The Hindu : Front Page : 41,685 Tamils sent back home from Sri Lanka relief camps

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Friday, Oct 23, 2009
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41,685 Tamils sent back home from Sri Lanka relief camps

B. Muralidhar Reddy

The rest of the people to be sent back gradually

COLOMBO: The Sri Lanka government on Thursday morning released 41,685 Tamils belonging to 12,000 families displaced during Eelam War IV and housed since then in government-run relief camps in the north of the country.

They are being sent back to their original villages Vavuniya, Mannar, Kilinochchi and Mullaithivu districts, transported home in government buses.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa had assured the 10-member delegation of ruling-combine MPs from Tamil Nadu, which visited Sri Lanka from October 10 to 15, that 58,000 internally-displaced persons (IDPs) in the camps would be sent back to their native places within a fortnight.

Prior to Thursday’s release of the 41,685 people, there were in all 2,50,000 Tamil refugees in the camps. The government plans to release the remaining IDPs gradually. Progress on their release is linked to de-mining work, certification by the U.N. and creation of basic infrastructure for people to return to normal life.

At a function in Mannar town, 6,631 displaced persons were released. Each of them was given Sri Lankan Rs. 5,000 in cash and a savings bank account with a deposit of Rs. 20,000. A packet containing rations to last six months, an emergency kit, roofing and bedsheets were supplied to each. The packets bear a message displayed in Tamil and English that they are gifts from the people of India.

Basil Rajapaksa, Senior Adviser to the President, expressed the government’s gratitude to New Delhi and the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu for their support in resettling the displaced Tamils.

He quoted President Rajapaksa as saying that the government would do all it could to help the resettled people return to normal life.

“All infrastructure on the land would be kept intact. The giant irrigation tank in Mannar district would be ready by November 15 after renovation and we estimate that more than 11,000 acres of paddyfields will benefit from the tank water,” he told the gathering.

He added that the Sri Lanka government has created a record by re-settling so many people in such a short time. “I challenge any of the INGOs and NGOs to dispute our assertion. A number of [the] 6,000 victims of the Hurricane Katrina of the 2005 in the U.S. continue to live in make-shift houses.”

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