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UN strongly warns Lanka over continued holding of civilians in refugee camps |
The United Nations has strongly warned Sri Lanka that the world body cannot continue funding indefinitely the huge refugee camps in the north of the country, and asked
the authorities to allow the hundreds of Tamil civilians to leave. The senior
UN official in the country hardened their stand when they said the camps should
be a last resort for civilians with nowhere else to go. Sri Lanka faces increasing
international criticism over its treatment of the estimated 300,000 civilians
held in camps, with the EU poised to cancel a trade concession worth one billion
dollars to the government, The Independent reports. Humanitarian aid groups have
complained that conditions in the vast Menik Farms camp, where most people remain
behind razor wire are still inadequate four months after the decades-long civil
war ended. "Nothing has changed over the past three months for the people in the
camps. They are overcrowded, with poor sanitary conditions and inadequate health
care. There are concerns about what may happen when the monsoon rains arrive in
the next couple of months," the UK-based Catholic Fund for Overseas Development
said on Friday. The UN's senior official in Sri Lanka, Neil Buhne, told the BBC:
"The best solution is, obviously, that as many people leave as soon as possible;
and, for the people who have no place else to go, that the site can become an
open one." UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has also said that he intends to speak
directly to Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa to protest against the decision
to expel the spokesman for Unicef, accused by the government of acting as "propagandist"
for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. He will also raise the issue of two
UN workers in the Tamil-dominated north arrested in June. |
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