the Internally Displaced (IDPs) from Vanni and held in the camps in Vavuniyaa are being provided with unsuitable food for consumption, which could make their condition deteriorate further, according to Dr. Bose, an Indian doctor providing medical assistance to the IDPs, sources in Colombo said.

At a ceremony held in Colombo last week to felicitate the Indian doctors who had provided medical assistance to the IDPs over the past six months, Indian Pediatrician Dr. Bose told media that malnutrition could not be eliminated with medicine alone.

“I have been treating the children in these camps for the past three months, and as a pediatrician, I wish to say that malnutrition cannot be cured with medicine only. Supplementary healthy foods need to be provided to them at least for three months,” Dr. Bose said.

He emphasized that authorities should at provide more protein-enriched food for these children.

“I do not think that the food prepared in camps provides the necessary nourishment to the malnourished. Instead each child should be given healthy homemade food. Even though the price of an egg is very high, each child should be given an egg daily as a supplementary high protein diet to overcome their illness,” added Dr. Bose.

Sri Lanka’s war on aid workers

The communications chief for United Nations children’s charity UNICEF, James Elder, has been given until September 21 to leave Sri Lanka for making statements critical of the government.

Elder, an Australian citizen, has been charged over claims he issued statements supporting the views of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
For nearly three decades, the LTTE waged an armed struggle for an independent homeland for the Tamil people in the north of Sri Lanka, before being defeated militarily in May.
Elder spoke out on multiple occasions about the shocking humanitarian crisis facing Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka. He told June 4 Australian: “The nutritional situation of children [in the camps] is a huge concern for Unicef, and restrictions on access hinder our ability to save lives.”
For these kind of statements, he was labelled an LTTE sympathiser and enemy of the state.
Former Australian diplomat turned Sri Lankan foreign secretary Palitha Kohona accused Elder of being biased in favour of the LTTE. “Mr Elder was doing propaganda in support of the LTTE”, Kohona told AFP on September 6.
Elder’s expulsion continues Sri Lanka’s long-running war on aid organisations, who are routinely banned from access to internment camps and other disaster areas by the Sri Lankan authorities.
UNICEF’s attempts to appease the Sri Lankan authorities have failed to free them from state harassment. UNICEF has been involved in supporting, with the Sri Lankan government, controversial internment camps and “rehabilitation” centres for Tamil civilians.
But UNICEF has itself admitted to often being denied access to these facilities.
Many aid workers fear speaking out about conditions facing Tamil civilians, as this often means deportation and can jeopardise their aid programs.
Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, told Al Jazeera on September 1: “I think the United Nations is in a difficult situation in the sense that it's really a grouping of states and the government of Sri Lanka has been very effective in terms of garnering the support of a large number of states and that does seem to have made the UN rather reluctant to speak out on these issues.”
On July 9, Sri Lanka called on international relief organisations to scale down their operations in the country. This is despite the fact that more than 250,000 Tamils languish in overpopulated internment camps and many more remain in “rehabilitation centres” for their alleged involvement with the LTTE.
For a government that continues to lie about its involvement in the deaths of large numbers of civilians and continuing disasterous conditions in their so-called welfare camps, this response is not surprising. The attacks on aid workers is simply another piece of the Sri Lankan regime’s wider war on dissent.

NEWS

Photographs of Tamils with ‘dog-tag’ imprisoned at undisclosed torture camps in Sri Lanka

Media has much reported on the fate of more than 300,000 tamil IDPs currently held in internment camps funded by UN and International agencies and their lack of freedom of movement. These rare images emerging from Sri Lanka shows the forgotten storey of Tamils who are “dog-tag”ed and arrested by Sri Lankan Military Officers for interrogations as possible suspects of Tamil Tigers. Sri Lankan government has claimed that they have arrested more than 10,000 suspects but ICRC has only access 2,000 of them. None of this suspects were produced in courts and don’t have access to any legal support & effectively in illegal imprisonment.


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