Hundreds dying' in Sri Lanka camp

The government declared victory over the LTTE in May after eliminating the top leadership [AFP] About 1,400 people are dying every week in a camp set up in Sri Lanka to detain Tamil refugees from the country's civil war, a British newspaper reports. Quoting senior international aid sources, The Times reported on Friday that the death toll at the Menik Farm internment will add to concerns that the Sri Lankan government has failed to halt a humanitarian catastrophe. Most of the deaths are the result of water-borne diseases, particularly diarrhoea, the paper said, quoting a senior relief worker it said spoke on condition of anonymity. Women, children and the elderly were shoved aside in the scramble for supplies, it said. The Menik Farm camp, in the northern district of Vavuniya, was set up to house the largest number of the 300,000 mainly Tamil civilians forced to flee the northeast as the military mounted an offensive against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). he government announced victory over the LTTE in May, ending a civil war that lasted decades. The Times said witness testimonies it obtained in May described long queues for food and inadequate water supplies inside the camp. Women, children and the elderly, it said, were shoved aside in the scramble for supplies. Aid agencies are being given only intermittent access to the camp. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was not being allowed in, The Times reported. Toll controversy The Times also said that its investigation had uncovered evidence that more than 20,000 civilians were killed, mostly by the army, in the final stages of the conflict. But Sri Lankan doctors said at a news conference on Wednesday that they had deliberately overestimated the civilian casualties. The Times said women and children are pushed aside in the scramble for food [AFP] As government officials looked on, they claimed that the Tigers had forced them to lie, The Times reported. It quoted Mangala Samaraweera, the former foreign minister and now an opposition MP, as saying: "There are allegations that the government is attempting to change the ethnic balance of the area. "Influential people close to the government have argued for such a solution." Mahinda Samarasinghe, the minister of disaster management and human rights, told the paper that "the challenges now are different". "Manning entry and exit points and handling dead bodies, transport of patients, in the post-conflict era are no longer needed," he said. Curbs on Red Cross The Times further reported, quoting the ICRC, that the agency was closing two offices in the country. One of these was in Trincomalee, which had helped to provide medical care to about 30,000 injured civilians evacuated by sea from the conflict zone in the northeast, the report said. The other was in Batticaloa, where the ICRC had been providing "protection services". The ICRC has revealed that it has been asked to scale down its operations by the Sri Lankan authorities, who insist that they have the situation under control. Source: Al Jazeera Friday, July 10, 2009 http://english.aljazeera.net/news/2009/07/200971035954492173.html -----------------------------------------------------