Word: lankan
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...rows, a group of young children begin their lessons at a makeshift preschool in northern Sri Lanka. They listen to stories, learn their colors, giggle, fidget and cry. The children are among thousands of Tamils who have fled their homes in the past 12 months, as the Sri Lankan army has surged toward the end of a 25-year war against an armed separatist movement, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Government officials and the aid agencies that help maintain the camp where these children live call them "internally displaced persons" (IDPs...
...they don't release us," says a resident of this camp, in the Mannar district on the northwest coast. His family left their home by boat, only to be intercepted by the Sri Lankan navy and then handed over to the army, which brought them to one of several "welfare centers" set up to house Tamils fleeing the Vanni, the jungle areas at the heart of Tiger territory. "We were told, 'Two or three months, and then you can go,'" he says. "But now it's almost one year." There are about 450 people in this camp, including 39 children...
...camps, but TIME obtained firsthand information about them from organizations alarmed by the internment of civilians, a practice that violates internationally accepted conventions on the rules of war. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Human Rights Watch and several other local and international groups have been pushing Sri Lankan authorities for months to open up access. On Jan. 10, the Sri Lankan government instead turned several of the camps into "high-security zones," off limits to everyone except the U.N. and the Red Cross. A recently disclosed proposal to set up "welfare villages" where up to 200,000 IDPs...
...great need to introduce innovative global conventions to exert adequate pressure on NGOs operating in war-affected countries—especially with a colonial history—to absolutely honor the sovereignty of the country. The pressure from the donors alone has proven to be insufficient in the Sri Lankan case...
...absence of independent information sources to assess the situation of IDPs trapped between the warring parties, the global community should empower international organizations like the United Nations to use modern technology such as satellite imagery and reconnaissance aircrafts to verify claims made by various parties. For instance, the Sri Lankan government claimed that the Tamil Tigers had moved more than six heavy artillery guns into the governmentally declared safe zone to invite return fire to civilian neighborhoods. The LTTE, on the other hand, claimed that the government forces had shelled a hospital in Puthukkudyiruppu. This hit the headlines of many...