DESPITE the end of the long drawn conflict, Sri Lanka will recruit 50,000 personnel to increase security in areas captured when Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were defeated last month, the military has said.

“We are planning to recruit at least 50,000 for army, navy, air force and police,” Keheliya Rambukwella, defence spokesman and a government minister, said in the first security media briefing since the end of the war.

Foreign diplomats have questioned the need for an increased post-war military, already boosted since 2005 to the size needed to finish off the LTTE’s de facto standing army of fighters, replete with artillery, boats and planes.

Stating that the LTTE held more than 1600 square kilometers of territory as well as two-thirds of the coast in the north before end of the war, Rambukwella said: “Now these areas have to be maintained and administered by troops,” Rambukwella said.

 “We need the security forces and police to be in action to safeguard our country.”

Sri Lanka’s military and police, with a combined strength of 350,000, won one of the Asia’s longest modern wars and declared total victory over the LTTE.

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse has told a Cabinet meeting that he would not be averse to Canada and the European countries granting asylum to the internally displaced Tamil civilians.

However, according to Daily Mirror newspaper, Rajapakse told his ministers that he would not allow Tamils to go to India anymore because that country was not willing to accommodate them.

“Canada has pledged to accept any number of IDPs (Interanlly Displaced People). I do not mind these countries putting up visa offices in the welfare camps to facilitate people willing to leave the country,” Daily Mirror quoted Rajapakse as saying.

According to the paper, Rajapakse charged foreign diplomatic missions of making malicious allegations against Sri Lanka. 

Rajapakse pointed out that the US State Department had now put up a news item regarding some Sri Lankan soldiers who were facing charges during their peace keeping mission in Haiti a few months ago, Daily Mirror further said.  

The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) is calling on the government of Sri Lanka to mount a thorough investigation of the murders of three Members of Parliament, two of them Tamils. 

The IPU's Human Rights Committee, which has wrapped up its latest session, has examined cases of abuse of some 300 MPs in 29 countries. 

The Inter-Parliamentary Union says the Sri Lankan government no longer has any reason for not investigating the murders of the Parliamentarians now that its long-running civil war with the Tamil Tigers is over.

Chair of the IPU's Human Rights Committee, Canadian Senator, Sharon Carstairs, says the government has always maintained it was unable to investigate the murders because they occurred in LTTE-held territory. She says that excuse no longer exists.

Tamil Parliamentarians are subject to arbitrary arrest, harassment and intimidation, she told Voice of America radio.

She says her Committee is concerned about the situation of 12 Tamil Parliamentarians.

She says they essentially have been stripped of their rights of freedom of movement and of their ability to perform their legislative duties.

She says the Tamil Parliamentarians are reluctant to leave the capital, Colombo, because their security is not guaranteed.

"So, there is great fear among the Tamil Parliamentarians," Carstairs said.

"So, what we hope from Sri Lanka at this point is to get a new signal from them that Tamil Parliamentarians will have freedom of movement, they will have adequate security, they will be full participants of the government of Sri Lanka because they are duly elected Parliamentarians." 

The Sri Lankan Governments thinking that “the concept of Tamil autonomy or freedom or even culture should be beaten to its knees and never rise again” can be compared to the actions of Joseph Stalin, said leading Australian Pediatrician Dr John Whitehall, describing government internment facilities as “concentration camps”, and saying the imprisonment of 300,000 refugees was much more sinister than he originally thought.

"The concept that you can indefinitely incarcerate a population to change their thinking is frightening," he observed.

Speaking at a forum held in Parliament on 17 June, discussing human rights in Sri Lanka and Australia’s need to act, Whitehall, the director of Townsville Hospital's Neonatal Unit who visited Kilinochchi in 2004 to train medical workers, also described the LTTEs former governance over the traditional Tamil homeland as an established civil administration.

"In my observation, The Tigers were not similar to the Vietcong, whom I had observed from a distance when we worked in Vietnam many years before. They [the Tigers] did not emerge from holes in the ground at night to do their business. This was in fact a practicing established civil administration. It wasn't perfect of course. It was to say the least autocratic. Nevertheless, there was the ability to discuss [...]," said the doctor who has co-authored a book, 'War and Medicine', a collection of short stories from the medical practitioners in the North-East.

Highlighting conversations with LTTE officials, over the future plans of improving governance if autonomy was achieved, Whitehall said support for the liberation movement was founded within the “concept of self preservation of their race, of their religion, of their culture”.

