Wednesday, October 14, 2009

The doctors in the concentration camps are seeing 200 to 300 patients a day

For the past three months, a Tamil woman has been living in a concentration camp in Menik farm with her husband and three children.

Two weeks ago, her five-year-old son had a fever and was barely responding. She carried him to the clinic in the camp at 5am and queued until 6pm to see a doctor. Like many others that day, she did not get to see a doctor and she returned with her sick child to their tent without receiving treatment. She went back the next day and again failed to see a doctor after waiting for another 13 hours. It wasn’t until the third day that she finally managed to see a doctor who gave her some antibiotics.

The doctors in the concentration camps are seeing 200 to 300 patients a day, there is little capacity to carry out tests or follow up with patients and only the most urgent cases are transferred to hospitals outside the camps.

Another 24-year-old woman arrived in Menik Farm at the end of May and is badly disfigured since a fragment of bomb shell cut her lips, cheeks and chins during the conflict. Her mouth is always open, her tongue is badly affected and she can barely drink and cannot speak. She is in need of reconstructive surgery, which is not available inside the camp.

When her wounds became infected, she went in pain to the camp’s clinic. There a doctor was unable to do anything for her and she was not transferred to a hospital outside the camp because she was not considered to be an emergency case. She spends her days lying in the sand outside her tent, waiting for the day to pass.

38 comments:

  1. Thambi

    Tamil IDPs brought to the islets of Jaffna in Sri Lanka starve

    Jaffna Government Agent, K. Ganesh, extended an urgent call to local and International Non-government Organizations (NGOs) in Jaffna to provide food for the IDPs brought to the islets of Jaffna from Vavuniyaa internment camps, now detained in Sri Lanka Navy (SLN) special camps and other places in the islets of Jaffna. The dry food rations given to the IDPs under World Food Programme (WFP) are insufficient to meet the needs as no food is provided by the Sri Lanka government to them.

    Altogether 7,742 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) from the islets of Jaffna have been brought from Vavuniyaa internment camps until Monday to the islets.

    These IDPs are again detained SLN concentration camps in Veala’nai, Oorkaavattu’rai, Nedunththeevu and Kaarainakar while some of them are held in the abandoned houses.

    The NGOs in Jaffna who are already taking care of the IDPs in Jaffna peninsula are now being urgently requested to feed the IDPs starving in the islets of Jaffna.

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  2. Thamil

    Vanni IDPs desposited close to a billion rupees in state banks within a few days ?????

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  3. Sinha God

    Undoubtedly, there is no evidence that the doctors in the welfare villages in Sri Lanka are seeing 200 to 300 IDPs a day

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  4. Thambi

    Sinha God, what do you mean by “undoubtedly “and “there is no evidence” ??

    Arrrrrhh……… another Sri Lankan Propagandist

    It seems to me that anyone would have to be utterly blinded by their ideological blinkers to write that

    ”Undoubtedly, there is no evidence that the doctors in the welfare villages in Sri Lanka are seeing 200 to 300 IDPs a day"

    and still go on to put together a barely coherent diatribe of pseudish claptrap on the subject, utterly ignoring the rather more obvious - and actually real - issue of the Sri Lankan military pulverizing civilians with artillery and then herding the survivors into concentration camps.

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  5. Sinha God

    Thambi,

    How is your oily and fat Thalaivar doing lately? Did he achieve Eelam?

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  7. Thambi

    Who are you calling fat?

    VP is a slim man compare to the King Mahinda


    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8304934.stm

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  8. Sinha God

    Sinhalese have only one country in the world. That is Sri Lanka. Don't mess with it. You should have learnt that lesson by now after 30 years of fooling your self.

    Try asking where ever you live in any country in the world to make Tamil their first language and give you an Eelam state. They will laugh and spit on you. So be nice and live in harmony with the majority or get out.

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  9. Thamil
    In Sri Lanka, the Buddha has been made a Barbarian. I do not want to be part of a country where a Buddhist Monk was the FIRST POLITICAL ASSASIN and that is why we are fighting for the separate state

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  10. Sinha God
    Thamil, if you don't want to part of Sri Lanka then please don't. It's your loss and not the loss of the Sinhalese or Sri Lanka. Prabhakaran is dead and the country is moving on. If you wish to live in your dream land and go on

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  11. Mr.Sinha God.

