Caring for the people

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With the Security Forces advancing towards the core of the LTTE controlled areas, some of international media machinery now have taken up the path to back the retreating guerrillas. Minister of Disaster Management and Human Rights, Mahinda Samarasinghe, shared his views at the UN Human Rights Council Geneva held recently.

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Despite the conflict in which we have pushed the forces of terror to a small parcel of land in a corner of Sri Lanka, we have not lost sight of our duty to protect and care for our people - the ordinary people who have suffered from the conflict.

Throughout the period of conflict to date the Government of Sri Lanka, complimented in its efforts by the UN and ICRC, continued to send in food and non-food relief items and continuously supported health and education services in areas yet to be cleared of the unlawful presence of the LTTE.

Such commitment and concern, though to us natural, is so unusual that our Ministries of Health and Education have been nominated for the Felix Houphouet-Boigny Peace Prize with the support of UN Agencies and non-governmental associations.

Basic provision

This, I should stress, is on top of the basic provision of food, which the Government has been supplying to the people of the Vanni right through the conflict, ensuring that the displaced were fed while prices were kept stable for the rest.

In the last 13 months, from January 2008 to January 2009, food and non-food relief items totalling nearly 55,000 metric tonnes were sent in. We know that the number of persons reported to be in those areas was grossly inflated. In one instance we discovered that 20,000 families - roughly 80,000 persons - were double counted. However we continued to send in food knowing that some of the supplies were being diverted and that the beneficiaries were the LTTE. In some Government hospitals wards were commandeered and set apart for the exclusive use of the LTTE.

Requested supplies

However we staffed and supplied those institutions with their requested levels of supplies. And even in the present final phase of conflict we have ensured that over 170 metric tonnes of food were supplied to the civilians in the past two weeks to the new safe zone on the coast. Another 40 metric tonnes is scheduled to go in tomorrow.

While we made all these efforts, the well-oiled propaganda machine of the LTTE and its proxies in Sri Lanka and all over the world are ceaselessly spreading canards about mounting civilian casualties.

These spurious stories, targeting our Security Forces since such stories are the last major weapon left to the LTTE, are being fed to international media, well-meaning human rights organisations and decision-makers in Government.

Unfortunately not everyone of these recipients of falsehoods treats the stories with any degree of discernment. As we well know, and the world acknowledges, it is the LTTE that is using the civilians as shields against the advancing Sri Lankan forces, using vicious tactics to prevent them getting to safety.

Treating the Government’s calls and the many international appeals with disdain the LTTE remains unmoved. Many thousands of civilians remain trapped. The Sri Lankan armed forces, on the other hand, are well versed in the laws of war - from the rank and file to the higher echelons.

Humanitarian law

The training in international humanitarian law which became standard practice a decade ago has paid rich dividends, as is apparent from the fact that even what might be termed a worst case scenario, the allegations on TamilNet and other media outlets associated with the LTTE, could not only assert 78 civilians casualties from the actions of ground troops in the last seven months of last year. In the course of over 400 air strikes there were allegations of a score of civilian deaths.

In November, with forty precisely targeted attacks - given the information we were supplied with by civilians sick and tired of brutality - there was just one strike alleged to have caused civilian lives.

After we cited these statistics the allegations have increased, but it will be recognised from all this that we have taken care of our own, and know the importance of abiding by law.

Our troops, who carry handbooks as part of their standard kit on how to conduct themselves in accordance with these norms and standards, know that even a few deaths of civilians are too many, and that is why currently we are holding back our strength even at the cost of increased casualties to our Forces, as Sir John recognised, would be inevitable if we abided by these principles.

Theatre of conflict

Over 36,000 Sri Lankans who were trapped in the Vanni have managed to escape the LTTE and flee the theatre of conflict. These include persons who were patients or casualties evacuated by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

We have housed these Sri Lankans in several hospitals as well as twelve temporary accommodation centres and one more fully facilitated welfare village. We will ensure that our fellow citizens will be provided not only with accommodation and food and sanitation facilities, but also a range of Government services including banks, post offices, schools, health and even recreational facilities, counselling and psychosocial care and vocational training.

These persons who flee the LTTE and arrive in safe areas will go through a gradual process of emergency care, accommodation, stabilization and eventually re-settlement. This policy will also apply to those persons displaced prior to 2006 and we are grateful to Professor Walter Kaelin who assisted us in conducting a national consultation on protracted displacement in September last year.

The outcome of that consultation, we expect, will be a plan of action that can resolve this long outstanding issue for many Sri Lankans driven from their homes by the conflict over a nearly twenty-year span of time. We will continue to work with the Representative of the Secretary General on the Human Rights of IDPs and with UNHCR and UNDP in Sri Lanka who are proving us with valuable support in this important area.

It should be noted that the possibility of finding a solution for this protracted problem will be facilitated by the elimination of LTTE influence, since a number of these long-term IDPs were Muslims drive out of the North of Sri Lanka by the LTTE nearly 20 years ago, with successive governments not seeking actively to solve this problem because of the implications for what were thought essential negotiations with the LTTE.

We are working closely with UN agencies and other partners to make the conditions in the welfare villages as comfortable as possible. UNHCR is even providing the security forces coming into contact with these persons training on the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement.

Capacities

We expect the flow of persons seeking safety to grow exponentially in the coming days when the capacities of the LTTE are degraded to such an extent that they are unable to prevent civilians from moving freely. The Government is confident of its ability to care for all these persons - Sri Lankan citizens - and ultimately return them to their places of origin, guaranteeing them a stable and secure future. That future can only be assured if massive development is undertaken, infrastructure restored and most important, democratic institutions at the local government and provincial administration levels are reinvigorated and re-established.