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."

BBC - China to ban beating web addicts

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China's ministry of health has moved to ban the use of physical punishment to treat teenagers addicted to the web, according to draft guidelines.

There are dozens of treatment centres offering to wean youths, mostly boys, from spending hours on the web.

Many of them are military-style boot camps that rely on tough programmes of physical exercise and counselling.

Two boys were beaten at separate camps earlier this year, one died and the other was severely injured.

"When intervening to prevent improper use of the internet we should... strictly prohibit restriction of personal freedom and physical punishments," the ministry said in a draft guideline quoted by Reuters news agency.

In July, the ministry of health formally banned the use of electroshock therapy as a treatment option.

There was a public outcry after 15-year-old Deng Senshan died in August less than 24 hours after arrival at the Qihang Salvation Training Camp in Guangxi province.

Days later, 14-year-old Pu Liang was put in a Sichuan hospital in a series condition after allegedly being beaten by his boot camp's principal and other students.

Some estimates suggest up to 10% of the country's 100 million web users under the age of 20 could be addicted, and a growing number of rehabilitation services have sprung up to deal with the problem.

Some define an internet addict as anyone who is online for at least six hours a day and has little interest in school.

"The goal of intervention is... to urge the target people to use the internet in a healthy way," the ministry of health statement said.

"It's not to stop them from using the internet."

Refugees From Russia-Georgia Conflict Might Never Go Home

By Sarah Marcus
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, August 11, 2009

TSEROVANI, Georgia -- Just off the highway between the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, and the city of Gori, epicenter of last year's war with Russia, lies this settlement of single-story, boxlike houses stretching toward the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains.

As Georgia marked the anniversary of the war this weekend with ceremonies and speeches, the internal refugees living here continued their daily struggle with the fallout of the fighting -- gathering in clusters to wait for humanitarian aid, searching in vain for jobs and managing the bittersweet memories of their lives before the conflict.

"I never expected this would happen," said Marina Dzhokhadze, 50, sitting in her basic, sparsely furnished home and describing how she had been forced to leave the South Ossetian village of Kemerti a year ago. "I am afraid that it will happen all over again. I pray that God will preserve us from another war."

Dzhokhadze is one of an estimated 30,000 people, mostly ethnic Georgians, who have been unable to return to their homes in the breakaway region of South Ossetia and the nearby area of Akhalgori, which was under Georgian control before the war but is now occupied by Russian forces.

Like many others, Dzhokhadze and her family, though not wealthy, enjoyed a comfortable existence in South Ossetia as farmers on fertile land. Now they struggle to make ends meet.

In an address to the country Friday night, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili paid tribute to internal refugees like Dzhokhadze and vowed to reunite the nation not by war but by "peacefully strengthening our democratic institutions, by constantly developing our economy."

A neatly lined collection of bright green and whitewashed houses, Tserovani is the largest of 36 settlements established by the Georgian government. The authorities won praise last year for quickly building the settlements before the onset of winter.

But today, the limits of the settlements are obvious. Almost all are located far from jobs that might be found in urban areas, while the houses sit on small plots that are all but useless for commercial farming.

As difficult as life is for residents in Tserovani, they at least live in structures that don't leak and are equipped with indoor toilets and running water. In other settlements, the houses are damp and as many as eight families share a tap.

"The living conditions are really bad here," said Neli Peruashvili, 53, a Georgian woman who fled her bomb-damaged house in the Ossetian village of Eredvi and now lives in a nearby settlement named Shavshebi. "We have no money. The water in the taps is too dirty to drink so the men have to bring clean water from the next village by hand."

In a nation suffering the effects both of war and the global financial crisis, most displaced by the fighting survive on humanitarian aid and monthly government subsidies of $16 per person because there are few jobs available. They joined a previous wave of more than 200,000 internal refugees from South Ossetia and the Black Sea region of Abkhazia who fled during the separatist wars fought in the 1990s after Georgia gained independence from the Soviet Union.

The Georgians who fled South Ossetia are coming to grips with the reality that they may never be able to return to homes and farmlands that they struggled for years to accumulate. The ethnic Ossetians, many of whom are married to Georgians, wonder when they will be able to see the relatives they left behind.

The South Ossetian authorities have made clear that Georgians who left are not welcome to return. But many of the estimated 6,800 people who fled homes in the Akhalgori region have been allowed to go back. Most, however, have been too frightened to stay for long.

"There is little security there. There are tanks in the streets, and if you speak Georgian, the Ossetians and Russians there dislike you," said Irma Basilashvili, 24, who fled the region in the days after the war as Ossetian militias looted homes and rumors of rape and other violence against Georgians circulated.