“The people were thinking we want our freedom, we want autonomy, we want respect of our culture. These things are not easily or ever eradicated. But the concept that you can indefinitely incarcerate a population to change their thinking is frightening” Whitehall said, comparing Sri Lankas imprisonment of refugees to Joseph Stalin’s execution and starvation of thousands of Ukrainians.

Urging the Australian Government to involve itself in the crisis “for the humanity of it as a nation”, Whitehall said allegations of war crimes by human rights commissions made the need for access to camps vital.

In a wide ranging address, Dr Whitehall also highlighted the role of China, Cuba and Russia in the United Nations Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) regarding the "pusillanimous decision by the human rights council to ratify the behaviour of the Sri Lankan government", which has established an "international precedent that these countries can wage ruthless and unrelenting war on their minorities using all kinds of weapons to do the job."

A Coalition of six US-based Human Rights Organizations in a letter to U.S. President Obama wrote: "[t]o address abuses associated with the recent fighting [in Sri Lanka's north], there is an urgent need for an independent, international commission of inquiry into many credible allegations of laws of war violations, including possible war crimes, by both sides, as well as illegitimate detentions. Mr. President, we urge you to publicly call for an international commission of inquiry and to take necessary steps to achieve it. We also urge you to take steps for the full protection of internally displaced persons, including independent access to camps, former areas of conflict and to conflict-affected civilians by humanitarian and human rights organizations and the media."

The Coalition included the Carter Center, American Jewish Council through its Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), International League for Human Rights (ILHR), Freedom House (FH), and Amnesty International (AI) representatives signed the letter.

"Despite repeated warnings by several international organizations of impending mass killings of civilians and despite strong statements of concern by you and several other world leaders, more than 20,000 civilians are reported to have been killed. The Times of London and Le Monde have published investigations, based on reliable data, and suggested that most of the civilian deaths were caused as a result of shelling by the Sri Lankan government," the Coalition said in the letter.

The letter warned that "[t]he failure of the international community to take concrete action to protect civilians in Sri Lanka has given the green light to regimes around the world and has signaled that there is nothing that the international community will do when a government kills its own people under the cover of sovereignty."

On the 300,000 Tamil civilians still held in internment camps, the HR Organizations appealed to "urgently address the plight of those in de facto internment camps and to initiate action to hold accountable those responsible for the mass killings. There are reports that some in the camps have already died from starvation or malnutrition....there are consistent reports of widespread and serious human rights violations facing the displaced people, including enforced disappearance, extrajudicial executions, torture and other ill-treatment, forced recruitment by paramilitary groups and sexual violence."

Pointing out that "the Sri Lankan government’s record on investigating serious human rights abuses is poor and impunity has been a persistent problem," and that "[t]here have been serious ongoing violations of human rights and a backlog of cases of enforced disappearance and unlawful killings that run to tens of thousands," the letter drew attention to the the past failed efforts to address violations through the establishment of ad hoc mechanisms in Sri Lanka, such as presidential commissions of inquiry, the letter urged Obama to take steps to initiate an international inquiry into "allegations of laws of war violations, including possible war crimes, by both sides."

In the background of the failure of the United Nations to take any punitive action and realizing that effective leverage can only be exercised by the U.S., the letter said, "[i]t is now imperative that the United States assume the leadership necessary to mobilize the international community to protect the surviving civilians and to hold accountable those responsible for mass atrocities. Failure to do so would encourage governments to commit mass atrocities without fear of consequence. That is why your immediate action is important at this juncture," the letter said.

MEDIA groups in Sri Lanka have urged the government to scrap moves to re-establish a media panel which could jail journalists. The reactivation of the Press Council is being seen as a means to control the media in a country where concerns have been voiced about intimidation and pressure on reporters critical of the government.                

The government's move to revive the powerful Press Council was announced by the Sri Lankan media minister, Lakshman Yapa Abeywardena.

The Press Council was staffed with government appointees. It had the authority to hear complaints about inaccurate reporting or defamation and fine and jail journalists if found guilty.  It ceased operations in 2002, after it was criticized as an anti-democratic tool to suppress criticism of the government.

The government says it reactivated the body after a parliament committee found that council salaries were still being paid and office space was still being rented. Minister Abeywardena says the media has nothing to fear, and it has no intention of gagging the press or imposing restrictions on it.

