The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon yesterday visited a mass displacement camp packed with Tamil civilians as he appealed to Sri Lanka's triumphant government to "heal the wounds" after three decades of civil war. As he surveyed the beleaguered and shell-shocked refugees held there and as the army searched for Tamil Tiger fighters among them, he would not have found time to talk to Sopika, aged 10.
Sopika is one of at least 250,000 Tamil civilians being held in Menik Farm in the north of the country. Barbed-wire fences encircle the endless rows of white tents, preventing civilians from getting out and journalists from getting in, as the government continues to prevent the stories of Sopika and thousands like her from being told. (Read Menik’s story on The Observer website)
Conditions inside the camps are squalid: food and water are in desperately short supply and even the government admits the toilets are inadequate.
Others imprisoned behind the wire have their own tales of hardship and horror. According to private UN documents, at least 7,000 civilians were killed in the final months of fighting in the war. The Red Cross says it evacuated 13,769 sick and wounded people and their relatives from the war zone.
"It is a great relief that the war is over, but peace has come at a very high price, with thousands of civilians killed, including large numbers of children," said James Elder, the Unicef spokesman in Sri Lanka. "There is no end to the gut-wrenching stories of death and destruction that scar these children." - More on The Observer