Word: vanni
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Many thousands of civilians have been forced to flee since fighting started in March 2008, when the Sri Lankan army began advancing on areas held by the Tigers in the northern region known as the Vanni. Over 65,000 civilians have since braved the fighting and escaped to safety behind army lines, and another 10,000 sick and wounded civilians and caregivers have been evacuated by sea by the International Committee of the Red Cross...
...other parts of the region. "He is surrounded by the army," says Vinayagamoorthi Muralitharan, previously known as Colonel Karuna when he served as the LTTE's eastern military commander. "It is now almost impossible to escape undetected. All the top Tiger leaders are still very much in the Vanni [the region where the fighting is taking place]." Muralitharan defected from the Tigers in 2004 and formed a breakaway faction that supports the government...
...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 under the age of 5. The families live...
...country," says an official with an international aid agency. In the best case, the camps, under the monitoring eye of U.N. agencies, will be used as holding stations where the army can weed out any LTTE fighters who remain in hiding, before allowing civilians to return to the Vanni to rebuild the north. "In the worst-case scenario, they establish concentration camps for Tamils," the official says. There have been no reports of mass killings, but aid groups and human-rights workers say that they are troubled by reports of disappearances and that they cannot monitor the safety of detainees...
...ways," says Lakshman Hulugalle, a spokesman for the Sri Lankan Defense Ministry. "In Iraq, how many innocent people were killed?" Hulugalle says any concerns raised about the army's practices should also acknowledge the abuses of the LTTE and that there are many. Indeed there are. People from the Vanni say they left home not just to escape the fighting but also to get away from the forced recruitment of their children and from forced labor, which the Tigers used to build a massive, booby-trapped trench around parts of their stronghold in the jungle...