Humanitarian disaster warns NGO head

The director of an Australian non-governmental organisation (NGO) has warned of a humanitarian disaster in the war zones of Sri Lanka in the absence of foreign aid workers.

The extreme humanitarian situation of Internally Displaced Persons, including thousands of children, who are already malnourished, would deteriorate dramatically as clean water is not available for all the IDPs and they have been deprived of medicine by the Sri Lankan government, said Executive Director Paul O'Callaghan of the Australian Council for International Development (ACFID).

ACFIOD has had 25 member organisations working in Sri Lanka over many decades.

Mr. O'Callaghan expressed fear of a blood bath as foreign aid workers of UN agencies and NGOs packed their bags following the orders by the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) to leave the Vanni region.

"Apart from the direct military conflict we would expect that many, many people will die or be in extreme circumstances if humanitarian workers are not able to access this area," Mr. O'Callaghan told Australia's ABC Radio last week, after Colombo's decision to exclude foreign workers.

According to UN estimates, 40% of all children in the North are currently malnourished and don't have access to any prospect of food, he noted.

In response to the Sri Lankan government’s statement that it did not want to see a repeat of the 2006 massacre of 17 local aid workers employed by French agency Action Contre La Faim, Mr O'Callaghan said the circumstances of that incident were never clear.

He reiterated that by clearing Tamil areas of foreign aid agencies, the Sri Lankan government is also ensuring no independent sources exist to comment on ground realities.

"If you exclude all foreign humanitarian workers then you won't have any, not only the immediate support for those communities but also those who can actually see what's happening on the ground," he said.

Accusing the government of having received the highest number of complaints of any government in the United Nations Human Rights Commission over recent years, O'Callaghan said Sri Lanka had as result been reviewed recently by the commission.

In response, the government had made commitments to the commission only a few weeks ago to protect civilians.

"[Sri Lanka] undertook at that point to make special efforts to ensure that the situation for citizens who are not involved in the conflict would be taken care of, and that those citizens would be able to be safe and obtain food and water and medicine and so on," he told ABC Radio Australia.

He added that it is worrying to see the government’s change in policy after only recently pledging to protect civilians.

"So this does worry us - that we could see very quickly a very large scale disaster occurring, quite apart if you like from what the civil war is directly involved in," he concluded.

ACFID is an independent national association of Australian NGOs working in the field of international aid and development.

Paul O'Callaghan, who is the Executive Director of ACFID, also serves on the Foreign Minister’s Aid Advisory Council, is a member of the National Nonprofit Roundtable and the Australian Collaboration and is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management.

While in government (1982–2000), he served as Australia’s High Commissioner in Samoa (1997–2000) and had earlier diplomatic appointments in Malaysia and Thailand.