Controversy and confusion followed Thursday’s ceremony at Manthai West where the government in a highly-publicised move released some 6,000 internally displaced people, saying it was in keeping with its 180-day deadline set in July.
The government claimed that the IDPs were sent to their homes but reports said they had not gone to their houses.
Questions have arisen when some of them were brought back to the camps while others were sent to transit camps or temporary shelters set up in schools and other government buildings.
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| A section of the IDPs who were asked to go home and then brought back to the transit camp at Manthai West. |
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| Basil Rajapaksa ceremonially inaugurating the bus ride |
At Thursday’s ceremony attended by Senior Presidential Advisor Basil Rajapaksa, Ministers and other politicians, journalists who were taken on a Resettlement-Ministry-sponsored tour to Manthai West were told some 1,200 IDPs brought from the Chettikulam camp would be sent to their original homes in the Mannar district.
The IDPs were asked to board the buses parked outside, but after a short ride, they were brought back to the original location where the ceremony took place, our photographer Ranjith Perera, who was one of the journalists taken on the tour said.
It was more a photo-opportunity for the journalists, he said.
Other groups who were released earlier have also not reached their homes.
A group of IDPs who were released from camps to be resettled in Mullaitivu, which saw some of the heaviest fighting in the last days of the Eelam war, were instead taken to transit camps in schools and government buildings at Thunukkai.
When the Sunday Times asked government officials regarding Thursday’s IDP ride at Manthai West, they said the resettlement process was proceeding as scheduled, although 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, they said
The IDPs who were relocated at Thunukkai were, however, allowed to visit their villages in Mullaitivu on Thursday and they saw for themselves the damage caused to their houses, the officials said adding that the International Organisation of Migration was also involved in the process of providing temporary shelters.
One official acknowledged that the IDPs felt that living in their own areas was a thousand times better than living in crowded camps under squalid conditions.
Meanwhile, Emelda Sukumar, the District Secretary for Mullaitivu and Kilinochchi, told the Sunday Times that they hoped to resettle the 6,000 families in the two districts by next month.
She said that normalcy had returned to the Thunukkai AGA division with power-supplies being restored with the help of generators while the hospital and the three schools in the area had also begun to function.
Ms. Sukumar said another batch of IDPs would be resettled in the Karachchi AGA division in the Kilinochchi district on Monday.
She said she visited the Mullaitivu and Kilinochchi districts where reconstruction work was underway and hoped to move her office to the Kilinochchi AGA division next week. She now functions from an office in Vavuniya.
Two weeks ago, an Indian parliamentary delegation that visited Sri Lanka told journalists in Chennai that the Sri Lankan government had given them an undertaking that 50,000 IDPs would be resettled within the next 15 days.
The government this week said that some 40,000 IDPs would be resettled in the coming weeks.
There are some 240,000 IDPs are currently in camps in the Vavuniya district and the government has come under heavy international pressure to resettle them or allow them to live with their relatives.
Meanwhile, in another development international NGOs providing relief aid have said they would be cutting down their assistance to the IDPs by the end of the year. |
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