Starting Points: Sri Lanka

Showing posts with label Sri Lanka. Show all posts

Jan 27, 2010

Sri Lanka’s President Declared Victor by Wide Margin

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s president, was re-elected by a wide margin, election officials here said Wednesday, defeating the newly retired army general who had tried to lay claim to Mr. Rajapaksa’s biggest political victory, the defeat of the Tamil Tiger insurgency.

Official results gave Mr. Rajapaksa an 18-point advantage over his nearest opponent, Sarath Fonseka, the general who carried out the successful military operation against the Tigers. Mr. Fonseka rejected the result, saying that campaign had been marred by violence and irregularities in the vote counting.

“The enthusiasm of the people we noticed in the campaign is not reflected in the result,” Mr. Fonseka said at a news conference.

Independent Sri Lankan election monitors said that there was no evidence of major fraud in the voting, but left open the possibility of problems in the counting.

More broadly, election observers and advocacy groups have questioned the fundamental fairness of the campaign, accusing Mr. Rajapaksa of using state resources to run his campaign. State-owned news media all but shut out opposition candidates.

The election results illustrate the still-yawning ethnic and religious divides that plunged Sri Lanka into civil war in the first place, and underscore the difficulties Mr. Rajapaksa will face in trying to reconcile the country after 26 years of conflict.

Mr. Fonseka spent the day secluded in a five-star hotel, which the government surrounded with commandos, saying they had been placed there for security reasons. He said that he feared for his safety.

“They are trying to make me a prisoner,” Mr. Fonseka said, addressing a conference room packed with journalists. “They have made things very clear today.”

Lucien Rajakarunanyake, a government spokesman, rejected the suggestion that Mr. Fonseka was in danger, saying that the troops outside the hotel were merely for safety. “He is free to leave at any time,” the spokesman said.

The Tamil Tiger insurgency fought to create a Tamil homeland in the north and east of Sri Lanka, separate from the Sinhalese majority. But over the years the group became little more than a criminal enterprise famous for its cruel tactics, human rights groups say, like holding civilians as human shields as well as using child soldiers and female suicide bombers.

While Mr. Rajapaksa won a large majority, Tamil and Muslim voters largely rejected him.

Mr. Rajapaksa pledged to be a president for all Sri Lankans, not just those who voted for him, an apparent effort to reach out to Tamil voters who shunned him in large numbers.

“Six million people voted for me,” Mr. Rajapaksa said at a news conference at his office late Wednesday evening. “Even the people who voted for other candidates, I have to look after their interests.”

It had been an ugly and sometimes violent campaign between two men who had once been close allies. The evidently exasperated elections commissioner, Dayananda Dissanayake, described numerous transgressions by the government during the campaign, concluding that “state institutions operated in a manner not befitting state organizations.”

Guidelines for the state media to behave fairly toward both candidates were ignored, he said, adding that the stress of overseeing the election had taken a toll on his health.

A long night of counting ballots confirmed that turnout in northern Tamil areas was very low, in the single digits in some war-hit areas, while voters had flocked to the polls in Mr. Rajapaksa’s southern stronghold.

Dayan Jayatilleka, a political analyst who was Sri Lanka’s representative to the United Nations in Geneva until the government fired him last year, said that the Tamil political parties had lost touch with the electorate during the long years of war.

“They have been engaging in the politics of exile,” Mr. Jayatilleka said. “They have not done the hard yards of rebuilding their political network.”

But election observers said that explosions and other disturbances, along with the heavy militarization of the northern and eastern Tamil areas, also suppressed the vote.

The other political parties in Mr. Fonseka’s coalition also struggled to bring in voters. The center-right United National Party failed to deliver the capital, Colombo — its stronghold — for Mr. Fonseka. And the Marxist party known as the J.V.P., the Sinhalese acronym for People’s Freedom Party, seemed to make little headway against the president in its southern Sinhalese bastions.

