No more funding for camps’ says UK

Britain has announced that it will withdraw all but emergency funding for camps in Sri Lanka.

The news comes after the British Minister for International Development, Mike Foster, visited the detention camps in Northern Sri Lanka, and criticised the way they were run.

More than 280,000 Tamil civilians are held in about six camps across northern Sri Lanka. They were all displaced by the last stages of the war, and despite numerous promises to release at least 80% within 6 months, the Sri Lankan government has made little efforts to do so. Even the few thousand who have been released are sent on to other camps, and not to their homes, according to reports from the island.

$195 million has already been donated by foreign countries, almost all of which has been spent by the Government on the camps. However, they still need a further $225 million in order to run them, a sum which they cannot afford without any international assistance, press reports said.

 “This has always been one of the few effective tools that Western countries could use to influence the Government’s conduct in the latter stages of the war and its aftermath,” said Jeremy Page, South Asia correspondent for the Times.

“ The question that needs to be asked — if only to avoid crises such as this one — is why it took so long to use it.”

Initially, as the Sri Lankan Government proposed setting up the camps in February, the Department for International Development (DfID) in Britain released a statement saying, “There is no UK government money going into the camps”, whilst also commenting “prolonging the displacement of this vulnerable group of people is not in anyone’s interests”.

This position rapidly changed though, as the entire Vanni population was herded into these camps. The British Government then began to provide millions of pounds in funding through the UN and NGO’s, raised through British tax payers money.

DfID still refuses to use the terms “detention centres” of “concentration camps”, as alleged by many other activists and politicians, instead referring to them as “camps where civilians are detained”.

Now, the UK has announced that once the monsoon is over, it will fund only “life-saving emergency interventions”.

“That’s increasingly going to be the attitude not just of us, but of other donors as well,” Minister Mike Foster reportedly said.

"We are drawing up a fresh appeal to meet our running costs next year that will include funds for livelihood support and resettlement projects," Minister of Disaster Management Mahinda Samarasinghe told a meeting attended by representatives of the Sri Lankan government, various UN agencies, the Red Cross and diplomatic officials in the capital Colombo.

The Minister reiterated that he hoped to raise "much, much more than the $225 million raised this year".

More than 250,000 Tamil civilians remain trapped in these camps, as the October monsoon rapidly approaches.