Sri Lanka - Atleast four deaths reported in barbed-wire camp

by senthil5000 | May 6, 2009 at 04:48 pm

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Tamils kept inside the barbed-wire detention camps face humanatarian issues. The first reported deaths inside the camp was atleast four. There are many such unreported crimes which doesn't get attention.

Among the dead were three women whose bodies are found at bathing area.

Women are also forced to bath in public in front of everyone. After the report UN asked Sri Lanka to keep female security officers at bathing areas in the camp and also to investigate the deaths. It is very unlikely that Sri Lanka investigate this deaths.

This was not informed to the British MP who visited Sri Lanka last week.

Channel 4 reported recently about the sexual abuses, abductions, disappearances, deaths etc happening inside these camps.

At least four Tamil refugees have also died in the internment camps where Sri Lankan authorities are holding almost 190,000 civilians attempting to reach government-held territory, The Times has learnt.

Three women were found dead at a bathing area in one camp on Monday, and a child was crushed to death at another in a stampede last week over scarce food supplies, UN officials said.

The four deaths in the barbed-wire camps over the past week were the first to be reported.
Some Tamil activists and MPs have likened the enclosures to concentration camps. Tamils fleeing the front line are held in them and screened to make sure that they are not rebels.

UN officials said that the three women were found in a camp called Manik Farms Zone 2, where the former Defence Secretary, Des Browne, and four other British MPs were taken on Tuesday to view the humanitarian relief effort.

The British High Commission said that the MPs were not informed about the deaths and did not raise them in meetings with President Rajapaksa and other senior officials.

Gordon Weiss, the UN spokesman in Colombo, said that the UN refugee agency had asked the Government to investigate the deaths and provide female security officers to guard the women’s bathing areas in the camps.

Sri Lankan officials declined to comment on the deaths, but the Government said that it had invited Ban Ki Moon, the UN SecretaryGeneral, to visit the camps.