Mr. Fonseka, who ran on his record of winning the war against the Tamil Tigers, had counted on support from Tamil voters, who he hoped would choose him over Mr. Rajapaksa as the more palatable of the two options. Though Mr. Fonseka led the military campaign that may have killed thousands of Tamil civilians, he portrayed himself as committed to healing ethnic divisions and allowing communities a greater measure of self-rule.

He also sought to capitalize on dissatisfaction with Mr. Rajapaksa in some quarters of the Sinhalese majority. Voters expressed concern about the concentration of state power within Mr. Rajapaksa’s family. One of his brothers is the powerful secretary of defense, another is a senior adviser and many members of his extended family work in senior government positions.

But Mr. Rajapaksa emerges from the election in many ways stronger than ever. He ran on his war record, arguing that if he delivered on his pledge to win the war he could also bring a peace dividend and heal the nation’s ethnic rifts.

“The president keeps his promises,” said Gamage Banduwathie, a voter who left the United National Party to support Mr. Rajapaksa in the election. “I hope that he will be a savior for Sri Lanka.”

Jan 9, 2010

Video of Sri Lankan Executions Appears Authentic, U.N. Says

By ROBERT MACKEY

On Thursday, Philip Alston, a human rights lawyer who is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said that reports by three experts he had retained to examine video that appears to show the execution of prisoners in Sri Lanka “strongly suggest that the video is authentic.”

A screenshot from video exiled Sri Lankan journalists say was filmed in Sri Lanka in January 2009.

Mr. Alston explained that he had commissioned reports from the experts — in forensic pathology, forensic video analysis and firearm evidence — after the government of Sri Lanka responded to his request for “an independent investigation” by claiming that the video was fake based on reports produced by four investigators, two of whom worked for the Sri Lankan military, that were, Mr. Alston said, “more impressionistic than scientific.”

After making the results of the scientific analysis of the video public in New York, Mr. Alston called for an inquiry into the executions it appears to document, which a group of exiled Sri Lankan journalists say was a war crime recorded on a soldier’s cellphone in January 2009, near the end of the government’s war with Tamil separatists.

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As The Lede reported in August, the video was first broadcast by Channel 4 News in Britain, which had obtained the video from the group Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka. On Thursday night, Channel 4 News broadcast a video report on Mr. Alston’s findings, which includes scenes from the graphic, disturbing video.

Mr. Alston made the full text of the experts’ technical analysis available for download on a United Nations Web site. In his introduction to that technical analysis — also available for download — Mr. Alston wrote that the experts had “systematically rebutted most of the arguments relied upon by Sri Lanka’s experts in support of their contention that the video was faked.”

A partial transcript of Mr. Alston’s remarks was published on Channel 4’s Web site. His call for “the establishment of an independent inquiry to carry out an impartial investigation into war crimes” which may have been committed in Sri Lanka was included in a news release from his office.

On Friday, Sri Lanka’s foreign minister, Rohitha Bogollagama, responded to the findings of Mr. Alston’s experts by saying, “We reject these allegations,” Reuters reported. Mr. Bogollagama ignored the conclusions and pointed only to some of the details the experts said they were unable to explain, saying, “In light of those continued contradictory findings, we can’t accept it.”

As Jonathan Miller noted in a blog post on the Channel 4 News Web site, “the U.N. Secretary General, apparently prompted by Philip Alston’s findings, has resurrected the possibility of appointing a Commission of Experts to advise him on alleged violations of human rights and humanitarian law in Sri Lanka.”

In December another report by a forensic video specialist commissioned by The Times of London to examine the video concluded, “This is clearly an original recording.”

On Thursday, the Wikipedia entry on Mr. Alston was edited so that it temporarily read, “Philip G. Alston is a prominent international racist law scholar and human rights practitioner/ tool of western oppression of developing countries.”

Dec 20, 2009

Tamils in Canada vote for independent homeland in Sri Lanka

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In the latest such vote to be held by Tamils of Sri Lankan descent living abroad, members of the diaspora across Canada overwhelmingly voted “yes” on a referendum held Saturday calling for an independent homeland.