    First of all, the hatred is not one sided. The hatred was first shown by sinhalese leaders openly in 1956 and Tamils continued to be killed, raped and their economy targeted through mob attacks and pogroms. Those days we did not have LTTE. The armed resistance only started in full bloom only when Tamils suffered all sorts of killings and discrimination in the hands of sinhala governments and their 'hatred' loving mass followers. Don't try to spin the history here. Your advice is more suited to the sinhala extremists than to the Tamil people.

    Million dollar question now: Can the sinhalese be magnanimous in 'victory' now?? Are they willing to 'unite' with Tamils as you claim and treat Tamils and other minorities equally? Are they willing to share power with minorities? At least, are they even capable of following Buddhism to its true values. My answer is a 'pathetic' no. Then why are you advising Tamils? It is the sinhalese like Gotabhaya who will have to look for their pants when war crime investigations start, does not matter when. For Tamils, they may have lost the battle, but they have not lost their cause. Unless sinhalese leaders and their followers reform themselves to be true people of the 'civilized world' than behaving like barbarians, there won't be any peace in Sri Lanka, with or without LTTE.

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  12. Thamil

    To-Sinha God.

    In Marriage, particularly in an arranged and forced marriage, if one partner beats the other partner daily, and if the beaten partner asks for divorce, is that stupid?

    In the civilised world, divorce and separation are normal, legal and wise solutions.

    So is the case with Nations married by force into as one country.

    Just as all male chauvinists will get together and say that divorce is stupid and rape is legal and wise, some countries are helping the Sinhala Nation to rape the Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka.

    Well, there are enough Tamils in the world to chase the Sinhala rapists to their own homeland.

    The Sinhala rapists have already woken up some Tamils and hopefully they will wake up all the sleeping Tamils.

    Sinha God, please go ahead in full steam.

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  13. Sam Fernando

    I am a true Sinhalease and a expert in sri lankan history. Just think what did you Tamils who supported ltte to create an eeniya state got after 30 years? It just cost thousonds of lives of both sides and draged the country 30 years back in development. Now prabhakaran is dead and your tamil eelam is just a dream which it was always was. Please realise the reality and join with us because we got a great deal to work on the development process and please undertand it's not only for the sake of we Sinhalease , It's for all the races who live in sri lanka.

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  14. SBB
    I'm a tamil. While I was going to engineering school in England, many of my friends were Sinhalese. Now I see that distrust among two communities is creeping in as the government continues to keep the civilians in detention camps.

    My wife used to tell me how her father shielded the seasonally residing Sinhalese fishermen in the coastal villages in Mullaithivu, from some Tamil rioters in the late 50’s, early 60’s, during the time of civil unrest.

    He single-handedly saved their lives by hiding the entire sinhalese community in his banana plantation, feeding them for days and when tension eased between the two communities, he loaded them up in trucks, risked his life by travelling with them armed with a shot gun, and saw them safely returned to their respective villages in the South, around Negambo area. My wife still fondly remembers some of their names, addressing them as “mamas”.

    Now the sons (and their families) of the hero who saved the lives of a number of Sinhalese families are in camps with squalid living condition. I hear that due to heavy down pour around the area during the past few days, they have no choice but to sleep on rain soaked mud. They have lost everything in life. I guess nobody is going to come to save them this time around.

    As Dr.Anton Balasinham put it before he died; “Only God can save the Tamils from the Sinhalese regime”.

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  15. It’s a very touching story. I guess the saviors of those Sinhalese are languishing in concentration camps now and dying from thirst or hunger

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  16. Sam Fernando

    I feel that if the SL Government is wise, the time has come to send all these INGOs home before they create further problems. I think the SL Goverment has very well understood this. The western people and INGOs are pushing the SL Government towards China, Russia and Iran, as we understand. If the west or the INGOs are really worried, they can give aids and be away from SL soil. I feel that this is the high time for SL Government to make that decision. If further troubles were created by these INGOs, the public may go uncontrollable by the SL Government and take the control to their hands

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  18. Thambi
    Why are you blaming NGO for everything?

