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Posts Tagged ‘Sri Lanka’
UN: Sri Lanka should allow children to return home
Friday, December 11th, 2009AFP reports Retired Major General Patrick Cammaert, the UN special envoy on children and armed conflict, said children who had been conscripted by the Tamil Tiger rebels should be allowed to return to their families.
“Hundreds of children are still missing or separated from their parents. They must be reunited as soon as possible,” the Dutch UN official said during a visit to Sri Lanka.
Cammaert is in Sri Lanka on behalf of the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy.
The six-day mission, at the invitation of the Government, is aimed at following up on the recommendations of the Security Council Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict on Sri Lanka within the framework of Security Council Resolution 1612 from 2005.
Mr. Cammaert will ascertain firsthand the situation of the children affected by the recent conflict with a view to ensure greater child protection. Particular attention will be paid to the situation of displaced children and the reintegration of children formerly associated with armed groups into civilian life.
He will meet with Government officials, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society representatives and children, and report to the Security Council Working Group when he returns.
Sri Lanka continues media ban on war refugees
Monday, December 7th, 2009AFP reports that despite proclamations to the contrary, the government of Sri Lanka is continuing to bar journalists from reporting on people displaced by the war in Sri Lanka. The northern part of the island nation is still off-limits to reporters.
Foreign minister Rohitha Bogollagama declared in a BBC interview Tuesday that the media now had full access, prompting a flood of requests from reporters to travel to the former war zone in the north.
But restrictions on visits to the northern district of Vavuniya where the government maintains its camp complex remain in place despite them being declared “open” on Tuesday.
“The restrictions on journalists to visit displaced people in camps have not been relaxed yet,” Human Rights Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe told reporters. Pressed for a date when the camps would be open to the media, the minister said: “We are trying to lift the ban on media access, but it will take time.”
The few visits that have been allowed have been under strict military supervision.
UNHCR welcomes actions by Sri Lanka
Friday, December 4th, 2009The United Nations refugee agency has welcomed Sri Lanka’s decision this week to allow greater freedom of movement for some 135,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) remaining in 20 closed camps in the country’s north following the recently-ended civil conflict.
“We are encouraged by the Sri Lankan Government’s long-awaited decision,” Andrej Mahecic, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told reporters in Geneva.
“Our teams are in the process of assessing the number of IDPs exercising their new freedom of movement over the past few days and report that people continue to leave the camps,” he added.
There were some 280,000 IDPs staying in closed camps in May after a final push by Government forces ended the decades-long civil war with separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
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Dispatches from Sri Lanka, Day Four
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009Father Kenneth J. Gavin, S.J., the Regional Director of Jesuit Refugee Service/USA, is in Sri Lanka this week for a meeting of JRS Regional Directors. He will be writing daily updates on what it is like in Sri Lanka, seven months after the end of a devastating civil war that left tens of thousands dead, and hundreds of thousands displaced. This is the fourth installment.
Wednesday, December 2. “Speak on our behalf,” a human rights activist in Trincomalee urged us today as we watched a short PowerPoint presentation on the history of injustice and violations of human rights endured by the Tamil people of the north and east of Sri Lanka over the past 60 years.
Victims of intense shelling during the war seek help at a hospital in Sri Lanka.
In fact, as a Sri Lankan present explained, the harrowing photo was only a small piece of a larger, more brutal story. In 2006, a Tamil woman was raped and murdered while her husband and young children were forced to stand by and watch helplessly. Afterwards, the children themselves were slashed with machetes and hanged in front of their father who was then himself finally killed.
This story and so many others like it fill the pages of the sad history of Sri Lanka’s recent conflict — a conflict marked by inhumanities committed by all sides of the conflict. In a real way, these crimes against humanity force us to ask ourselves not simply what has become of the people of Sri Lanka, but what has become of humanity itself. How can we, as humankind, face and understand such brutality?
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Released from camps, Sri Lankans face long road home
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009IRIN reports that thousands of internally displaced persons who have left camps in Sri Lanka’s north say they are struggling to rebuild their lives.
Those leaving camps are transferred to transit points such as schools or churches, and then make their way to their places of origin or new resettlement areas, according to local NGO sources working with the returnees. Many are accompanied by dozens of other family members who cannot return to their homes because the areas have still to be cleared of mines laid during the conflict. This means homes are overcrowded and resources stretched, according to local NGOs in Jaffna.
Dispatches from Sri Lanka, Day Three – Reflections on Reconciliation
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009Father Kenneth J. Gavin, S.J., the Regional Director of Jesuit Refugee Service/USA, is in Sri Lanka this week for a meeting of JRS Regional Directors.