By Nachammai Raman Correspondent
posted December 20, 2009 at 11:47 am EST

Montreal, Quebec —

Tamils of Sri Lankan origin across Canada overwhelmingly voted “yes” on a referendum held Saturday calling for an independent homeland in the island nation.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

It's the latest in a series of such votes held in Sri Lankan Tamil communities in Europe and North America, and organizers say the purpose is to apply international pressure on Sri Lanka to devolve more autonomy to Tamils.

Political analysts say this goal is unlikely to be achieved anytime soon, but that the votes may help reinvigorate the pro-Tamil Tiger diaspora in the wake of the Tigers' devastating military defeat this year after decades of fighting.

“The referendum has been organized by groups supportive of the Tamil Tigers,” says Dr. Narenda Subramanian, associate professor of political science at McGill University, who specializes in South Asia. “They’ll use this as a way of revitalizing their pro-Tiger network outside Sri Lanka. They may be laying the foundation for a transnational Eelam government, a legitimate self-governing authority outside Sri Lanka that will one day take over a future Tamil state in Sri Lanka - in the event that ever happens.”

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According to Mr. Subramanian, the decades-long war, which ended last May, only destroyed the Tamil Tigers’ military capacity and activities in Sri Lanka. He says the Tamil Tiger network outside Sri Lanka is still fairly intact, operating covertly under different front organizations even in countries like Canada that have slapped a ban on the rebel group.

Canada vote only the latest

Canada is the third country to be holding such a referendum this year. It is home to the largest Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in the world, an estimated 150,000 people.

The first referendum was held last May in Norway, which is one of the few Western countries that hasn’t banned the Tamil Tigers. Norway brokered the 2002 cease-fire between the Tamil Tiger rebels and the Sri Lankan government, which was torn up formally in Jan. 2008.

The diaspora in France voted on the referendum just last weekend.

The turnout was high in all three countries, according to the pro-Tamil Tiger website Tamilnet, which also reports that the vote was 99 percent “yes” in all three countries.

In the referenda, people of Sri Lankan origin were asked to vote “yes” or “no” on the following statement: “I aspire for the formation of an independent and sovereign state of Tamil Eelam in the north and east of the island of Sri Lanka on the basis that the Tamils in the island of Sri Lanka make a distinct nation, have a traditional homeland, and a right to self-determination.”

The statement itself is drawn from a 1976 resolution adopted by Tamil political parties in Sri Lanka in the face of deteriorating minority rights before the island nation plunged into civil war in 1983. Sri Lankan Tamils only make up about 18 percent of its population. The origins of the ethnic conflict go back to the changing of the country’s language and education policies to favor the Sinhalese majority.

Does the vote matter?

On why it’s necessary to hold a diaspora referendum now on a resolution that was drafted 33 years ago, Senthan Nada, one of the organizers and spokesperson for the Toronto-based Coalition to Stop the War, says it’s a touchstone to determine the future path. “The 1976 resolution calling for an independent state - is this still the way to go forward to find a peaceful and lasting solution? That’s what we want to establish by a democratic vote.”

The referenda will have no effect in Sri Lanka, says Madras-based political analyst Ramani Hariharan, a former intelligence officer working on the Sri Lanka dossier for the Indian army.

“The Sri Lankan government won’t comment on this because they don’t want to recognize this as being influential," says Mr. Hariharan. "It won't change anything in the country.” He says the Sri Lankan government is using its own strategy to win over conciliatory elements of the Tamil diaspora.

According to Hariharan, the real motive of the referenda may just be to fill the leadership vacuum created by the death of rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and lay claim to the vast financial empire the Tamil Tigers have worldwide. “The Tigers want to create some sort of legitimacy to revive the movement,” he says.

But Nada says that holding the referenda in countries like Canada, rather than in Sri Lanka among its Tamil citizens, is important. “From the viewpoint of the community here, the Tamils in Sri Lanka are disenfranchised," says Nada. "We are trying to voice their concerns because they can’t talk freely.”

