Sri Lanka was ranked 162nd of the 175 countries in the latest press freedom ranking released by the Paris based Reporters without Borders on Wednesday October 21.

The Asian countries that least respected press freedom were announced as North Korea, one of the “infernal trio” at the bottom of the rankings, Burma, which still suffers from prior censorship and imprisonment, and Laos, an unchanging dictatorship where no privately-owned media are permitted, RSF said.

"To compile this index, Reporters Without Borders prepared a questionnaire with 40 criteria that assess the state of press freedom in each country. It includes every kind of violation directly affecting journalists (such as murders, imprisonment, physical attacks and threats) and news media (censorship, confiscation of newspaper issues, searches and harassment). Ánd it includes the degree of impunity enjoyed by those responsible for these press freedom violations," RSF said in its website, explaining the details behind computing the index.

Asia’s few democracies are well placed in RSF's latest rankings. New Zealand (13th), Australia (16th) and Japan (17th) are all in the top 20.

Respect for press freedom and the lack of targeted violence against journalists enable these three countries to be regional leaders, press reports said.

South Korea (69th) and Taiwan (59th) fell far this year.

South Korea plummeted 22 places because of the arrests of several journalists and bloggers and the conservative government’s attempts to control critical media.

The new ruling party in Taiwan tried to interfere in state and privately-owned media while violence by certain activists further undermined press freedom.

Two Asian countries were included in the index for the first time: Papua New Guinea (56th), which obtained a very respectable ranking for a developing country, and the Sultanate of Brunei (155th), which came in the bottom third because of the absence of an independent press.

The report came as Sri Lanka announced plans to monitor and block websites that were "known to spread anti-government propaganda and feed incorrect information."

"Counter propaganda will be launched by the government to safeguard the present environment of peace and prevent unrest among the public,” said Media Minister Lakshman Yapa Abeyawardene at a press briefing.

“When browsing through some of these websites we wonder whether there is an insidious attempt to create a rift between President Mahinda Rajapakse and the military leaders," Yapa said.

"There has been a sharp increase in fabricated or misleading propaganda which has been a hindrance to maintaining peace and stability in Sri Lanka The screening of the news reports and feature articles would be carried out by a committee especially selected by the Information Department,” he said.

Yapa said that the mainstream newspapers and TV channels have acted with responsibility, but a section of the electronic and print media that have "behaved in an irresponsible manner."

“Through newspaper advertisements we will correct misinformation and give the government’s take on those issues while exposing websites that publish such misinformation,” Yapa said.

"The video and audio of the events depicted in the Video, were continuous without any evidence of start/stops, insertions, deletions, over recordings, editing or tampering of any kind," said the preliminary findings from a US-based forensic company that took nearly three weeks to analyze the Channel-4 broadcast video allegedly showing Sri Lanka Army (SLA) soldiers extra-judicially executing Tamil captives stripped naked and hands tied behind their back.

US pressure group, Tamils Against Genocide (TAG) which sponsored the study, placed an embargo on revealing the details of the forensic company, until the final report is complete early November.

 The notarised report contained determinations on ten different critical issues on the characteristics of the video and audio portions of the 3gp format file distributed by the German-based Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS) on 25th August.

The forensic firm used a firing range to conduct field experiments to arrive at some of the findings according to the report.

The key findings listed in the preliminary report include:

·        No evidence of tampering or editing was discovered with either the video or audio portions of Video

·        The blood pooled around the previous victim with the white shirt and with the victim of the 2nd shooting appears to be consistent with blood from the brain, which would contain high amounts of oxygen giving the blood its bright color. The fact that it is still bright in color appears to be consistent with it being very recent.

·        The audio delay with respect to both gun shots’ audio compared with each corresponding rifle recoil is consistent for some, if not most, camera cell phones that are capable of video recording.

·        Preliminary field test with a typical camera cell phone of similar audio qualities (per header information in Exhibit “A”), was able to record a MAK-90 (AK variant w/16” barrel) gun shot w/7.62x39mm ammo, with the camera cell phone being positioned in a similar camera field of view of the 2nd gun shot, or 12 feet away from the muzzle, without any distortion of the audio.

·        The leg of an apparent previous shooting victim lying prone on the ground, down range and at the feet of the first victim, rises in the air when the first victim is shot, and then slowly drops to its former position. This reaction appears to be from the bullet that passed through the first victim and then striking the down range victim and would be consistent with a victim that was very recently shot that has not died yet.

TAG officials told TamilNet that the official copy of the preliminary findings will be released as soon as the draft for the final report is complete.

