An answer to the radio audience and more informations about the present situation in Sri Lanka

While expressing my deep appreciation for your concerted efforts to safeguard the IDP human rights, I beg to bring to your kind notice the following regarding situation of the IDPs in the so called “Safe Area” in the Vanni and in the IDP Centers in Vavuniya and in the hospitals in the Government controlled areas.

1. All the remaining civilians in the Vanni are confined in the unilaterally declared  “Safe Zone”  circa 20sq. km. and they number over 300,000. Trapped  in this little space, they are left to face death and destruction every minute. They survive with a bare minimum of food, medicine, shelter, sanitation, space with no possibility to safely move out of this death trap. Children numbering over 50,000 have no education. This area needs to be bilaterally accepted as “ safe zone” for the civilians and relevant  UN Agencies and their partners be permitted to reside in this area and monitor  it in keeping with and international humanitarian laws on IDPs and secure the lives of these civilians.
2. Those IDPs who had come out of the above zone either with the help of the ICRC or through the jungles or by boats sustaining on their way injuries and deaths due to shellings and gun-fire from both sides of the divide, are kept in Vavuniya in 16 educational institutions depriving over 25,000 students of their proper education. They are confined to these centers  with no free movement, no visitors, no media, no possibility to join their families or relatives, no proper education for children, no possibility to privately talk to anyone to unburden their mental agonies. The substantial food that is rice is given to the IDPs, thanks to the WFP, needs to be changed into red rice in place of white rice as most of the children and many adults get sick eating the white rice which they are not used to. Only the over 65 are permitted to join their relatives or homes for the elders  and this process too is dead slow. There are still in the above IDP centers at the moment over 700 such elderly and  they need to be sent out without delay. Such elderly number in the Vanni Safe area circa 6000 and there is a hope that most of these will be brought to the Government controlled area. There are in the IDP centers, mentally and physically retarded people and they need to be sent to the homes which take care of them.  There are many parentless minor children in the IDP centers and they need to be sent to children- homes which take of them. Provision to provide special consideration for joining own families or relatives for members of the same family , mothers with newly born babies, families with minor children, Teachers and other Government servants and many other similar cases on humanitarian consideration should be made operative. Chickenpox is fast spreading in these IDP centers and there are at the moment over 800 at the hospital at Poowarasankulam. These IDP centers as they are at the moment can become breeding grounds for many other  infectious diseases. In toto this practice of keeping the people in the IDP centers after the needed security checks are gone through, can not be permitted as it is a crime against humanity.
3. The Vanni patients brought to the  hospitals  would number over 4500 and a large number of them are limbless and they are mostly children. These are people who have lost many of their family members back in the Vanni due to the war. These unfortunate ones are now directly sent back to the IDP centers after hospitalization and are left to labor under physical and mental pain with no hope of a future which these patients already dread. These patients should be permitted to join institutions or their families that can take care and rehabilitate them.