Tamil in SriLankan IDP camp Manik Farm facing torture and intimidation Sky News

Most of the arguments about Manik Farm (and other transit camps in the North of Sri Lanka) seem to get stuck on definitions and comparisons. Is it a concentration camp? Is it like the camps run by the Nazis or old colonial powers? I believe these debates miss the most important question: what is the actual predicament of people who have escaped from the Wanni to be held in these camps? Can we spend just a few minutes to really consider their situation? Or does victory mean we do not need to know the cost of liberation and do not care what their new form of captivity means to those who have been newly liberated?

Family Separation
When people were fleeing the fighting, families were often split up. When they reached the Sri Lankan forces, men and women were separated for screening and after that were herded into vehicles to be taken to transit camps. Although they assumed they would be taken to the same camps and could find their loved ones again, they were often mistaken On different days, people were taken to different transit camps, and even if they all escaped the shelling, fighting and screening, they did not always end up in the same place. They hoped they could find each other, but since no one is allowed to leave the camps or even call anyone, they have no way of finding their children, husbands, wives, parents and other relatives.

The people in the camps dont know if everyone in their family made it. They dont know if anyone of their family was taken away as a suspect. Families dont know what happened to those who were injured, and the injured lying in hospitals sometimes dont know where the rest of their family are. There are even injured children in hospital who do no know where the rest of their family is or whether they will find them again. There are no lists in the camps, no central registers of displaced people and camp inmates, no up-to-date public records of which hospitals the sick and the injured have been transferred to in Vavuniya, Trincomalee, Polonnaruwa, Anuradhapura or further afield.

Imagine if you were stuck inside a camp with no way of knowing whether your husband and child were alive or dead. Whether your son had been taken away as a suspect during screening. Whether your wife in the hospital will be discharged to your camp or transferred to some other place.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Sri
• Lankan
• war
• lankan
• Tamils
• INDIA
• LTTE
• NAZI
• CAMPS
• Children
• Vanni
• Manik
• Camp
• SInhalese

[aliyamahagedara]

THis is a very biased report and media is playing their game. A lot of unverified false information. At the end they say "the tamils are forced to fly the sinhalese flag". There was never a sinhalese flag. There was only one flag for all of us. That's the Sri Lankan flag. The Orange lines in that flag represents the tamils. Green lines represents the muslims and other colours for others and so on. The person who did this report did not even get the facts right. Media can never be trusted.

[B12N]

@aliyamahagedara: Tamils never accepted this flag. The flag your are talking about was in the first place only to represent sinhalese.

Orange and green lines are added later after many protests of Tamils. So don't act like the sinhalese politicans take tamils as equal citizians. There is no WE or OUR in Sri Lanka. 99% victims are Tamils!!!!! And that is a FACT many sinhalese don't want to acknowledge!!!!!!!!!!!!

[eazydee415]

that 2 bad blacks r suffering all over the world

[chulomuchacho]

This is a very biased report, I am concerned about the welfare of the camps, but the media is now playing a very dangerous game.

Firstly it was our politcians from both sides who played communalism, then it was the mobs from both sides, and now it is the international media who cant verify a story, but go on the whim of accounts.

What do they want another war for 30 years?