Lalitha Chandra, who uses a fictitious name in the fear of reprisal for her views, abstained from voting. She has misgivings about where all this will lead because she has seen her family suffer from the civil war that claimed nearly 100,000 lives.

“I just want peace," she says. "After all these years of fighting, we know that the Sri Lankan government is dead against separation. So, realistically speaking, I don’t know how it’s going to happen, because any solution has to be worked out together between the Sinhalese and the Tamils.”

Nov 11, 2009

In Sri Lanka, anger over fate of ethnic Tamils held in camps - washingtonpost.com

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Many languishing in camps months after war's end

By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 11, 2009

TRINCOMALEE, SRI LANKA -- Six months after Sri Lanka's decades-old civil war ended with a final assault, about 200,000 people remain trapped in overcrowded government-run camps that were once safe havens for those fleeing the conflict.

Facing pressure from the Obama administration and the European Union, the Sri Lankan government last month launched a campaign to resettle tens of thousands of the minority Tamil detainees. But interviews in the country's war-ravaged north reveal that many civilians have merely been shuffled from the large camps to smaller transit ones and are being held against their will. Others have been released, only to be taken from their homes days later with no indication of where they have gone.

After the army defeated the Tamil rebels in May, top government officials paraded their success on the streets of Colombo, the capital, and the country's leaders made noble promises about ensuring national harmony. Now analysts say the real test of Sri Lanka's success in building a stable, post-conflict society lies in the fate of these scores of thousands of detainees.

Human rights groups say the government is lying about its resettlement efforts; authorities concede they are using the camps as a tool to uncover any remaining Tamil militants but deny they are deliberately stalling civilians' return home.

"We thought this war was over. But for Tamils, it's like going from the frying pan and into the fire," said Devander Kumar, whose brother was released, only to be taken away by police without explanation, one of 30 men in this seaside city who have disappeared soon after their homecoming. "Do we Tamils have to prove every second of the day that we are not terrorists?"

Tamil leaders worry that if civilians end up languishing in the camps indefinitely, the situation will only breed more resentments and risk spawning another generation of rebels. But the government says it needs more time to de-mine vast stretches of land in the north, as well as to repair infrastructure damaged by war. Authorities also say they continue to root out rebels who have blended into the civilian population.

"History will prove us right," said Basil Rajapaksa, who is leading the resettlement process. Rajapaksa is a U.S. citizen and an adviser to President Mahinda Rajapaksa, his brother.

"We need the transit camps to weed out any underground rebels. The Tamil people have had a lot of hardship," he said. "So the last thing we want is to sacrifice their security for the sake of risking even one more sleeper cell or one more attack."

After a fierce military offensive in May, the government declared victory over the rebels, formally known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a well-funded militia that for 26 years fought for a separate homeland in northern Sri Lanka. The United States and other governments have labeled the Tamil Tigers a terrorist organization. The group pioneered the use of suicide bombings and is said to have orchestrated bombings that killed a Sri Lankan president, six cabinet ministers and, in 1991, former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

The U.S. State Department has called for an investigation into war crimes allegedly committed by both sides during the war's final days. After the fighting stopped, the president commissioned patriotic pop songs extolling the virtues of a prosperous Sri Lanka united under one flag. In the new Sri Lanka, he said, the Sinhalese Buddhist majority would embrace its Tamil compatriots, who are mostly Hindu and make up 15 percent of the nation's 20 million people.

But there is growing frustration among Tamils over the camps, ringed by razor-wire fencing and patrolled by armed guards. There is also anger over the unexplained arrests of military-age men.

On a recent day at a camp set up inside a school here, soldiers held back a group of weeping women who rushed to the gates to greet family members they had not seen in more than a year because they had gotten separated during the fighting.

"The most worrying part of the transit camps is that nobody is allowed to even meet them inside, not even religious leaders or desperate relatives," said V. Kalaichelvan, head of the Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies in Trincomalee. "It's like a wound on the psyche of the already damaged Tamil community."