TAG also intends to issue a separate supporting document containing the background technical information necessary to understand the on-going dispute raised by the Government of Sri Lanka on the authenticity of the video.

Earlier, Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary or arbitrary executions, dismissed Sri Lanka's investigations as not independent.

"The only way to do this [authenticate the video] is for an independent and impartial investigation to take place,'' Alston had said.

 I AM suffering flashbacks of my time at Woomera Detention Centre. Not as a detainee, but as a psychologist and part of the medical team employed to cover contractual requirements to ''manage'' the psychological needs of asylum seekers.

These needs were expressed through hunger strikes, severe depression, suicide attempts and the trauma of children.

It strikes me as incredible that again boat arrivals prompt the regression to ignoring and violating the human rights of people who are seeking to flee persecution.

The old cliches are being invoked to justify a harsh and cruel response to the plight of desperate people.

They roll smoothly off the tongue, the old biased assertions. These people who get on boats. These people who bring their children here.

Those people who threw their children overboard are now the people who burn their boats and who smile and take vitamins in luxurious accommodation on Christmas Island.

The discrediting myths and insinuations are being reconfigured like retro fashion apparel.

There was a Swedish language test, now discredited, designed to discredit refugees' claims to be from Afghanistan through analysis of their accents and words. Yes, it does sound like a joke, but it produced bizarre and dreadful outcomes.

The Bakhtiyari family, Afghanis whom I had supported in Woomera, were eventually deported to Pakistan on the strength of this evidence. They had to find their way back to Afghanistan, without appropriate papers.

Refugees are required to fit a stereotype. Alex, the Sri Lankan spokesman on the boat at the centre of the latest dispute, has been criticised for his articulate and American-accented speech.

Amid laments for the loss of the ''Pacific Solution'', the emerging ''Asian co-operation'' is being offered as the new hope for our fears regarding permeable borders that the hoards will cross. Semantically, it is an improvement.

The ''Pacific Solution'' was a term that had an unfortunate consonance with the ''Final Solution''. Co-operation with our Asian neighbours conjures a warm sense of bonding.

It thinly disguises the sinister reality. These people are being pushed back to a nation that is not a signatory to the UN convention on refugees.

Australia is a signatory to the convention, which defines a refugee as ''a person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country''.

It also requires that ''states shall not expel or return ('refouler') a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership or a particular social group or political opinion''.

As the debate over boat arrivals and people smugglers intensifies I find myself suffering from acute deja vu. These echoes of history do not just reach back to the Tampa. They recall 1939. After sailing from Hamburg, the Saint Louis sat in the dock in Havana while the US refused refuge to more than 900 Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. They were sent back and half of those asylum seekers died in concentration camps. Out of this and other similar situations the Geneva Convention of 1951 was born.

In 2002 I was employed as a psychologist in Woomera Detention Centre and was a daily witness to the distress of detainees.

Late at night I watched the television news as the politicians denigrated and disparaged these people as ''queue jumpers'' and ''illegals''. In truth there was no orderly bureaucratic process possible in the countries from which they fled - mostly Saddam's Iraq, and the Taliban's Afghanistan and now Tamils fleeing fear of genocide in Sri Lanka.

We split our awareness. On the one hand we daily absorb and decry the horror stories in far off lands. On the other we shoo and push away those who flee these impossible situations as we might unwanted stray dogs. This is defined as being tough and humane. There is blame and denigration to justify these actions. Our fear of engulfment and of difference dooms asylum seekers to suffering and death.

The most common refrains after the exposure of atrocities have been ''we didn't know'' or ''how could this happen?''

But now we do know. According to the UNHCR there are 15.2 million refugees worldwide. Poorer countries bear the burden of these numbers, in the millions, while in Australia only 4750 people sought asylum in 2008.

We need to do our fair share of resettlement. Climate change may result in even more displaced persons. We must find genuine compassionate responses for a world-wide problem.

Lyn Bender is a psychologist based in Melbourne.

"Sri Lanka refugees, we have lived in forest for one month. Please, sir, please take us to a country. It's OK if it is not Australia. It's better if any other country trades us. We can't live in Sri Lanka."

These were the desperate words of 9 year old Brindha, as she pleaded on Australian television.

She is one of the 255 men, women and children who have been stranded in waters off the Sunda straits of Indonesia since last month.

They were attempting to flee from Sri Lanka and make their way towards Australia, where they could claim asylum, before they were intercepted by Indonesian authorities.

The desperate Tamil civilians aboard the boat staged a hunger strike last week, as they attempted to persuade Australian authorities to allow them to seek asylum.

