Families getting split up as Sri Lankans flee violence, says charity

[Peikko 1,575]

Growing numbers of traumatised and hungry children are arriving unaccompanied at camps in Sri Lanka after being separated from their parents as they escape a tiny enclave engulfed in heavy fighting, a charity said today.

The children, as young as five, have been forced to flee with relatives while their parents remain trapped in north-east Sri Lanka, where the movement of civilians has been restricted by Tamil Tiger rebels. But the vast majority of unaccompanied children, all under the age of 16, are becoming lost as they arrive at overcrowded camps in government-controlled areas.

"The camps are chaotic," said Save the Children's acting country director in Sri Lanka, Branko Golubovic. "These children are coming out of combat areas where they have been severely traumatised, only to find themselves in yet another harsh environment in the camps. Many of them are malnourished and most have witnessed horrific events. Being removed from the support of their families at this point will have serious long-term consequences for their overall development."

Save the Children said that a recent survey of 100 shelters found that 72% of families had been separated and lost each other. It warned that the number of children parted from one or both parents will have risen dramatically in the past few weeks, when there was an influx of displaced persons.

The UN special representative for children and armed conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy, has also expressed her concerns at the deteriorating crisis and its serious toll on children. Around 196,000 people have escaped the area in northern Sri Lanka controlled by the rebels since the beginning of the year, at least 40% of which are children. Most arrived in government camps in the past three weeks.

According to UN figures, more than 6,400 people have died in the fighting since January, when the government launched an offensive that has left the Tamil Tigers trapped in a tiny enclave in the north of the island. The government estimates that 50,000 civilians remain trapped in the conflict zone.

Save the Children expects 20,000 of those still trapped will escape and arrive in the hugely overcrowded camps by the end of the week. In the meantime, thousands of unaccompanied children are relying on the ad hoc systems put in place by aid organisations attempting to reunite desperate parents with their missing children.

Golubovic said: "While they are few and far between, we have had rare success stories."

The Sri Lankan government said thousands of civilians were crossing a lagoon today to escape the combat zone. "Already, 2,000 civilians have crossed the lagoon. There is a large number of people crossing, and the [rebels] fired at them. Four people were killed, 14 were wounded," a military spokesman, Brigadier Udaya Nanyakkara, told Reuters.

The fighting showed no signs of abating despite appeals from Barack Obama and the UN security council. Obama late yesterday said: "Now's the time, I believe, to put aside some of the political issues that are involved and to put the lives of the men and women and children who are innocently caught in the crossfire, to put them first."

In a formal statement, the UN security council said it "strongly condemned the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) for its acts of terrorism over many years" and voiced "grave concern" over reports of heavy military shelling and the dire condition of innocent people trapped in the fighting.

The government has ruled out a further truce and insisted troops were only using small arms, while welcoming the calls for the LTTE to surrender and recognition of its right to combat terrorism on its own soil.

"We will cease operations simultaneously when the LTTE lays down arms and surrenders, there will be no need of conducting operations to free the civilians," Mahinda Samarasinghe, disaster management and human rights minister, told Reuters.

The Tigers are pursuing their fight for a separate nation for minority Tamils, which began in the 1970s and erupted into full-scale civil war in 1983.

Link