Donors are increasingly concerned over the conditions in Sri Lanka’s camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) and are less likely to provide funding if they continue to restrict IDPs’ freedom of movement, say UN officials.
The donors are becoming increasingly "frustrated" over the closed nature and conditions of the IDP camps, said Neil Buhne, the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for
Conditions in the illegal detention camps, where over 240,000 Tamil civilians remain forcibly held against their will, have shown no signs of improvement as the threat of flooding from monsoon rains draws ever closer, he said.
“Among the donors we talked to, there is a hesitation in terms of their assistance to camps over the next three or four months if there’s not significant progress on people returning, or larger numbers of people being allowed to leave,” Buhne told the Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN), a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The Menik Farm camp complex, surrounded by barbed wire and 24-hour armed security patrols by the Sri Lankan Army, is the single largest concentration of Tamils in the country.
The camp has expanded rapidly and consists of 10 zones, with a population of nearly a quarter of a million Tamil civilians.
A United Nations Common Humanitarian Action Plan (CHAP) report identified that US$270 million were needed for 15 projects, to which Buhne had said the response had been "pretty good".
However, he carried on to say “donor fatigue is really in respect to continuing these closed camps… Donors have not said no, but they have indicated their concerns to us”.
The Government vowed to release 80% of the camp inmates by the end of the year, but that target now seems increasingly unlikely.
“Large areas where people lived or used for economic activity... have been extensively mined... but demining takes time...” President Mahinda Rajapaksa said at a Ministerial Meeting of the Asian Cooperation Dialogue in
“There have been numerous promises, but there needs to be tangible change. We want concrete action instead of promises,” a senior official from a western donor agency told IRIN.
“If the camps open, then I think there will be a lot of donors willing to give more. But as it stands, the concerns are too great to continue to support a closed camp scenario,” the official added, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“The message we’re getting is that it may be difficult to sustain the amount of funding we’ve had over the last months into 2010,” concluded Mr Buhne.
This follows a recent announcement by the
The British decision was announced after a visit to the Menik Farm complex by the country’s international development minister Mike Foster, who was accompanied on his rare visit by BBC reporters, who were able to document the dire conditions in which the people actually lived.
"There is no water to drink. There is no water to bathe. We are going to die here," were the grim words of one of the many camp inmates.
There have been at least 2 protests by the camp inmates, both of which have been violently suppressed by the Sri Lankan Army.
One incident, according to the UNHCR resulted in several people being injured "including a child who was hit by a stray bullet and is now paralyzed".