The hunger strike lasted 52 hours before authorities eventually persuaded them to cease.

A wooden board with the words "We are Sri Lankan civilians, Plz save our lives" scribbled onto it, is on display aboard the ship.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has so far been unmoved and said that their individual cases should be processed by the United Nations.

In reference to the hunger strike he commented that he would not be swayed by "any tactics deployed by any particular person".

"There are still Tamil people in Sri Lanka who are dying every day. This is why most of these people here have fled from genocide in Sri Lanka and trying to find a future somewhere else... We're just people without a country to live in," said Alex, spokesman for the group.

"But the situation in our country right now, I'm telling you, Tamils do not have an opportunity to survive in Sri Lanka," he said.

The group of asylum seekers are still aboard their boat, which has docked the West Java port of Merak in Indonesia and are refusing to leave the vessel.

According to the spokesman there are 195 men, 31 women, and 27 children on board, each of whom reported to have paid $15,000 USD in order to be smuggled out of Sri Lanka, amounting to nearly $ 4 million USD in total.

The conditions of the boat have been described as far from adequate with there being just one toilet on the boat for all on board.

One of the inhabitants, Varshini from Jaffna, is on board with Marthavan, her seven-year-old son, and Amirtha, her four-year-old daughter. She said her children believed they would see their father soon.

She has yet to tell them that he was taken away by Government affiliated paramilitary forces, while they were sleeping 18 months ago.

"There are still many more Sri Lankans who need help," said Alex, at a press conference organised by the asylum seekers last week.

Alex and his fellow civilians are still refusing to leave the boat until they meet a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) official to explain the asylum procedure and give assurances about their future.

"If you had no place to go, if you had no country of your own, what would you do and how long would you stay in a boat before you were promised to enter a country that will give you asylum? How long will you go? How desperate will you be?" said Alex.

"We're not only suffering back home we're suffering here. We have no choice."

"We have no country to go back to."

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, criticized the Sri Lankan Government on the issue of "accountability" and for refusing to co-operate “to our many requests for an international investigation of what we say is widespread acts of killing of civilians."

She made the comments during a speech at a press conference in Brussels.

“We have pointed out that they have in the past attempted to hold national investigations of very serious acts of killings that occurred of NGO and humanitarian workers and these investigations were dropped," said Pillay.

“They do not have a very good record in holding serious investigations. Now, I am engaged in discussions with the Secretary General over what kind of mechanism would be acceptable. But as I said the bottom-line is that the government is resisting these suggestions," said the former South African judge.

 She also mentioned that “such a request has also been made by the (UN) Secretary General and we are working very closely with the Secretary General to hold the President of Sri Lanka to his promise which he made to the Secretary General that he will look into the issue of accountability and so we want to know what kind of mechanism is he setting up."

The UN Commissioner also mentioned that the Sri Lankan Government, both publicly and to the UN Secretary General stated that they would not allow her to enter the country.

Her call was reiterated by her colleague Rupert Colville a few days later.

"We still believe that something like the Gaza fact-finding mission is certainly warranted given the widespread concerns about the conduct of the war in Sri Lanka," said Colvile, referring to recent fact finding mission into the Israel-Palestinian conflict on the Gaza Strip earlier this year.

"It seems that more clarity is likely to emerge about who did what to whom and whether or not war crimes and crimes against humanity and other very serious war crimes were committed by one or both sides," said Colville, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

"The issue of some 240,000 - 250,000 displaced people living in what are in effect internment camps continues to be of great concern... We hope the government takes serious actions to fulfill these commitments in the very near future" he added.

The statement comes after publication of a US State Department report that contained reports of atrocities committed at the climax of the war earlier this year. Sri Lanka has so far categorically rejected all calls for investigations into war crimes.

Many of the 76 migrants seized from a ship off the Canadian coast have valid travel documents and legitimate reasons to apply for refugee status in Canada, according to a lawyer who has spoken to them.

Human rights lawyer Lee Rankin told CBC News he has met about 30 of the men who journeyed to Canada from Sri Lanka, and he believes many have good reasons to seek refugee status.

Rankin said many of the men planned to come to Canada and brought supporting documents with them, including birth certificates, national identity cards and in some cases passports.

Rankin said that as members of the losing side in Sri Lanka's civil war, the Tamil men have a good case for refugee status.

"If you look at the information about the country involved, the human rights record is poor, the treatment of prisoners is poor — extra-judicial killings, as well as very brutal treatment to people suspected of being on the losing side of the civil war," said Rankin.

