It is now more than one month since the Sri Lankan military detained
the final batch of Tamil refugees fleeing the northern war zone on
May 19. They joined more than a quarter of a million civilians
already incarcerated in camps set up near Vavuniya and on the Jaffna
Peninsula during the last phase of the war. About 160,000 people are
interned in four units in the biggest camp, known as Manik Farm.
In order to brush off criticism of the denial of democratic rights
and terrible conditions in the camps, the government falsely claimed
that most detainees would be resettled within six months. However,
senior military officials have told Mark Cutts, a UN senior
coordinator at Manik Farm, that they expect 80 percent of the people
to be still detained in a year’s time. Cutts told the BBC that the
government was building permanent structures at Manik Farm. Nothing
less than a new city had been created, he said, with phone lines,
schools, banks and even a cash machine.
The government is treating all the detainees as suspected supporters
of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), saying
that no-one can be released until the camps have been screened to
identify those with LTTE connections. Every day 20 to 30 young
people are taken away and their whereabouts are unknown, a human
rights organisation, INFORM, reported this week. Interviewed by the
BBC Sinhala Service, a spokesperson for the organisation said people
wearing hoods were brought into the camps and they indicated by
signs whether a detainee had LTTE connections or not.
No register is being kept of such removals, in violation of Sri
Lankan and international law, and the media has been excluded from
the camps to prevent any reporting of the conditions in the camps or
the fate of the nearly 9,000 youth that the government has admitted
taking away to separate detention facilities. Their parents do not
know what has happened to them.
A report in the right-wing Island newspaper on June 16 provided a
glimpse of how the military and police authorities are applying
pressure to the Tamil youth to declare support for the government.
According to the article, a deputy inspector general of police Nimal
Lewke addressed over 2,000 detainees at the Neriyakulam Technical
College and told them that President Mahinda Rajapakse was “their
only hope”. Lewke told the Island that about 8,729 youth were being
held in several detention centres at Vavuniya as LTTE cadres,
including about 1,700 young women, and that 283,000 displaced people
were in camps at Vavuniya, with 11,000 more on the Jaffna Peninsula.
Because of the government’s exclusion of the media, the only source
of information is the testimonies of detainees relayed by relatives.
We publish below two interviews given by relatives who visited two
Manik Farm camps, in which they report the conditions there, as well
as detainees’ accounts of the military’s shelling of civilians in
the final stages of the war.
* * *
On the day I visited the camp, Education Minister Susil Premjayantha
and Resettlement Minister Rishad Bathiuddeen were meeting with some
NGOs [non-government organisations] in the camp. So we had to wait
until they left. Police officers were controlling the people,
wielding batons.
Speaking about the last days of the war, my relative told me: “The
military fired more than a thousand shells an hour. The shells fell
on people because there was a smaller chance of falling on the
land--people were so crowded into a tiny area. About 1,400 people
killed on the day when I was injured. I saw this in the hospital. I
do not know how many died on the spot. I was admitted to
Mullivaikkal hospital. After few days, they took me by ship to
(eastern) Pulmoddai hospital. Again I was transferred to Polonnaruwa
hospital. Later they brought me to Vavuniya and finally here. They
photographed me each time when they transferred me.
“We are like prisoners here. Why don’t they allow us to go out? The
toilets are overflowing. There is a lack of water to use toilets and
for other needs. There are some tube wells for drinking water. For
that we have to wait in a long queue. We have to bathe in a river
running behind the camp. However if we bathe in that river
continuously, some skin deceases will spread among us. A doctor
visits the camp only once a week. Sometimes essential medicines are
not available. We have to obtain a token two days in advance to
consult the doctor for any severe illness.
“We are living with fear. We do not know what will happen at
anytime. The foreign representatives who visit here do not know the
real situation. We are not allowed to speak with them. When the UN
secretary general [Ban Ki-moon] visited, the authorities took half
the detainees out of Kadirgamar camp and cleaned it up. They showed
him each family with a tent. They took him only to that camp.”
An elderly person who was leaving the camp with a relative who was
released after nearly a month of requests, said: “I think we were
the first people who crossed into the military-controlled area after
the government announced that we could do so. But the treatment that
the young and middle-aged people got and the words used against us
made me think that I should have died starving rather than come
here.
“Now of course they have put up tin sheets and thatched roofs. When
we came here it was almost like a jungle. Numbers of families had to
live in one hut. Because it is hot, people can sleep anywhere but
the problems start if it begins to rain. If it rains, you can’t even
walk because of the muddy land.
“Since we came here many of the parents with children have never
slept at night for fear that their children would be taken away.
There were numbers of such incidents. We had no lights, so nobody
knew what was going on.”
A 60-year-old person who visited a camp to see his children said: “I
went from one camp to another searching for the family of my
daughter who was in Kilinochchi. Yesterday I went to a camp at
Periyakattu in Vavuniya, which opened soon after the government
announced its war victory. But visitors are not allowed there. The
military considers those interns to be strong supporters or
associates of the LTTE because they were there in the war zone until
the last minute.”
* * *
I went to a camp recently to see some of my relatives detained
there. We wrote down the name of the detainee we wanted to visit,
his block and tent number and handed it over to the officers, who
seemed to be intelligence officers or members of paramilitary groups
working with the military.
They announced our visit by loud speakers. We were not sure whether
the message had gotten to the particular relative. However, we
stayed in the queue for checking. Officers checked all our bags and
parcels, and our bodies. No shopping bags, betel and areca nut, big
bags, boxes or hand phones were allowed.
We had to talk with our relatives through the barbed wire fence. We
were allowed just 15 minutes. There were about 60 or 70 visitors
talking to their relatives behind the fence, so it was difficult to
hear or respond to each other.
My relative, 19, described his experience under the military’s
shelling attacks in Mullivaikkal: “There were pieces of shells in
the backbone of my mother. We think the shells were fired by the
army. Medical staff would only give medicine without removing the
shrapnel, because they said she would become paralysed or
unconscious if the pieces were removed. After my mother was injured,
I carried her and moved secretly during an entire night, without the
knowledge of the LTTE, to reach the military-controlled area.
“My brother, who is 13, must study in grade 7 and I in the advanced
level. But we have not been able to go to school for more than six
months. The officials said they would arrange for us to study in the
advanced level.
“They cook meals here for us. This morning it was porridge. For
lunch, they gave us rice with soya meat, pumpkin, dhal and dried
fish. We may have porridge tonight also. People who were able to
find pans were cooking, but when a temporary tent burned down [due
to a cooking fire], we were asked to stop cooking.
“We are facing a huge lack of water and there are lots of flies
here. They gave us a floor sheet to put inside the tent, but the
flies live on those sheets.” As we talked, flies flocked around our
faces.
Another relative I wanted to meet did not turn up although I lined
up in the queue three times. He may not have received the message
about my visit. On my third attempt, I met another detainee I know
and managed to send things for my relative through him. That
detainee, a government employee told me:
“We are unable to get a good meal. The meals are not tasty—they are
just to prevent hunger. I do my job here and they pay me. How many
days do we have to suffer this camp life? There is no water here.
Smallpox and mumps are spreading.”