But the move to restore the Press Council has provoked concern among journalists in Sri Lanka.

Seven media bodies, headed by the Editors Guild, have in a joint statement to President Mahinda Rajapakse, saying that a media culture cannot be based on placing charges against journalists, fining them or sending them to jail.

Vincent Borsell of the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders calls the decision to restore the Press Council another step to suppress the independent media.

"It's very dangerous and also is unfortunately a new step in all this campaign against free media in Sri Lanka," he said. "I think the government should consider it again."

The Press Council is being considered in the wake of a number of threats and attacks on journalists who have been critical of the government and its handling of a war against Tamil Tiger rebels.

The war ended last month, raising hopes the situation would improve. But some people fear that may not be the case.

Just two weeks after the war ended, a strong advocate of freedom of expression, Poddala Jayantha, was abducted and assaulted in Colombo. 

Vincent Borsell says there has been a spate of attacks on journalists, in recent years, dealing a blow to investigative and independent reporting.  

"Since the war has restarted in 2007, there is a lot of incidents," he said. "It starts from killings, beatings, kidnappings and death threats. But it also goes on to pressure on the media, so it means now there is no let us say direct censorship in countries like Burma, but there is a huge self-censorship, especially on all the issues related to the army, and all sensitive issues. They are victims of self censorship on issues that were very well covered by the media."   

The government denies any interference with the media and says that police are investigating the attacks on journalists. It also says it is prepared to discuss any changes to the Press Council suggested by rights groups.

Amnesty International says at least 14 members of news organizations have been killed by suspected government paramilitaries and the defeated Tamil Tiger rebels since 2006. Twenty journalists critical of the government are said to have fled the country. 

Sri Lankan authorities appear to be building permanent camps to house many of the 300,000 refugees from the last phase of the war with the Tamil Tigers, despite promising to resettle 80 per cent of them by the end of the year.

Aid workers have told The Times that permanent buildings are being erected at the Manik Farm site where the UN says that 230,000 of the refugees are being held after the Tigers’ defeat in May.

The aid workers said that they were able to do humanitarian work in four of six zones at Manik Farm but were barred from two others, including the mysteriously named Zone Zero.

“We’re not allowed to work in these areas,” said Rajinda Jayasinghe, the head of Relief International in Sri Lanka. “But you can see from the outside proper brick-walled buildings going up.”

Some aid workers said that the site was fast becoming Sri Lanka’s second biggest city after the capital, Colombo, with schools, clinics and banks, where refugees have deposited more than a billion rupees.

“In zones where the Government works there are permanent shelters: cement floors, timber structures, corrugated iron roofs,” said one aid worker, who asked not to be identified. “These are designed to last years.”

The Government originally proposed holding the Tamil refugees in “welfare villages” for up to three years to check that they were not Tigers, and to clear their villages of mines.

After donor nations protested and Tamil MPs and activists compared the barbed wire enclosures to concentration camps, the Government promised to resettle 80 per cent of the refugees by the end of this year.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the Defence Secretary, who is also the President’s brother, renewed the promise last week. Aid workers said that the new structures violated UN guidelines on temporary refugee shelters, and suggested that the Government meant to hold refugees for much longer.

UN sources also said that the Government had been using refugees to build the permanent structures without paying them — a possible violation of UN guiding principles on internal displacement.

Refugees involved in the building had asked to be paid but the Government refused, the UN sources said.

Aid groups’ concerns over the buildings grew last month when the Government proposed giving people in each tent two bags of cement to build their own floors, a leaked document obtained by The Times shows.

At a meeting on June 15, a group of non-governmental organisations providing shelter in the camps expressed “strong reservations” about the plans, according to the document. They said that the proposed concrete flooring was too expensive, provided no protection against flooding and violated UN guidelines on temporary refugee shelters.

“The use of concrete flooring is inconsistent with temporary structures and is one of the recognised criteria of a semi-permanent structure,” the document said. “The use of concrete or screed flooring suggests a commitment by the SLA [Sri Lankan authorities] to increased longevity of the IDP [internally displaced person] sites.”

A spokesman for the Sri Lankan High Commission in London denied that the Government was building permanent structures in the camps.

“Concrete is laid only for the safety and to maintain cleanliness. It should not be considered as an indication for permanency,” he said.

“People will be resettled as fast as possible. [The] 180-day target is a huge challenge. However, the Government will accomplish it with the help of the UN and friendly foreign countries.”