The migrants feared for their lives during a gruelling, lengthy voyage, said a lawyer who spoke with one of the men. The 76 Tamil asylum seekers had only minimal supplies and skeleton facilities during the journey, he said.

"It was a very difficult, difficult experience and something that I think can probably best be described as parallel to a Titanic-type of an experience," said Gary Anandasangaree, a lawyer for the Canadian Tamil Congress.

The migrants had little sense of time, only that the voyage lasted for weeks, Mr. Anandasangaree said. He said they encountered rough weather and "there were times" they feared for their lives.

One migrant looked "exhausted" when he spoke to him late Tuesday at a detention centre in Maple Ridge, B.C. Mr. Anandasangaree interviewed the man on behalf of a Toronto lawyer who is representing him.

"They took extraordinary risk during the voyage," he said. "It's quite eye-opening to look at what they went through to get here."

Lawyers hired to represent some of the detained men are criticizing Canada's slow response to the refugee drama, saying they cannot even speak with their clients and that it is taking far too long for them to get hearings.

"If this happened in a criminal [law] context, people would be up in arms," said Hadayt Nazami, a Toronto lawyer who is representing one migrant.

Lawyer Doug Cannon said he hasn't been able to speak to his client even though the man was taken into custody Saturday night. Under Canadian immigration law, people detained at the border must get a hearing within 48 hours, or within a reasonable time.

"I'm frustrated," Mr. Cannon said, adding he has contacted Canada Border Services Agency and the Immigration and Refugee Board to demand that his client get a detention hearing today. "I can't even get through to him."

Mr. Cannon said he suspects that the officials are overwhelmed by the volume of migrants who arrived en masse but argued that's no excuse for the holdup. If delays persist, he said, a lawyer could make a valid argument to have a client released.

Rankin dismissed reports the men paid an Indonesian human smuggling ring as much as $45,000 for passage to Canada, saying the men he met told him they paid 45,000 Sri Lankan rupees, worth about $410 Cdn at current exchange rates.

About 30 of them say they have family or friends already in Canada, and Rankin said 60 Tamil-Canadian families in the Vancouver and Toronto areas have volunteered to take the others.

The ship departed from India early last month, according to international shipping records. While it sailed as the Ocean Lady, it was registered as the Princess Easwary, press reports said.

After a stop in Mumbai on Aug. 31, the Princess Easwary sailed from the northwest Indian port of Mundra on Sept. 8. That was its last recorded port of call until it entered Canadian waters.

While the records indicate the ship's last port of call was India, it may have made unreported stops elsewhere in South or Southeast Asia to pick up its human cargo before heading for Canada.

The company listed as the ship's owner does not appear to exist. Ray Ocean Transport Corp., registered in the Seychelles, owns the vessel and it is operated by Sunship Maritime Services, records show.

But the National Post has been unable to locate any company officials. Both companies share an address in Cebu, Philippines, but the telephones appear to be out of service and emails sent to Sunship were returned as undeliverable. The Princess Easwary is the only ship operated by the companies.

Several other businesses, including another shipping company and a Canadian immigration consultant, have used the same office. The Woodbridge, Ont.-based consultant said a prospective business partner had operated from that address but it had never been an official branch of his firm.

Edward Mortimer, chair of the Advisory Council for Sri Lanka Peace and Justice Campaign, a rights group, in a letter to Financial Times responding to an earlier article on GSP+ says: "[G]overnment has until now held more than 250,000 civilians in insanitary internment camps, currently threatened with monsoon flooding, while an unknown number of alleged combatants are held elsewhere, out of sight of the media, Red Cross and other humanitarian agencies. Wartime promises that Tamil grievances would be peacefully redressed once hostilities were ended have not been fulfilled. Instead an atmosphere of racist triumphalism has been encouraged."

Noam Chomsky, Bianca Jagger, and several other intellectuals and prominent persons are members of the group, Sri Lanka Peace and Justice Campaign.

Full text of the letter to Financial Times follows:

Your argument for extending Sri Lanka’s “GSP+” access to the European Union market is plausible but specious (“Tigers and trade”, editorial October 21). There might be a good case for extending this concession to all developing-country imports, but no one is suggesting that. As things stand, Sri Lanka is one of only 15 countries in the world to receive this treatment, and the only one in Asia. This discriminates unfairly against imports from other Asian countries.

GSP+ was accorded to Sri Lanka in 2005 on a wave of international sympathy after the tsunami. It was, as you say, conditional on ratification and implementation of 27 international agreements. The EU now has to decide whether to extend the deal, in the face of a damning independent report, commissioned by the EU itself, which shows that Sri Lanka has flagrantly ignored many of these conditions, including notably those that cover basic human rights.

