“The refugees will be free to return to their villages after Dec 1. The camps will be closed completely by Jan. 31,” Basil Rajapaksa, senior advisor to the President, said in Colombo on Saturday, Nov 21.
He added 136,000 refugees from the Wanni War will be allowed to leave the camps by December end. ‘They will be free to settle in areas cleared of mines”
The camps are located in Manik Farm and are guarded by soldiers and strung with barbed wire. Most of the camps remained out of bounds for the media and foreign relief workers till recently. The first outsiders to visit the camps were a group of lawmakers from Tamilnadu. Their visit was followed by a team of TNA leaders.
Initially, Manik Farm housed in makeshift camps some 300,000 war displaced ethnic minority Tamil families who fled their homes just before the war against Tamil Tigers, as the insurgent outfit, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were known, ended in May 2009.
The camps became a political issue and an embarrassment diplomatically with pressure mounting on Colombo firstly to give a better deal to the refugees and secondly to let them go back to their normal place of living. More than half of the Internally Displaced People (IDPs) as the refugees are described officially, were released in recent months to leave the camps,.
Human Rights groups say the detention is an illegal form of collective punishment for the ethnic group but the government has maintained that Tamils must be screened for their LTTE linkages and their villages must be de-mined before the camps were closed.
The Rajapaksa government, under pressure from the US State Department, has ordered an inquiry into human rights violations during the closing phase of the Wanni War. An independent group has been appointed to carry out the probe.
The nearly three-decade old Tamil imbroglio broke out initially as a political campaign for equal rights. In the eighties it became a violent movement led by the LTTE for separate home land for Lanka Tamilians. India too burnt its fingers by lending its hand to both sides in addressing the ethnic issue. An estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people were killed in the violence.
