The Ceylon News

By David Perry

Horror stories in Britain about conditions in Sri Lanka camps housing hundreds of thousands of Tamil refugees are wrong, a north-east MP said last night Gordon Liberal Democrat Malcolm Bruce, chairman of the Commons overseas development committee, said there may be shortages but refugees he spoke to were happy to have escaped the fighting in the north of the island state.

Back from a two-day flying visit, he said his delegation, led by ex-Scottish secretary Des Brown, was the first international group to have reached the war-torn area near Vavuniya, where 123,000 men, women and children are surviving in primitive conditions in government camps.
The delegation faced an angry tirade from President Mahinda Rajapaksa when they arrived in the capital of Colombo asking questions about what had happened.

The president was “aggressively defensive” about the campaign against the rebels, who have conducted a terrorist campaign for decades – including the earliest suicide bombers – in support of the fight for independence.

“The president lost his temper with us and accused us of treating Ceylon like a colony,” said Mr Bruce. “He categorically denied the Sri Lanka army has bombarded civilians and said we had been killing civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and we should not be lecturing him.”

The mood calmed after the MPs said they had no previous links with Sri Lanka and were not there to support the Tamil rebels but to see what help could be offered coping with the refugees.
Mr Bruce said: “I hope we managed to persuade them they should be more open and allow the international community to do more to assist them, and that keeping aid groups out is allowing the rebels to misrepresent what is going on.”

The group became the first to be allowed access to the camps, where they were able to talk to refugees.
Mr Bruce said: “They were pleased to have reached safety but concerned at shortages of water, sanitation, food and medical supplies.

“Many had been separated from other members of their families and were desperately anxious to find each other and be reunited.

“Many of the people we spoke to said they had not been able to leave the conflict zone because the rebels warned them that if they attempted to escape they would be shot and sentries were posted to prevent escape.”

The hospital was said to be full of casualties from weekend fighting

LTTE has shelled a hospital inside the conflict zone killing at least 45 people, Tamil Tiger rebel and hospital sources say.

SL Army said the makeshift hospital in Mullivaikal was hit early in the morning, and people injured in weekend attacks were among the dead.

A government spokesman denied knowledge of the incident, but said the army was not using heavy weapons in the zone.

The claims are impossible to verify as reporters are banned from the area.

More than 400 people were killed and over 1,000 injured over the weekend in what the UN has described as a bloodbath.

Many of the casualties from that fighting were taken to the Mullivaikal hospital.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has told the BBC that it has a ship waiting off the rebel-held zone to deliver essential supplies and evacuate sick and wounded people.

But its spokeswoman said the ground situation was making it difficult to dock and carry out humanitarian operations. The last evacuation was on Saturday.

'Nowhere to run'

Thurairaja Varatharajah, a health official at the hospital, told the Associated Press news agency it had been hit by a single mortar shell.

More than 50 people were injured, and he expected the death toll to rise because many of the injured had bad head and stomach wounds, he added.

However, military sources have suggested that doctors in the zone may be being forced to give statements at gunpoint by rebels.

Rebel spokesman Seevaratnam Puleedevan told AP civilians were fleeing in all directions.

"There's no place to seek shelter or protect themselves," he said.

The Sri Lankan military has meanwhile blamed civilian deaths on the Tigers, saying they are using people as human shields.

Defence ministry spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella told the BBC he knew nothing of the incident but that the military was not deploying heavy weaponry in civilian areas.

The UN estimates that about 50,000 civilians are trapped by the conflict, in a three-sq-km strip of land.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said on Monday he was appalled by the killings and called for an immediate halt to the fighting.

Diplomats from the UK, France and Austria said the Security Council should address the crisis, while the US said it was "deeply concerned" by the crisis.

The Tamil Tigers have fought for an independent homeland for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority since 1983.

More than 70,000 people have been killed in the war.