Mano Ganesan, a Tamil member of Parliament, has filed a lawsuit against the government to allow him and other Tamil leaders to visit both the transit and the relief camps.

"Tamils feel like inmates in their own country. . . . The irony is that the root causes of this conflict are being ignored yet again. That can only mean more Tigers in the future," Ganesan said.

On a 10-hour trip by car from the capital to Trincomalee, one encounters frequent checkpoints, abandoned villages and fields of weeds where once rice and cashew were grown. The transit camps appear overcrowded, with families spread out under trees.

"In the last few weeks, there has been a sincere effort to release more people from the detention camps," said a senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect diplomatic efforts. "But we have so far been unable to track where exactly they are going. We are hoping to see evidence soon that they have actually been resettled."

Sri Lankan officials say the government has begun relocating nearly 42,000 people from the camps. The government also says it will dedicate a large amount of development money to the Tamil-dominated north.

But mistrust prevails. In one village, residents said police had taken away several of their neighbors, who they said were innocent. "One of the major problems with the camps is that the government is not telling people when or why they are arresting relatives," said Gordon Weiss, a spokesman for the United Nations in Sri Lanka. "In a country with a long history of disappearances, just snatching people creates an incredible atmosphere of fear. At the same time, the sinister nature of this war was that so many civilians were militarized, which legitimized them as targets by the other side. That is the tragedy of this conflict."

Sep 22, 2009

U.S. Faces Doubts About Leadership on Human Rights - washingtonpost.com

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By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 22, 2009

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 21 -- From the beginning, the Obama administration has unabashedly embraced the United Nations, pursuing a diplomatic strategy that reflects a belief that the world's sole superpower can no longer afford to go it alone. But, as the U.N. General Assembly gets underway this week, human rights activists and political analysts say the new approach has undercut U.S. leadership on human rights issues.

Rights advocates have been frustrated by several episodes. They say U.S. diplomats have sent mixed messages about their intention to reward -- or punish -- the Sudanese government for its alleged role in genocide in Darfur. The United States rejected a U.N. proposal to compel Israel and Hamas to conduct credible investigations into war crimes in the Gaza Strip. And the administration has pursued a low-profile approach to Sri Lanka, where a military offensive against rebels is believed to have killed thousands of civilians.

The administration continues to assert that "the United States is not going to preach its values and not going to impose its values," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "The problem is they are not American values -- they are international values."

U.S. officials assert they have shown leadership on human rights, citing the administration's decision to weigh prosecutions of CIA interrogators. They note that the administration joined the U.N. Human Rights Council, reversing the Bush administration's policy of shunning the troubled rights agency in the hopes of reforming it. A U.S. vote on the Security Council in June was crucial in ensuring continued U.N. scrutiny of Sudan's rights record.

Being a Team Player

But U.S. officials say that American credibility also lies in their willingness to be team players. In the past several months, the United States has pledged to sign U.N. arms control and human rights treaties, and has committed to sending U.S. officers to far-flung U.N. peacekeeping missions. Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, says cooperation with the global organization is essential for coordinating international efforts to combat terrorism, scrap nuclear weapons arsenals and fight pandemics.

"No single country, even one as powerful as our own, can deal with these challenges in isolation," Rice said. "We are fundamentally living in an era when our security and our well-being are very much linked to the security and well-being of people elsewhere. That's a simple recognition of reality."

John R. Bolton, one of the U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, said the Obama administration's strategy at the United Nations resembles a religious "act of faith." He questioned the wisdom of empowering the organization.

The United Nations' contribution to the "great questions of our time" -- counterterrorism and nonproliferation -- have been only "marginally effective," Bolton said.

He also has criticized U.S. support for the Human Rights Council, a body that "spends its time attacking Israel and the United States."