Though Russia signed a cease-fire pledging to withdraw troops to prewar positions and strengths, it has boosted its military presence in South Ossetia and refused to surrender Akhalgori. Russia says it is no longer bound by those promises because it has recognized South Ossetia as an independent state and Akhalgori as part of South Ossetia.

Addressing troops at a base not far from the Georgian border, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Saturday that Moscow would never withdraw its recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

"Some of our partners have an illusion that it's a temporary thing, some kind of maneuvering," he said. "Such decisions are made once and for all, and there is no way back."

Over the past week, Georgia and South Ossetia have traded accusations of mortar fire and shootings. Since the end of the war, nine civilians and 11 police officers have been killed in Georgian border areas, according to the Georgian government.

Some residents said they felt caught in a never-ending cycle of conflict.

Khatuna Kasradze, 39, first fled Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, for the village of Ergneti during fighting between Ossetian and Georgian forces in the early 1990s. But then her new home was burned down by Ossetian militia in last year's war.

"Just as life was starting to improve a little bit, everything began again," she said, sitting in a small cottage she built with United Nations and European Union aid next to the ruined shell of her former house. "I don't think the situation will ever normalize."

Envoy's Advice on Darfur Draws Criticism

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 6, 2009

NEW YORK, Aug. 5 -- The Obama administration's Sudan envoy is facing growing resistance to a suggestion he made recently to civilians displaced from Darfur that they should start planning to go back to their villages. Darfurian civilians and U.N. relief agencies say it is still too dangerous to return to the region where a six-year-long conflict has led to the deaths of more than 300,000 people.

In the latest sign of tension, Sheik al-Tahir, a leader at Kalma, one of Darfur's largest camps for displaced people, said Tuesday that homeless civilians would protest retired Air Force Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration's strategy for resolving the conflict and his assertion in June that genocide in Darfur has ended. Tahir and other camp leaders have accused Gration of taking the side of the Sudanese government, which has been seeking to dismantle the camps.

Gration denied this week that he is seeking to send Darfur's displaced into harm's way, saying he was simply urging Darfurians and the United Nations to begin preparations for return.

"I am not pushing for anybody to go back right now, because I don't think the situation is secure enough," he said in an interview Tuesday. "I don't want to get into a position where people are trying to return because there is peace and some modicum of security, and then we haven't done the planning to ensure they can move back."

The latest round of violence in Darfur began in February 2003, when two rebel movements took up arms against the Islamic government in Khartoum. In response, the government, backed by local Arab militiamen known as Janjaweed, launched a bloody counterinsurgency operation that the Bush and Obama administrations have termed genocidal.

A recent State Department analysis showed that more than 3,300 villages have been severely damaged or destroyed in the violence. Most of the survivors have either fled to neighboring Chad or crammed into a network of camps in Darfur.

Gration's effort to prod the displaced communities into preparing for a return has been complicated by the loyalty many still profess to an exiled rebel leader, Abdul Wahid al-Nur, who lives in Paris and has refused for years to participate in talks with the Khartoum government.

Gration met recently with leaders of the Kalma camp, which houses more than 100,000 displaced Darfurians. He told them that the violence was easing in Darfur and that he was confident he could negotiate a political settlement by the end of the year, according to notes of the encounter by a U.N. relief coordination team in Darfur known as the Inter-Agency Management Group.

Gration also urged camp leaders to select envoys to represent their interests at ongoing U.S.-backed talks in Doha, Qatar, suggesting that Wahid's boycott would deny them a voice in the process. Your "future is in his hands, and his hands are in Paris," Gration said, according to the briefing notes. "You need someone who is working for you."

Some of the camp leaders, according to the account, said they were unhappy with Gration's assertion that genocide was no longer occurring in Darfur, insisting that government forces and allied militias continue to commit atrocities against residents of Kalma. They said that they would never return to their villages unless the Janjaweed were disarmed.

The U.N. interagency group also expressed concern about Gration's assurance that "peace will prevail in Darfur by the end of the year, and returns have to happen," and described the conditions in Darfur as too dangerous to ensure civilians' safe return. It voiced concern that Gration was linking the fate of Darfurian civilians to political goals.

The U.N. group concluded that there are not enough funds or resources to deliver assistance to the villages people had fled or even to oversee the administrative work of ensuring that those who return are doing so voluntarily.

"In addition," the briefing note states, "it is important to keep in mind that a large part of the IDPS [internally displaced people] might opt for staying in their new settlements over a return to their place of origin."