COLOMBO: Around 1,500 Tamil civilians have been killed and over 2,000 injured in the landmine blasts triggered by the LTTE to stop the mass exodus from the war zone between April 20 and 27, says moderate Tamil leader V Anandasangaree.
He told Express here on Thursday that while most of the deaths during the exodus were due to the landmines, some were due to firing by the Tigers.
Over 100,000 people had fled to the government-controlled side in a matter of days, putting a heavy strain on the Vavuniya district administration and the armed forces, he added. While Anandasangaree, who heads the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) and is considered close to the government, says there are about 165,000 civilians still in the No Fire Zone which has become the de facto war zone, the government puts the figure between 20,000 and 50,000. He also said that contrary to the government’s claims, food is a major problem in the war zone.
“The weekly requirement is 578 metric tonne but the availability is far short of that. About two weeks ago, the judicial magistrate in Vavuniya had certified seven deaths in the refugee camps, among the new arrivals, as being due to starvation,” he claimed.
“Of course, we cannot find fault only with the government for this, as the pro-LTTE Tamil politicians do. The administration is doing its best under the circumstances. The LTTE should also be held responsible for keeping the people in the war zone under terrible conditions,” he added.
A Sri Lankan Tamil aid worker told The New Indian Express that government should have been prepared for the massive influx of people from the No Fire Zone. “The lack of preparedness is obvious,” the aid worker, who did not want to be identified, said.
Both Anandasangaree and the aid worker denied that there was any significant harassment of youth in the screening centres, as alleged by the pro-LTTE media abroad. The refugees did not mention screening as a major problem, they said.
“One thousand in a refugee population of 185,000 is not a huge figure. And many of those taken in had said that they were LTTE cadre and wished to surrender,” the aid worker said.
Anandasangaree and the aid worker also denied the British Channel 4 story that unnatural deaths had occurred in the camps and that some girls had been raped by the army. Both pleaded that the government should let the media into the camps to talk to the refugees.