Nor is it only, as you suggest, a matter of “human rights abuses committed ... in the course of the conflict with the Tamil Tiger rebels”. That conflict ended five months ago, with a total victory for the government. Yet so far from being magnanimous in victory, the government has until now held more than 250,000 civilians in insanitary internment camps, currently threatened with monsoon flooding, while an unknown number of alleged combatants are held elsewhere, out of sight of the media, Red Cross and other humanitarian agencies. Wartime promises that Tamil grievances would be peacefully redressed once hostilities were ended have not been fulfilled. Instead an atmosphere of racist triumphalism has been encouraged.

“Sri Lanka is not Burma”, you write. Perhaps not, but it seems some of its leaders would like it to be. Burma was the first foreign country visited by President Mahendra Rajapaksa after his victory over the Tigers last May, and his own government website reported that one of his aims was to advise the Burmese generals on how to defeat their own ethnic insurgents, learning from Sri Lanka’s methods.

If the EU does not resist this repressive contagion, who will?

Edward Mortimer,

Chair, Advisory Council,

Sri Lanka Peace and Justice Campaign

The Sri Lankan government angrily rejected a US state department report containing allegations of human rights abuses in the final days of the country's civil war, saying the document would fan further conflict.

According to accounts said by a senior US state department official to be "credible and well substantiated", government forces abducted and killed ethnic Tamil civilians, shelled and bombed no-fire zones, and killed senior LTTE leaders with whom they had brokered a surrender.

Although the US stressed the allegations in the report did not constitute an accusation of war crimes, the Sri Lankan foreign affairs ministry in Colombo accused the US of smearing its reputation.

"The allegations against the government of Sri Lanka ... appear to be unsubstantiated and devoid of corroborative evidence. There is a track record of vested interests endeavouring to bring the government of Sri Lanka into disrepute, through fabricated allegations and concocted stories."

"Thereby these interests hope to fan, once again, the flames of secessionism and to undo the concerted efforts of the Government and people of Sri Lanka, for rehabilitation and national reconciliation. The people of Sri Lanka therefore have every reason to be concerned that this report to the US Congress, may be abused for a similar end,” said a statement issued by the Sri Lankan Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.

"Sri Lanka’s domestic jurisprudence provides all the necessary scope for those perceiving themselves subjected to a violation of their human rights, to obtain redress through judicial directives to the concerned authorities," the statement said.

Stephen Rapp, the US ambassador-at-large for war crimes, called on Sri Lanka to investigate allegations of abuse by both sides.

"We want accountability in this situation," he said.

"We believe that [Sri Lankan authorities] can investigate this. We're trusting in that commitment."

The report says it reaches no conclusions on the veracity of the charges, although Rapp said the individual sources were "credible and reliable" and that allegations had been corroborated.

The US embassy in Colombo also defended the report, saying a majority of the incidents cited originated from first-hand accounts from people who had been in government-declared "no fire zones" and locations close to the fighting during military operations that concluded in May.

The US embassy said the report detailed incidents that occurred during the final months of the conflict between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that might constitute violations of International humanitarian law or crimes against humanity.

"The report compiles alleged incidents, as reported by a wide range of primary and secondary sources, involving both sides in the conflict," the US embassy said.

The US Congress report came less than three days after the European Union also submitted a report that accused the government of violating International human rights laws. 

A small percentage of the Tamil refugees held in camps since May have allegedly been released amid growing international pressure on the Sri Lankan Government over its human rights record. But reports from the island suggested that the civilians were merely moved from one place of confinement to another.

About 5,700 refugees left the huge camp at Menik Farm, in the country's north, on October 22 to be resettled, the Government said.

Rehabilitation Minister Rishat Badurdheen told the press that 5,700 IDPs were allowed to return to their homes, claiming this was in keeping with a promise to release 80% of the inmates within a 180-day deadline.

The minister also claimed that another 36,000 would be resettled "over the coming weeks" as he spoke to the BBC.

Many of these civilians have been transferred to smaller transit camps or small shelters that have been set up in schools and other government owned buildings in other regions of the North and East, reports said.

On the same day, the US State Department released a report of possible war crimes committed during the final months of the civil war, citing actions by government forces and the Tigers between January and May 2009.

Senior Presidential Advisor Basil Rajapaksa, brother to President Mahinda Rajapakse, had led a press conference week earlier, where journalists were taken on tour and a ceremony was held to mark the release of 1,200 IDPs.