He said that the Government had already resettled 600 families and the army had cleared 100,000 landmines.

UN officials say that those resettled are mostly the elderly and children, and foreign demining agencies say that they have been given access so far to only about 30 sq km (11½ sq miles) of the former conflict zone.

Three Tamil College students from Canada are on a 1000-mile walk from Chicago to Washington D.C. to "raise awareness with the general American population to what is happening in Sri Lanka,” Illinois Times reported. More than 50 people assembled on the steps of the Capitol Friday, wearing tan, gray and blue T-shirts that carried their message: Break the Silence in Sri Lanka, the paper added.

"Despite the afternoon’s stifling heat, these Sri Lankan natives and descendants showed up to rally behind Kannan Sreekantha, Vijay Sivaneswaran and Ramanan Thirukketheeswaranathan, three college students who are walking from Chicago to Washington, D.C., to call attention to the humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka," the paper said.

The crowd – with members young enough to ride in strollers and old enough to be grandfathers – chanted “Stop the genocide” and “We want justice.” They wielded American flags and handmade signs that reported the number of deaths, rapes and detainees in the war-torn island country. They even hit the street, passing out fliers to drivers stopped at the intersection of Second and Capitol, according to Illinois Times.

From Springfield, the three men will travel east through Indianapolis; Cincinnati; Dayton, Ohio; Columbus, Ohio; Cambridge, Mass. Wheeling, W.V.; and Pittsburgh before reaching Washington, D.C., during the week of Aug. 9., the paper further said. 

What kind of violence has the Sri Lankan state been committing against its Tamil civilian population as the island‘s civil war ended; on what scale and with what intentions? Martin Shaw explores the difficult terrain where war, atrocity and genocide meet.

The civil war in Sri Lanka is receding from the international headlines, as crises in Iran and celebrity deaths occupy the media's limited space and attention-span.

A very large number of its Tamil victims are still, more than six weeks after the fighting ended, confined in government forces in a complex of forty camps in the north east of the country.

An estimated 280,000 civilians - originally displaced from their homes by the fighting between the Sri Lankan military and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers / LTTE), and in some cases fleeing from the brutal regime in the LTTE's former "liberated" zone - are being held, generally against their will.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa, in his "victory speech", told Sri Lanka's parliament that "our heroic forces have sacrificed their lives to protect Tamil civilians", and he took "personal responsibility" for protecting Tamils.

Yet his government is now scandalously confining this huge population - who have already suffered not only from the LTTE but from Sri Lankan bombardments which caused probably tens of thousands of deaths and injuries - in squalid conditions.

The government has officially backtracked, under international pressure, on plans to hold the displaced, while screening them for potential "terrorists", for up to three years; it now says that 80% will be resettled by the end of 2009.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) comments: "The government's history of restricting the rights of displaced persons through rigid pass systems and strict restrictions on leaving the camps heightens concerns that they will be confined in camps much longer, possibly for years."

In the shadows

The eruption in Iran has in a twisted way done the Sri Lankan government a service.

In any case, Colombo has been ruthless in restricting international journalists and rights organisations: in May 2009 even the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was barred from Menik Farm, the largest camp, and Channel 4's Nick Paton Walsh was deported.

Sinhala nationalism remains oppressively dominant within the majority population, and critics of the government face an atmosphere of intimidation and even terror: Sri Lankan journalists have frequently been murdered, assaulted and detained.

Although human-rights organisations and western governments have continued to protest at the situation, the Sri Lankan government has found friends in the United Nations’s new Human Rights Council; it was able to pass a resolution there on 27 May 2009 praising its own commitment to human rights (endorsed by such notable bastions of freedom as China, Cuba, Russia, Pakistan and Egypt).

The vigorous campaigns by members of the Tamil diasporas have ensured that the situation has not been entirely forgotten, but the interned Tamils don't have the mobile-phone access that (in the early post-election stages at least) so embarrassed the Iranian regime.

There are some pictures of the camps on the internet, but no iconic images of Tamil suffering have entered the commercial, established media in the manner of Iran's Neda Soltani - or indeed of Fikret Alic, the emaciated prisoner pictured behind barbed-wire in the Trnopolje camp in Bosnia in summer 1992.

A dire predicament

It is often said that pictures tell their own story.

