Despite the claim of the Sri Lankan government that rehabilitation work is in full swing in the regions where Tamils live, the real condition is worse. To say the least, it is non-livable and within two years, all the Tamils and everything about them will be destroyed and obliterated from memory if the present squalid condition persists, I Kayal alias Angayarkanni, who was detained in Sri Lanka recently for visiting the northern part of the island nation, said here on Tuesday.
Angayarkanni, an advocate by profession, along with her associate M Thirumalai, had visited the Tamil regions in Sri Lanka, including Vavunia, Mattakalappu, Omandai, Kilinochi, Jafna and Valvettithurai and got to know firsthand the condition of the Tamils in various camps.
‘In a camp at Kattariankulam in Vavunia there live about 1600 persons making up from 746 families and most of them are women and children. Men who are fewer live without either leg or hand and we even hear that the women are subjected to sexual harassment’, she said.
Though the government claims that rehabilitation work is in progress, only 30 per cent of relief materials reach the people at the camps. Still the people lead a life with their hands tied up and undergo torture at the ‘concentration camps’ and ‘torture centres’, she said. About 16,000 young men and 9,000 women in the 18-35 age group who were once LTTE sympathisers are lodged in separate camps and their condition is worse, Thirumalai said.
‘When the UN officials visited the camps, the women inmates petitioned to them to know about these displaced young people and most of the parents were not in a position to know whether their sons were alive’, she said. Those who are healthy are kept in torture centres and those who are not are kept in camps for internally displaced persons.
If this condition persists the whole of Tamil race would be rooted out of the island nation, Angayarkanni said. She also pointed out that the agricultural tools distributed to the Tamils were used by the Sinhalese. That shows the failure of the authorities to reach the welfare measures to the affected Tamils, she added.
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