Providing permanent shelter for IDPs:

FM seeks UK, French assistance

Humanitarian organizations working in the North have been accorded needs based access to the Internally Displaced Persons’ (IDP) welfare camps, to ensure the unhindered delivery of assistance, explained Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama at the trilateral meeting held with his French and British counterparts, Bernard Kouchner and David Milliband at the UN Headquarters in New York on Friday, states Foreign Affairs Ministry press release.

While noting that the conditions in the welfare villages having improved, Bogollagama elaborated in detail the progressive reduction of the numbers of the displaced in various camps in the Vanni and their current returns to Jaffna, Mannar and the Eastern Province.

Dismissing the misperception of returnees being relocated to other closed facilities, he outlined that they were interim sites in Jaffna for housing them until they readied their places of ownership for resettlement which generally would take about three weeks.

The Minister called on France and the UK to assist in providing permanent shelter which will facilitate the requirements of the returnees who had left Jaffna for the Vanni over a decade ago.