Sri Lanka orders aid agencies out of north
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The Sri Lankan government has ordered all aid workers to leave territory held by the Tamil Tiger rebels in the north of the country. The army is pressing ahead with an offensive aimed at crushing the Tigers, and the government says it can't guarantee the aid workers' safety. Aid agencies say tens of thousands of people have fled their homes in recent weeks.
Presenter: Tom Fayle
Speaker: Paul O'Callaghan, executive director of the Australian Council for International Development
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O'CALLAGHAN: Yes we have 25 member organisations that have been working with communities in the north and the south of Sri Lanka over many decades, and of course our principle concern is to do with the humanitarian needs of people in those communities. Over the last several years the situation in the north of the country has deteriorated during the civil war. Listeners will be aware that this has been running for 25 years now, this civil war, based on political disputes between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities, and hasn't been resolved unfortunately and we believe that it's regrettable that there's an effort to resolve it purely by military means, because it's unlikely to be successful. But the key thing from our perspective is that the humanitarian situation now, for well over 150,000 people is extreme, it's an extreme situation even before the decision yesterday by the government to exclude foreign aid workers.
We had a critical food and water shortage for many people, we're talking here about currently tens of thousands of children who are starving according to UN estimates, 40 per cent of all children in this area are currently malnourished and don't have access to any prospect of food. That will deteriorate dramatically over the coming weeks in the absence of humanitarian workers. Clean water is not available in many areas and medicine has been deprived from these communities by the Sri Lankan government, in fact by not allowing medicines through to hospitals and clinics in the area.
So this situation is likely to become a bloodbath in the next several weeks. Apart from the direct military conflict we would expect that many, many people will die or be in extreme circumstances if humanitarian workers are not able to access this area.
FAYLE: And how do you interpret the government's statement that it doesn't want to see a repeat of the 2006 massacre of 17 local aid workers employed by a French relief agency?
O'CALLAGHAN: Well the circumstances around that particular incident, of an aerial bombing of a particular humanitarian facility, have never been completely made clear. But this has been a civil war, it's like every civil war, it's an awful business. Our concern is that as the government now decides to proceed with a military campaign into the north of the country that the more than 150,000 already-displaced people be protected from the impact of that military activity, that they are allowed to get access to medicines, that they can access food and water, that they don't become collateral damage so to speak. It seems to us that if you exclude all foreign humanitarian workers then you won't have any, not only the immediate support for those communities but also those who can actually see what's happening on the ground.
FAYLE: And is it clear that this new ruling applies to locally employed personnel of foreign relief organisations as well?
O'CALLAGHAN: It's not clear to us based on the media reports. We haven't seen a formal statement from the Sri Lankan government, but we would simply urge them to reconsider this, particularly in the light of the commitments they made at the United Nations Human Rights Commission only a few weeks ago. They were obligations that they undertook to protect civilians in the context of a review of the government of Sri Lanka, which had received the highest number of complaints of any government in the United Nations Human Rights Commission over recent years, and it undertook at that point to make special efforts to ensure that the situation for citizens who are not involved in the conflict would be taken care of, and that those citizens would be able to be safe and obtain food and water and medicine and so on. So this does worry us - that we could see very quickly a very large scale disaster occurring, quite apart if you like from what the civil war is directly involved in.