However what is important is the media narrative and the momentum behind the issue: in both the Iranian and Bosnian cases the crises were much more strongly established in the dominant media (and the exposure of the experiences of Neda Soltani and Fikret Alic) fed this.

In the case of Sri Lanka, sadly, the level and intensity of coverage - despite the impressive Tamil campaigns - has not matched these.

Moreover, what was important in Bosnia was that Trnopolje was described as a "concentration" camp - so the image facilitated the connection between the atrocious treatment of Bosnian Muslim prisoners and the murderous history of concentration camps in Europe under Nazism.

The Bosnian-Serbian government that was responsible for Trnopolje naturally disputed this appellation, describing it merely as a holding centre for "refugees"; today the lowest-common-denominator descriptor seems to be a "detention" camp.

The Sri Lankan government also prefers its camps to be seen as "refugee" camps.

However once people are detained, camps are clearly more than that; and where there is a sustained policy of concentrating detainees then the term "concentration camp" applies.

In war, these camps - invented at the beginning of the 20th century to describe the enclosures in which the Spanish detained Cubans and the British detained Boerfarmers and their families during the South African wars - are usually designed to corral a civilian population seen as potentially sympathetic to a guerrilla enemy (as Tamils evidently are still seen despite the LTTE's defeat).

Totalitarian regimes, including Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, have also used camps to concentrate other civilian groups - actual and potential political opponents, trade unionists, and ethnic "enemies" such as Jews.

The complication in using the "concentration camp" category is that such regimes went on to develop their camps into something more - in the Soviet case, labour camps, in the Nazi case, extermination camps.

Clearly, not all concentration camps are "death" camps in the Nazi sense; but all concentration camps tend to produce death, as well as widespread physical and mental harm.

Since their premise is enmity towards the interned civilians, the history of concentration-camps has been marked, from the Boerwar onwards, by callous disregard for their welfare, and often worse.

As Human Rights Watch remarked of the Sri Lankan situation on 11 June 2009: "Virtually all camps are overcrowded, some holding twice the number recommended by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Food distribution is chaotic, there are shortages of water, and sanitation facilities are inadequate. Camp residents do not have access to proper medical services and communicable diseases have broken out in the camps."

What is more, "the military camp administration has imposed numerous restrictions on humanitarian organizations working in the camps, such as limiting the number of vehicles and staff members that can enter the camps, which has delayed the provision of much-needed aid. The military does not allow organizations into the camps to conduct protection activities, and a ban on talking to the camp residents leaves them further isolated.'"

If reports of violence and disappearances are added to this, the situation of the interned Tamils appears dire.

A "rolling" genocide?

The western fixation with the Nazi holocaust means that there is an obvious political temptation to link all anti-civilian violence with the Nazi model.

The pro-Tamil United States-based academic Francis Boyle, in his posts, sees a sixty-year "rolling" genocide in which Sinhalese governments of Ceylon (the country's name at independence in 1948) and Sri Lanka have sought "to annihilate the Tamils and to steal their lands and natural resources.

This is what Hitler and the Nazis called lebensraum - "living space" for the Sinhala at the expense of the Tamils."

In this perspective, the camp system is all too clearly the latest stage of genocide - although other Tamil advocates date genocide back to the anti-Tamil pogroms in 1983 in response to which the LTTE campaign began.

The idea of "rolling" genocide, applied by Madeleine Albright to distinguish the Sudanese campaign in Darfur from the "volcanic" genocide in Rwanda, suggests discontinuity in a history of genocide - albeit, in the Darfur case, within two or three years rather than six decades.

However in many cases, there may be genocidal "moments" (as the genocide historian, Dirk Moses, has suggested of colonialism) in stories of oppression - decades or even centuries long - which do not, taken as a whole, constitute processes of genocide (see A Dirk Moses ed., Empire,Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History [Berghahn, 2008]).

There may be sporadic genocidal massacres, rapes and expulsions, or even sustained campaigns, at particular points in these histories.

Something like this seems to be true in the Sri Lankan case: no one doubts the long history of Sinhalese nationalist oppression against the Tamil community since independence, which includes moments like 1983 which can be plausibly seen as genocidal outbursts.

But the history as a whole is not simply one of genocide.

Indeed the dedication of the LTTE to armed struggle against the Sri Lankan state helped turn a history of oppression and resistance into one of brutal insurgency and counterinsurgency (see The trouble with guns: Sri Lanka, South Africa, Ireland", 10 June 2009).