The press were told that the people would be allowed to resettle back in their original homes in the Mannar district.

The ceremony was held at Manthai West transit camp, where thousands of “released” IDPs were being held. These civilians had been taken to Manthai West from the camps in Chettikulam.

But witnesses said the displaced boarded buses that merely took them back to the camps.

Sunday Times photographer Ranjith Perera, who was amongst the journalists taken on the tour, reported that he witnessed the IDPs board a bus, said to be taking them to their homes, and then return back to the same Manthai West transit camp.

“It was more of a photo opportunity for the journalists” reported the photographer.

 “Every aspect of the exercise was a fraud designed to deflect criticism at home and internationally over the detention of Tamil civilians,” said Sarath Kumara of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

He called the event a “public relations charade”.

When government officials were asked by the paper about the IDPs of Manthai West they were told that “the original houses of the IDPs had suffered heavy damage due to the heavy fighting... it was not possible to send them directly to their homes as their houses needed repairs”.

There were also 144 Tamil students who were being held at Poonthooddam Child Protection and Rehabilitation Centre, a Vavuniya internment camp, being forcibly transferred to Ratmalana Hindu College in Colombo. Parents were told they could visit "once or twice a month".

The Sunday Times reported of another case of IDPs, originally from Mullaitivu, who the government claimed to have resettled.

It was uncovered that these Tamil civilians were being held in a transit internment camp in Thunukkai and were merely “allowed to visit their villages in Mullaitivu” and “(see) for themselves the damage caused to their houses”.

Even Minister Douglas Devananda confirmed that IDPs from Mullaiththeevu and Kilinochchi districts in Vanni are now being held in the detention camps in Mirusuvil, Kodikaamam Naavaladi and Kaithadi in Jaffna.

Separately, in Trincomalee fifteen IDPs were abducted from a transit camp located in the complex of Eachchilampathu Sri Shenpaga Maha Vidiyalayam in Seruvila division. They were all Tamil men, who were married and aged between 25 and 45.

A group of unknown persons dressed in army camouflage uniform were said to have taken them and their whereabouts are currently uknown.

This is a situation that is seen all over the North-East of Sri Lanka as these smaller indefinite ‘transit’ camps are established, observers said.

And this is now an open secret.

“The government has widely publicised recent releases from the camps yet Amnesty International has received reports that many are simply transfers to other camps where the displaced may be subjected to rescreening by local authorities,” reads a report by the international NGO.

The organisation “confirmed the location of at least 10 such facilities in school buildings and hostels originally designated as displacement camps in the north” while stating that there were “frequent reports of other unofficial places of detention elsewhere in the country”.

Places such as Poonthotham Teachers Training College have been identified as “irregular places of detention” and widely condemned.

“The danger of serious human rights violations, including torture, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings increases substantially when detainees are held in locations that are not officially acknowledged places of detention and lack proper legal procedures and safeguards”, said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International's Asia Director.

Since the climax of the civil war in May, over 240,000 Tamil civilians remain forcibly held in internment camps by the Sri Lankan Government. Repeated promises by the government to send these IDPs home have been broken and pressure is mounting on Colombo to act quickly.

More than 250 000 humans are kept in concentration camps for “screening” by the Government of Sri Lanka, allegedly to discover “terrorists”. The question arises why children are kept there, even babies. These Concentration camps are called “welfare camps” by the Sri Lankan Government.

I refer to the latest report by Human Rights Watch from October 10, 2009: http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/10/09/sri-lanka-tensions-mount-camp-con…. It is in agreement with other international human rights organisations’ reports. In addition, I refer to the EU Commission’s report with an evaluation of Sri Lanka on 19 October 2009: http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2009/october/tradoc_145141.pdf

The following information is documented by human rights’ organisations in the field in August/September 2009. Names of the children have been left out here. The list makes it possible to follow up the fate of each child over time and makes denials by the Government of killings through neglect of children impossible. The list can be ordered from me. The world has an eye on every child listed. The list gives unfortunately only a part of the total number of children in all concentration camps.

1. Total number of children on the list: 1200

2. Names of the concentration camps and the number of children:

1. Vavuniya Anantha Kumarasami Camp: 118

2. Vavuniya Arunachchala Camp: 65

3. Vavuniya Kathirkamar Camp: 8

4. Vavuniya Sheriliana: 50

5. Vavuniya Ulukkulam Camp: 959

3. Age of the children: Youngest: 1month. Oldest: 18 years.

4. Number under 5 years: 308

5. Girls: 536 Boys: 664

6. Orphans: 1082

The following is an eye witness report with special regard to children from a prisoner in a concentration camp. The prisoners managed to get free in August 2009. The whole report was published in October 2009 (http://www.tamilnet.com/img/publish/2009/10/Living_in_Menik_Farm.pdf), but the section on children was slightly revised for this message by the former prisoner who rightly prefers to be anonymous.

