Sri Lanka to allow displaced civilians to return home
Updated
Sri Lanka has promised to free nearly 140,000 Tamil civilians being held in detention camps by Tuesday next week, and to close the controversial facilities down altogether by the end of January. Last week the UN's humanitarian chief John Holmes paid a visit to Sri Lanka, and urged the resettlement process to be speeded up. Around 300,000 Tamils were forced into the squalid camps, during the last brutal months of the military's campaign against the Tamil Tiger rebels. Around half have gone home, but up to now Colombo had been resisting freeing the rest, saying it wanted to weed out any former rebels, and clear landmines from villages and towns in the north-east.
Presenter: Corinne Podger
Speaker: Gordon Weiss, United Nations spokesman for Sri Lanka
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WEISS: It's unlikely that everyone will be out of the camps by the 1st of December but the President of Sri Lanka gave an assurance to the Secretary General that they were aiming to get most people out by the end of January. Certainly whereas a month ago we pretty much had the same number of people in the camps that have been there for some months, the last month saw a huge speeding up in the return process and something like half of the people who were in the great big camp at Manik Farm have been returned to their places of origin. So the returns process has really gathered pace and indeed the end of January is a much more achievable target.
PODGER: One of the holdups of course has been the need to get rid of landmines in northeast Sri Lanka planted during the conflict. I understand the Sri Lankan government has appealed to the UN for more help in that regard?
WEISS: The UN has been providing help as have a lot of bilateral donors, including Australia who have provided equipment to the government of Sri Lanka. The mines problem with Sri Lanka is going to be around for a long, long time. The question really is mapping out where the mines are, surveying it and roping off those areas as areas of Sri Lanka are demined in order to allow as many people as possible to go home. So that's pretty much what people are aiming for. The mines problem is like many in conflict zones, it's going to be around for many years to come.
PODGER: Humanitarian aid to the camps has come mostly from foreign governments and aid groups and we've heard some concerns from Britain for example that foreign aid workers aren't being allowed to assist with the resettlement process and haven't been apprised of the government's plans. Is that a concern shared by the United Nations?
WEISS: Well there's been a lack of transparency all throughout and that has not been what is considered good practice under international practice. Nevertheless this return process there's similarities with previous large-scale return process which occurred in 2007 after the government had wrested control of the east from the LTTE, in which in a very short space of time and with equal concerns being expressed from the international community, about 130-thousand people were returned home. So it's something of a practice of the government of Sri Lanka. It's not satisfactory, we're not happy with it but nevertheless people are going home and that is a priority at this stage.
PODGER: Here in Australia of course you'd be aware there's a lot of attention on Sri Lankan civilians fleeing the country and attempting to enter Australia illegally by boat. Some are certainly Tamil civilians, so there's an interest here in Sri Lanka doing all it can to stabilise and resettle Tamil civilians. Is that happening or is there more that needs to be done?
WEISS: Well I think it's opaque still. One of the very early calls from the Secretary General after the conclusion of the war was that there's be a process of political reconciliation put in place in order to take the wind out of any future insurgency, and we're waiting to see what's happening, whether that is going to happen. We've entered a very unstable period in domestic politics in Sri Lanka. The Armed Forces Chief General Sarath Fonseka has resigned his post and it looks as though he's going to put himself up as a candidate for the presidential race which is going to come probably this coming year. And that has destabilised the domestic political scene. And so what we might wished to have seen at the moment is a real plan being put forward for political reconciliation between the two major ethnic groups; the Sinhalese and the Tamils in Sri Lanka, seem to have been put on the backburner at the moment and we're really waiting to see whether that will happen.