We know however that counterinsurgency is one of the most common contexts of genocidal violence.

It remains to be seen - since most of the survivors are locked away from the world's media and the Sri Lankan government is blocking all attempts at independent investigation of the recent violence - how far the Sri Lankan army went in the direction of deliberate atrocity as opposed to brutal disregard for civilians.

Here, indiscriminate allegations of a long-running Sri Lankan genocide paradoxically blunt the real questions: what kind of violence did the Sri Lankan state commit against its Tamil civilian population in the concluding prosecution of the war, on what scale and with what intentions?

The continuing concentration of over 250,000 people in the camps both blocks the search for answers to these questions, and itself constitutes a most serious crime.

If the doors are not opened quickly, this will raise questions of whether the government seriously intends a restoration of Tamil society in the conquered zone.

This would indeed pose a question of genocide, in the sense of the deliberate destruction of a population group in its home territory.

Martin Shaw is a historical sociologist of war and global politics, and professor of international relations and politics at the University of Sussex. His books include War and Genocide (Polity, 2003), The New Western Way of War (Polity, 2005), and What is Genocide?(Polity, 2007).

A new group of eminent Tamil people in Sri Lanka has made a plea for those held in government camps to be given a timetable for their release.

The group said people were yearning to be released from their confinement.

The camps still house nearly 300,000 Tamils displaced in the final stages of the war which ended in May.

The Group of Concerned Tamils in Sri Lanka says Tamil voices are being stilled and members of the minority were nervous of speaking out.

In this, its third statement, the group says it is disturbed over persistent reports of poor living conditions and even political disappearances in the camps.

It said the refugees yearned to get away from the barbed wire enclosures where they are detained, adding that there must be steps to erase "their sense of being held captive".

The group urged that timetables be drawn up for ongoing screening of refugees for possible Tamil Tiger affiliation and for the de-mining of their home areas.

Then people could be given a release date which would ease camp congestion and remove "any fears of indefinite detention".

But the government's human rights secretary, Rajiva Wijesinha, told the BBC he believed many people were "quite relieved" to be in the camps and that on his recent visit to them people looked less miserable and less frail than before.

Mr Wijesinha said that people should have no fear that they might be held indefinitely and reiterated the government's promise that most will be allowed out by the end of the year.

A SRI LANKA Army (SLA) soldier was killed and two wounded in a clash that erupted at Kiraankulam in Batticaloa lagoon area in the early hours of Saturday, July 4 sources in Batticaloa said.

The incident occurred when ‘an army soldier spotted a suspicious boat with one man on board and tried to search it after talking to the boatman’ an Army statement said, adding that the man was later identified as a Tiger regional leader.

SLA soldiers wounded in the clash and a wounded LTTE fighter were admitted at Batticaloa hospital.

Military officials said Saturday's clash resulted in the first military loss of life since troops on May 18 announced the killing of the top leadership of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

About 15-20% of the 30,000 to 35,000 children housed in the Sri Lankan government run camps are suffering from ‘acute malnutrition’ according to NGOs and the UN.

“About thirty thousand to thirty five thousand children are sheltered in Manik Farm. Many of them are suffering from diseases and some still suffer from injuries sustained in the military operations. Fifteen to twenty percent of them are also suffering from acute malnutrition,” media reports in Colombo said quoting Dr. Vinya Ariyaratne, the executive director of Colombo based NGO Sarvodaya Shramadana Sangamaya.

It can take a few weeks to few months for these children to recover, Dr. Vinya has told media.

“The international standard is for 20 people to use one toilet, but in Manik Farm about 70 people are sharing one toilet,” he said.

Around five thousand internally displaced children from Vanni and sheltered in camps which are described as internment camps fenced with barbed wire are found to be malnourished, according to a survey conducted by a non-governmental organization.

Sri Lankan Health Ministry says it has been working together with Sarvodaya, UNICEF and others to improve the conditions in the internment camps.

Meanwhile, the high rate of malnutrition reported among children in camps for displaced people in Sri Lanka is a cause for concern, a senior UN official told the BBC’s Sinhala service.

The UN's representative on children and armed conflict said the government should set up special feeding programmes.

Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN's special representative on children and armed conflict, told the BBC Sinhala Service's Saroj Pathirana that the UN hopes to send a delegation to advise the government on a range of issues relating to child welfare.

"The malnutrition rates are very high, especially among young children, and [there is a] need for special feeding programmes and all those kind of things in the camps for the children.