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  19. John Worthington

    I completely disagree with Sam Fernando’s view that the Sri Lanka Government should send the NGO home. Instead, it should open the internment camps to the UN, rights & aid groups & the media, & give the displaced Tamil population all medical & nutritional care plus the rights given all Sri Lanka citizens including full freedom of movement & the right to return to their homes. Urgently recommended. There’s a danger the Tamils’ displacement may be made permanent by the Sri Lanka government in order to solve the Tamil “problem”.

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  22. Thamil
    Hi, Mawatha

    What about those poor Tamils on boats in Indonesia ?

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  23. a, savage

    Tamil Human Rights Activists’ plea to the International Community (IC) is self - limiting.
    The question is not what IC should do for Tamils, but what Tamils & their supporters
    Without political clout & economic pressure, why should Sri Lanka listen?
    The Sri Lankan attorney has come to learn from the US “model” of Guantanamo!!!
    Are the Tamils willing to learn from the model they need to follow?
    Is it time for a BDS — a Boycott - Divestment - Sanctions Movement against Sri Lanka’s apartheid state on the model of the Palestinian BDS movement against Israel??
    There are situations in which human rights & natural rights must grow their own teeth in the cause of their own physical survival.
    This isn’t some individuals, but an entire population of Vanni that’s living in Guantanamo.
    Campaigns of appeal & awareness alone won’t help.
    Only a movement on many fronts, political, economic, cultural, spiritual, can free the innocent women, children from the Sri Lankan concentration camps.

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  25. To Thamil,

    Yes, we have to help them, because they will face certain death in Sri Lanka.

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  26. SBB

    There is a tendency in Sri Lanka to provide justification to human rights abuses by pointing to past and present actions of the US or the UK.

    We cannot be compared to the US or the UK.

    We claim to have 2500 years of history. We have had 2500 years to get civilised, far longer than the UK or the US, and one would expect that we can learn to uphold human rights by now.

    If we can't after 2500 years, what's the use?

    Since independence our armed forces have been used exclusively against our own citizens.

    Since Independence we have spent billions of our citizens tax funds to bomb our own citizens.

    100,000 sinhalese have been killed from two JVP insurrections and 100,000 Tamils from a Tamil insurrection.

    We are still making the same mistakes.

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  27. Thambi

    There are reports that BDS — a Boycott - Divestment - Sanctions Movement in Sri Lanka is working

    Also the top level rulers and SL Government of Rajapakse henchmen are taking advantage of this humanitarian disaster and totally cashing in.

    There are corruption charges on import deals leveled against diplomats and the family.

    The Economy is in dire situation and the Sri Lanka exports shrunk by 23% in second quarter.
    Annual losses of the Institutions: Air Lanka- Rs. 9980 million ; MihinAir – Rs. 3900 million ; CEB – Rs. 3990 million ; CPC – Rs. 7200 million ; Ports Authority – Rs. 3500 million ; CGR – Rs. 3900 million ; CTB – Rs. 4500 million ; Road development Authority – Rs. 9900 million ; People’s Bank – Rs. 8900 million

    No wonder why the budget is not presented if you know where the money is going to.

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  28. Thambi

    Home Forensic analysis confirms execution-video authentic, says US-group

    http://www.nowpublic.com/world/channel-4-released-video-evidence-sri-lankas-war-crimes

    A report of preliminary findings from a US-based forensic company that took nearly three weeks to analyze the Channel-4 broadcast video allegedly showing Sri Lanka Army (SLA) soldiers extra-judicially executing Tamil captives stripped naked and hands tied behind their back, said “the video and audio of the events depicted in the Video, were continuous without any evidence of start/stops, insertions, deletions, over recordings, editing or tampering of any kind.”

    The report contained determinations on ten different critical issues on the characteristics of the video and audio portions of the 3gp format file distributed by the German-based Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS) on 25th August.

    The forensic firm used a firing range to conduct field experiments to arrive at some of the findings according to the report.