In April, the council, based in Geneva, called for an investigation into alleged abuses during the war in Gaza last winter. Richard Goldstone, a South African judge who headed the probe, insisted on expanding the investigation to examine abuses by Hamas and other Palestinian militants. His report accused both sides of committing war crimes and called on the Security Council to compel Israel and Hamas to conduct credible investigations.

Human rights advocates urged the United States to back Goldstone, saying it would show that the United States is willing to hold even its closest ally to account for abuses. But Rice rejected his recommendations, saying the "weight of the report is something like 85 percent oriented towards very specific and harsh condemnation and conclusions related to Israel. . . . In that regard it remains unbalanced, although obviously less so than it might have been."

Troubled About Darfur

Jerry Fowler, executive director of the Save Darfur Coalition, said the administration's approach to Darfur has been troubling. In recent months, Obama's special envoy, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, has pursued a more conciliatory approach toward Sudan, saying that genocide was no longer taking place in Darfur and that it was time to ease some sanctions.

"We have been pushing consistently for a balance of incentives and pressures, and so far we haven't really seen that balance," Fowler said. "Publicly, there has been more of an emphasis on incentives."

Rice said Gration's "vitally important" efforts to pursue a political settlement to crises in Sudan should not be interpreted to mean "that we are any less concerned" about Sudan's commission of atrocities "or that we are prepared to wield carrots in advance of concerted and very significant steps on the ground. That's not the policy of the United States."

Silence on Sri Lanka?

The other major concern of human rights advocates monitoring developments at the United Nations is Sri Lanka.

When the government launched its final offensive this year against the country's Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), it was Mexico and Austria that first raised the alarm in the Security Council. France and Britain sent their foreign ministers to the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, to press the government to show restraint.

The United States supported those efforts to draw attention to the crisis in the Security Council, which China and Russia opposed. It backed a compromise that allowed for discussion on the Sri Lanka conflict in the U.N. basement.

"The U.S. government remained relatively silent on the Sri Lankan crisis, especially in the early stages of the fighting," said Fabienne Hara, vice president for multilateral affairs at the International Crisis Group. Its response to Sri Lanka "did not seem to match the commitment to preventing mass human rights abuses stated during the presidential campaign," she said.

Rice challenged that assessment, saying "my perception is that we spoke out very forcefully."She said that the United States had a strong ambassador on the ground in Sri Lanka, conveying American concerns, and that the assistant secretary of state for refugees traveled there to conduct an assessment mission. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Rice said, had been personally focused on the issue.

"I think that is an instance where our stand was clear, consistent and principled," she said.

Sep 1, 2009

Sri Lankan Journalist Punished for Writing About Army - NYTimes.com

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By LYDIA POLGREEN

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — On World Press Freedom Day in May, President Obama held up J. S. Tissainayagam, the editor of a crusading magazine in Sri Lanka who has been jailed since March 2008, as a symbol of the oppression of the media.

On Monday, a judge in Sri Lanka sentenced Mr. Tissainayagam to 20 years of hard labor for violating the country’s tough antiterrorism laws by writing articles highly critical of a government military offensive against Tamil Tiger rebels who had controlled a large chunk of Sri Lanka’s north.

Mr. Tissainayagam, who is Tamil, was the editor of the now-defunct North Eastern Monthly magazine, and was accused of accepting money and other support from the Tigers. He was convicted under laws that give harsh sentences for offenses like using racially divisive language or promoting disharmony. These laws were enacted in response to the Tamil Tiger insurgency. The insurgents, members of the Hindu Tamil minority, sought a separate state from Sri Lanka’s Buddhist, Sinhalese majority. The government decisively defeated the Tigers in a bloody final battle on a strip of beach in northern Sri Lanka in May, ending one of Asia’s longest civil wars.

As is often the case with local journalists in conflict zones, Mr. Tissainayagam’s reporting reflected the prevailing point of view of the minority to which he belonged, but the government argued that his work went further.

“The Constitution itself gives freedom of press, but that doesn’t allow anybody to spread false information to spur ethnic violence,” Sudarshana DeSilva, the prosecutor, told the court, Reuters reported.