"So, our sense is that the sooner they can get back to normalcy, to education, to schools, it is the best thing," she said.

Her comments follow concern expressed by Sri Lankan charity Sarvodaya about rates of chronic malnutrition in the camps.

She added that the UN is also concerned about the plight of children separated from their families.

"The delegation is to look into whether there is enough effort being taken to reunite them with parents," she said. 

Health experts warn that the expected rains could increase the risk of waterborne diseases for tens of thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in camps in northern Sri Lanka.

More than 280,000 people who fled fighting between government forces and the now defeated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam are staying in some 35 government camps in four northern districts - Vavuniya, Mannar, Jaffna and Trincomalee.

The majority, 220,000, are living at the Menik Farm camp, a sprawling site of over 700ha outside Vavuniya town.

“With such a large number of people concentrated together, there is always the risk of waterborne disease with the rains,” Laurent Sury, head of mission for Médecins Sans Frontières, told IRIN in Colombo.

MSF runs a field hospital in Vavuniya District where more than 23 of the IDP camps are located, housing 260,000 IDPs.

“There are around 115 patients at the MSF hospital now,” Sury said.

Even though the World Health Organization (WHO) says no major disease outbreaks have been reported, the risk factors for malaria and diarrhoea have increased.

WHO said the Ministry of Health had taken precautions to deal with a possible malaria outbreak, with proper surveillance mechanisms at all camps.

Until 19 June, only 29 cases of malaria had been reported, but health officials initiated a high alert when two cases were reported on 18 June from zone 4 in Menik Farm.

Field staff have been deployed to all hospitals and healthcare units assisting IDPs by the Regional Malaria Office for the Vavuniya District from 8 June.

“This is an alarming situation considering the very small number of malaria cases reported from the entire country in the recent past,” the WHO update said. “An active surveillance for malaria is ... [ongoing].”

Until 18 June, 1,060 cases of dysentery and more than 5,000 cases of diarrhoea had been reported from the camps, it said.

"There is a serious threat of waterborne diseases because of so many people living so close together," one humanitarian official said, highlighting the risk posed by improper disposal of solid waste and rubbish in the camps.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on 27 June, the greatest needs were specialist doctors.

“IDP health workers, paid by the government of Sri Lanka, are working in the IDP sites. Thirty-seven new doctors are expected to be appointed at the Vavuniya District within a week. However, a shortage of specialists remain,” OCHA confirmed.

Thousands of Tamil civilians have fled the fighting in the north and are now staying at government camps in and around the northern town of Vavuniya

According to the latest communicable Disease Weekly Update released on 25 June, surveillance within the camps by the Ministry of Health staff was being strengthened.

The greatest disease outbreak reported so far was chickenpox, with more than 12,000 cases, but those numbers had since been decreasing, the UN reported.

The number of new cases reported is steadily declining and admissions to hospitals are 40–50 patients per day, OCHA confirmed on 19 June.

“In Vavuniya, the number of Hepatitis A cases is also declining. A total of 2,139 cases were reported as at 12 June,” the report added.

Medical officers working with the displaced suspect that most of the chickenpox patients contracted the disease before they arrived in camps. 

An opposition MP in Sri Lanka has condemned the state of the internment camps in which Tamil civilians are being held.

The situation in the Internally Displaced Camps in the North are so dire that these person if given the freedom to move out of these camps would prefer to live under trees rather than inside the camps, United National Party (UNP) MP S.B Dissanayake told a news conference.

“The situation in those camps is so bad that if the people were given the freedom will go and live under trees,” Mr. Dissanayake was reported as saying by the Daily Mirror newspaper. 

“There are so many diseases spreading within these camps, there are no sanitation facilities, and water is scarce,” he noted.

“At this time when we must make the Tamil people feel equal we are just angering them by keeping them within these camps that aren’t just prisons but are almost like hell,” he was quoted as saying.

Meanwhile, a row has broken out in the Sri Lankan papers between supporters of the government and the aid agencies over the toilets (or lack thereof) in the camps.

The Sri Lankan government says it is the United Nations and its humanitarian agency partners who are responsible for building the toilets, according to reports from Colombo.

Thus, it is of little surprise that that government claims it is not happy with the quality and design of the toilets, which can best be described as open pit latrines with some wooden supports to cover the area - once the pit is filled, a new one is dug somewhere else.