"I was interned in the ---- camp of Menik Farm----. During those four months in the camp, it is the condition of the children at the camp that I found most depressing. I was too timid to go around collecting statistics though it would have been easy to collect statistics because of the proximity of the people crowded within a small area. However, I observed carefully and was overwhelmed by the wasting away of the children.

"Newborn babies are sent to the camp conditions, which are unsuitable for adults, just few days after being born. Toddlers play in the filthy area right in front of the toilets. I have never seen flies and mosquitoes in such numbers in my life. While eating, one hand is fully occupied with chasing the flies; a practice that children will not adopt thus consuming food contaminated by flies that come straight from the toilets very nearby. Children of well off families who appeared well cared for on arrival at the camp were visibly wasting away during the stay in the camp. The contributory factors were poor diet, the hostile weather, and continuous illness.

"Majority of the children including infants did not have milk (powder) except an occasional packet handed out by some charity. Once a father of a seven month old baby came begging for some sugar to put in the plain tea (black tea) to be given to his seven month old baby because the mother did not have enough breast milk and the baby was hungry. Plain tea had become the regular diet for this baby.

"The diet was most definitely inadequate for the children despite some nutritional supplement that were distributed. There was no milk, meat or vegetable in their diet. Sometimes soya bean was given but they were of rotten quality and children would hardly eat them.

"Illness among children was pandemic and it wasted them. Small injuries became infected and caused problems. Vomiting, fever or diarrhea seemed a natural condition in most children. Measures of malnutrition maybe a standard way of measuring worst affected children but it does not capture the general condition of children wasting away. When a child runs a fever most parents worry a lot fearing Hepatitis-A infection.

"The queues are very long at the OPD clinics inside the camp and the doctors work at break neck speed. I have seen a doctor writing a prescription to a 12 year old boy without finding out what is wrong with the boy. The medicines that are dispensed are arranged in a table and the total list of medicines consists of around 30 different medicines. The medicine dispensers too work with breakneck speed in dispensing them. Once an educated mother told me that she visited the doctor for treatment for her baby as well as for herself. The medicine dispensers mixed up the medicines and gave the baby what should have been given to the mother. Since the mother had some awareness of the medications she spotted it. Most mothers in the camp who do not have such awareness would have given the adult medicine to the baby. God only knows how many babies, children and even adults died due such medical negligence. Who is there in the camp to watch, monitor and investigate? Deaths are just that, deaths and no investigations are done as to the cause of it.

"Patients often queue up for doctors for hours even before the doctors arrive from outside. No one in the OPD clinic will know when the doctors are likely to arrive. One just waits around taking one’s chances. For all this the level of sickness among inmates is far higher than among the population at large and it is obvious.

"Take the eight tent group where I was staying. Five of the tents out of the eight had children under 10. One child died; one became seriously ill and taken away to Vavuniya hospital and all the other children had frequent fever, vomiting and diarrhoea. The children were wasting away and it was visibly obvious. Some of the children had persistent skin disease despite several visits to the doctors and treatment. Four of the children contracted HepatitisA and the parents were told by the doctors to just take good care of them and give lots of fruits because the hospitals had no medicine. Fruits were very expensive in the camp. There is a native treatment for HepatitisA involving a plant named “Keelkainelli” in Tamil. Even to get this plant was a struggle because it meant someone has to bring it from outside and handover to the inmates at the meeting spot as described later.

"People young and old suddenly dying after a few days of fever is a common occurrence. All of us were left puzzled as to the cause and no one gave any explanation. All of us without exception have suffered diarrhoea at least once and most of us many times.

"I used to keep telling myself during the stay in the camp how lucky I was that I do not have any young children under my care. The unhygienic living, especially the play area and the continuous illness is an ordeal for the young mothers. Even thinking about the condition of newborns and their mothers who are sent back to the camp conditions soon after birth is an ordeal. Perhaps the most telling scenes of the camp conditions and the health service can be found by visiting the OPD clinics and observing young mothers with very sick babies waiting for long time in queues with tears trickling down their face.