But rights advocates say that Mr. Tissainayagam’s sentence reflects the plight of Sri Lanka’s embattled press corps. At least seven journalists have been killed since 2007, including some singled out by the Tamil Tigers. Many more have fled the country.

“It is very serious blow,” said Sanjana Hattotuwa, editor of Groundviews, a citizen journalism Web site. “It sends a chilling message that the independent expression of opinion is no longer tolerated in Sri Lanka.”

Lucien Rajakarunanayake, spokesman for Sri Lanka’s president and a columnist, said that Mr. Tissainayagam had the right to appeal.

“The court has believed the evidence placed before it,” Mr. Rajakarunanayake said. “That he did accept money from a terrorist organization and did work that furthered the cause of terrorism in this country.”

The sentence is sure to increase pressure from the West on Sri Lanka’s government, which has been criticized for its handling of the last battle against the Tamil Tigers and the treatment of Tamils displaced by the war.

Mr. Tissainayagam’s lawyer told reporters that he planned to appeal. Though he confessed, he later said that the confession was given under duress. Legal experts said that the antiterrorism laws under which he was convicted violated the Constitution.

Asanga Welikala, a lawyer who has written on press freedom in Sri Lanka, said that the law was so vague that practically any speech could be prosecuted.

“Totally unacceptable that we should have such a law, and even more unacceptable that a court of law should feel that this journalist should get the maximum possible sentence under that law for simply doing his job,” he said.

Aug 16, 2009

Downpours Flood the Camps of Sri Lankan Refugees

By LYDIA POLGREEN

NEW DELHI — Downpours in northern Sri Lanka have flooded camps housing more than 250,000 people displaced by the fighting between the government and the Tamil Tigers, according to aid officials.

The rain, which fell heavily for much of the afternoon on Saturday, sent rivers of muck cascading between tightly packed rows of flimsy shelters, overflowed latrines and sent hundreds of families scurrying for higher ground.

The flooding raised fears for the safety of the displaced, who are being held in closed camps guarded by soldiers. Monsoon rains are expected to begin in little more than a month, and many aid groups worry that the hastily built camps will not survive the inundation.

“If only three or four hours of rain cause this much chaos, only imagine what a full monsoon can cause,” said David White, country director for Oxfam.

The camps occupy vast tracts of formerly forested land near the northern town of Vavuniya. Because the ground on which many of the camps were built was cleared of trees recently, the soil is soft and porous. It turns into mud almost instantly, making it nearly impossible to get trucks through to deliver food, water and medicine, aid officials said.

Life in the camps was already tough, but the rain has made it almost unbearable, according to people who have visited the camps in the last 24 hours. The pegs holding down plastic tents have come loose, leaving some families without shelter. Latrines have collapsed, sending waste spilling into nearby rivers. Silt has clogged water treatment plants that are essential for providing drinking water and preventing the spread of waterborne disease.

Groundviews, a citizen journalism Web site in Sri Lanka, published photographs that showed a grim scene of mud and squalor. Aid workers said that they were able to restore some services, like food deliveries, and get temporary shelters for families that lost their tents.

The people in the camps are displaced ethnic Tamils. Most were trapped, along with the last fighters of the Tamil Tiger separatist group, on a narrow strip of land in northwestern Sri Lanka. Government troops wiped out the senior leadership of the rebel group after a fierce battle in May. Thousands of civilians died alongside the fighters, according to the United Nations.

Those who survived fled to camps around Vavuniya, where they have been held ever since. The government has said it cannot allow the displaced people to go home because the areas they fled are sown with land mines, and because Tamil Tiger fighters remain hidden among them. Human rights organizations and several Western governments have criticized the government’s handling of the displaced, calling it tantamount to internment.

As the heavy rains approach, the government will need to move much faster to get displaced people out of the camps, Mr. White said. The government has pledged to get most of the displaced out of the camps by the end of the year.

“Really, we have run out of options and the only option that is left is to speed up the resettlement process,” Mr. White said.