Tuesday, December 1. How could Sri Lanka, a country still reeling after 25 years of civil conflict, be the right place for a workshop on reconciliation? The war here has just ended and its wounds on both sides are still fresh. The simple truth, however, is that Sri Lanka is a fine space — even a kind of sacred space — for the worldwide leadership of Jesuit Refugee Service to gather to discuss how reconciliation reveals the deepest mission of JRS. It is here that we have been invited to step into the heart of God and view through the eyes of the Trinity the broken world in which we live. How does JRS, with its mission to accompany, serve and advocate, help reconcile peoples whose lives have been so thoroughly broken and shattered?
This morning we listened to each other’s stories of both the power and the difficulty of reconciliation in the lives of refugees we have known. Many of them carry with them deep scars inflicted by callous and impersonal national and international responses to displacement that is an everyday occurrence for refugees and migrants. In today’s stories I was particularly moved by the work of JRS chaplains and pastoral visitors who work in detention centers throughout Europe and U.S., caring for the spiritual needs of detained migrants and asylum seekers. It is often there — in prisons and detention facilities — the need for and the call to reconciliation is experienced most deeply.
I will never forget the story of a 22-year old Mexican migrant, Francisco-Javier, who in early 2007 was killed by a U.S. border patrol agent while attempting to cross into southern Arizona from Mexico with his two younger brothers and a sister-in-law.
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Dispatches from Sri Lanka, Day Two
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009Father Kenneth J. Gavin, S.J., the Regional Director of Jesuit Refugee Service/USA, is in Sri Lanka this week for a meeting of JRS Regional Directors. He will be writing daily updates on what it is like in Sri Lanka, seven months after the end of a devastating civil war that left tens of thousands dead, and hundreds of thousands displaced. This is the second installment.
Monday, November 30. The retreat house where our meeting is taking place is located in Trincomalee, on the northeast coast of Sri Lanka. Trinco, as the locals call it, is a six hour drive from Colombo, the capital, on a congested two-lane highway unceremoniously called A-9. Stretching from the south all the way to the northern tip of the island, A-9 is the main artery for trade, travel and military movement in the country. During much of the last phase of Sri Lanka’s recent conflict, travel along A-9 was severely restricted by dozens of checkpoints that caused great hardship for civilians and tradesmen visiting family members or moving produce and goods to markets in the south.
Trincomalee’s harbor is one of the finest in all of Southeast Asia. The gentle rolling waves cast a soothing calm over the long stretch of beach where generations of Tamil fishermen and their families have lived and worked. Both a Hindu temple and a small Catholic chapel face east on the shore just outside our retreat center, in testimony to the religious diversity of the Tamil people.
Fishing in Sri Lanka. (Jesuit Refugee Service/USA)
Walking along the beach today, Fr. Peter Balleis, S.J., the International Director of Jesuit Refugee Service, and I pass dozens of multi-colored fishing boats with crews of Tamil men unloading their morning’s catch. Many greet us in English or simply stare in surprise at their unexpected visitors. Some lift large fish in the air to show us their catch and cry out to us, “Where are you from?” Older children run from their families’ wooden shacks, waving and greeting us while the smaller kids just stand and stare in amazement.
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Dispatches from Sri Lanka, Day One
Monday, November 30th, 2009Father Kenneth J. Gavin, S.J., the Regional Director of Jesuit Refugee Service/USA, is in Sri Lanka this week for a meeting of JRS Regional Directors. He will be writing daily updates on what it is like in Sri Lanka, seven months after the end of a devastating civil war that left tens of thousands dead, and hundreds of thousands displaced.
The conflict in Sri Lanka forced this man to flee multiple times from various places he sought shelter. (Ken Gavin, S.J. - Jesuit Refugee Service/USA)
Sunday, November 29. I land in Colombo, the capital city of Sri Lanka, at 8 a.m. this morning after nearly 16 hours of flying time from Washington, D.C. I am here to attend a meeting of the worldwide regional directors of Jesuit Refugee Service on the theme of reconciliation and its role in the mission of JRS.
The choice of locations was far from arbitrary. After more than 25 years of conflict between federal forces in the south and a northern rebel group known as the Tamil Tigers, the government of Sri Lanka finally defeated the Tigers this past May. The victory was not without devastating losses to both sides and the number of civilian deaths in the conflict was shocking. Both sides in the war have been accused by the international community of violations of the Tamil people’s human rights.
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UN urges more support for Sri Lanka’s displaced
Friday, November 20th, 2009The top United Nations humanitarian official has welcomed the recent releases of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from camps in northern Sri Lanka, and underscored the need to ensure full freedom of movement for those remaining.
John Holmes
John Holmes noted in particular that the Menik Farm camp contains only half the number of displaced now than it did at the end of May, when the Government declared an end to its military operations against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
During a joint press conference with Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama in the capital, Colombo, Mr. Holmes said he hoped to see continued progress in allowing people to leave the camps and restore their lives.
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