"Children went to makeshift schools staffed by teachers who were also interned in the camp. Many teachers have lamented how they can teach while living under such conditions. The school is made up of sheds with uneven floor covered with tarpaulin. The children cannot even place their books on the uneven floor to write. They have to keep the soft cover books on their knees to write.

"Most of the young children have to carry very heavy buckets of water to assist their parents who are also struggling to care for the children often as a single parent. The little bodies bent like a question mark under the weight surely would have done permanent damage.

"If we can tolerate the incarceration of the entire population of young children from a community which is clearly leading to long term damage to their development, how does this measure up in any of the international humanitarian/human rights laws? Can the long term damage done to them be measured and judged?"

A recent US report into alleged war crimes committed during the last days of the war in Sri Lanka has necessitated the need for an independent probe, said the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The "report should dispel any doubts that serious abuses were committed during the conflict's final months,” said Brad Adams, HRW’s Asia director.

"Given Sri Lanka's complete failure to investigate possible war crimes, the only hope for justice is an independent, international investigation," he added.

"Concerned governments should use the US State Department report as a clarion call for an international investigation. There are no more excuses for inaction," he said.

"The Sri Lankan government cannot get away with hiding what it did to civilians during the war," Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for HRW, told IPS.

"And this report helps to show that. It compiles all of the information out there about what happened and it turns out there's a lot of sources."

"If their goal was to win the war and not allow the world to see what was happening to civilian caught in the crossfire then they failed," Malinowski went on to say.

"Human Rights Watch's own research into the fighting found that both sides repeatedly violated the laws of war," said HRW.

"The LTTE used civilians as human shields, employed lethal force to prevent civilians from fleeing to safety, and deployed their forces in densely populated civilian areas. Government forces indiscriminately shelled densely populated areas, including hospitals. "

"Both parties' disregard for civilian life resulted in thousands of civilian casualties."

Human rights groups have complained that the Sri Lankan government has failed to take appropriate action to investigate the allegations of war crimes committed earlier in the year.

"In the absence of any domestic steps to investigate these terrible offences there does need to be, in our view, an international inquiry," said Malinowski. 

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 Sri Lanka.

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 Colombo. He was trying to justify the failure to release the detained persons by the promised date.

“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 UK government also that it would no longer be able to provide funding for the camps.

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".

An inquiry similar to one that looked into fighting in Gaza may be needed to determine if war crimes were committed in Sri Lanka in the final throes of its 26-year war this spring, a U.N. office said on Friday, October 23.

"There hasn't been a full inquiry into what did or did not happen in the last months of the war," Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner of Human Rights Navi Pillay, said.

"We still believe that something like the Gaza fact-finding mission is certainly warranted given the widespread concerns about the conduct of the war in Sri Lanka," said Colville.

Colville was referring to the controversial probe by former international war crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone into the recent conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Goldstone's fact-finding mission was set up by a vote in the 47 member state UN Human Rights Council, which has so far not taken up the Sri Lankan issue.

Colville’s comments came the day after the U.S. State Department detailed atrocities toward the end of Sri Lanka's civil war.

He underlined that the US report did not constitute the necessary full inquiry but he acknowledged that it "catalogues in quite some detail specific events that have been reported."

"It seems that more clarity is likely to emerge about who did what to whom and whether or not war crimes and crimes against humanity and other very serious war crimes were committed by one or both sides," he added.

Colville, speaking to a U.N. press briefing in Geneva, said that while the State Department findings were not exhaustive, it was important to credibly lay out what civilians endured as Sri Lanka's conflict neared its end.

"We still believe that something like the Gaza fact-finding mission is certainly warranted," he said.

In late May, the U.N. Human Rights council passed a resolution celebrating Sri Lanka's victory over the Tamils and blocked discussion on a European-drafted text raising concerns about the conditions endured by war survivors housed in Sri Lankan camps.

Sri Lanka said the vote vindicated its prosecution of the war against the Tamil Tigers and should silence calls for a foreign probe into what it described as the Indian Ocean country's own internal affairs.

But the United Nations had then signalled that an inquiry could still happen down the line.

The 575-page Gaza report was produced by a four member team led by Goldstone, a respected South African judge and a former lead war crimes prosecutor for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, after a week long fact finding mission in Gaza.

It condemned rocket attacks by Palestinian armed groups against Israeli civilians, but reserved its harshest language for Israel’s treatment of the civilian Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip, both during the war and through the longer-term blockade of the territory, a New York Times report said.

The team focused on 36 representative cases, and in 11 of these episodes, the report said the "Israeli military carried out direct attacks against civilians, including some in which civilians were shot “while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags.”