    Key findings listed in the preliminary report follow:
    •No evidence of tampering or editing was discovered with either the video or audio portions of Video
    •The blood pooled around the previous victim with the white shirt and with the victim of the 2nd shooting is consistent with blood from the brain, which would contain high amounts of oxygen giving the blood its bright color. The fact that it is still bright in color is consistent with it being very recent.
    •The audio delay with respect to both gun shots’ audio compared with each corresponding rifle recoil is consistent for some, if not most, camera cell phones that are capable of video recording.
    •Preliminary field test with a typical camera cell phone of similar audio qualities (per header information in Exhibit “A”), was able to record a MAK-90 (AK variant w/16” barrel) gun shot w/7.62×39mm ammo, with the camera cell phone being positioned in a similar camera field of view of the 2nd gun shot, or 12 feet away from the muzzle, without any distortion of the audio.
    •The leg of an apparent previous shooting victim lying prone on the ground, down range and at the feet of the first victim, rises in the air when the first victim is shot, and then slowly drops to its former position. This reaction appears to be from the bullet that passed through the first victim and then striking the down range victim and would be consistent with a victim that was very recently shot that has not died yet.

    Earlier, Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary or arbitrary executions, dismissed Sri Lanka’s investigations as not independent. “The only way to do this [authenticate the video] is for an independent and impartial investigation to take place,” Alston had said earlier.

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  29. Please write a strong letter to Hillary, Obama and Blake condemning SL PM Ratnasri's statement Digging 'Mr.Clinton and Monica Affair' when he spoke about allegations of women being abused in SL. (http://www.dailymirror.lk/DM_BLOG/Sections/frmNewsDetailView.aspx?ARTID=63901)

    This is a good chance for us to show Sri... lanka's real third rated filthy face to the world. Let them imagine the situation of Tamil people in the hands of these Singala leaders.

    Email:-
    Hillary - secretary@state.gov
    Obama - comments@whitehouse.gov
    robert blake - BlakeR2@state.gov

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  30. You idiots should be thanking the Government for saving your sorry asses from the crutches of Terrorist LTTE organization. At least now you have a land to live in than be ruled by a fascist dictator who was a lunatic. Few more days and the people will be free from camps to return to their houses. Wait till then. There is a reason for them to be held and it is for their own good.

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  31. Thambi

    Are you one of those, Sri Lankan Government stooges of a ruthless regime, who are singing hosanas for their next paycheck ?

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  32. Thambi,

    Thirumavalavan, who was part of a delegation of MPs from Tamil Nadu that visited some camps for the internally displaced Tamils in Lanka, took a stand independent of the delegation’s on Monday.

    “No one can tolerate the sufferings of Tamils in the camps. I am at a loss to understand why countries, including India, continue to be mere spectators to this tragedy,” he said.

    He said the displaced Tamils he met in the camps had cried and pleaded with the delegation to poison them rather than let them live in the camps.

    The camps were crammed, with eight to 10 people made to live in spaces meant for just two persons.

    Thirumavalavan has called upon the international community to declare the Lankan President and his brother ‘war criminals’ and impose economic sanctions on the island nation.

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  33. Thamil,
    The Sri Lanka government’s recent response to Damilvany Gnanakumar, a British citizen (the girl who was recently released from the concentration camps)

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/15/sri-lanka-war-on-tamil-tigers

    indicates that they do not want the inmates of the camp to have access to the media or foreign media.

    The issue here is not who she is or what she said, but the GOSL’s response to her statements. The GOSL made a statement that they will not release any more foreign nationals who were being held in the camps. They also arrested members of Damilvany Gnanakumar’s family who sheltered her, so that she stopped giving her statements to the international press.

    The salient point here is that the Sri Lanka government’s response is to refuse freedom to people in the camp because they did not want them to speak out.

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  34. EU Commission: Sri Lanka fails to meet Rights thresholds for GSP+
    National legislation of Sri Lanka incorporating international human rights conventions, in particular the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, is not being effectively implemented. In the light of these findings, the Commission will now consider whether a temporary withdrawal of some or all of Sri Lanka's GSP+ benefits is called for and make a suitable proposal to EU Member States in the Council. If such a proposal is made and subsequently adopted by the Council, it would enter into force six months after the date of adoption," the European Commission said in the notice summarizing the Commission's findings on the Sri Lanka's GSP+ status released today.

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  35. Hello friends ,
    Have you seen the videos where SLA degrading dead female combatants?
    http://www.warwithoutwitness.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=226:sri-lankan-army-war-crime-evidence-photo-srilankan-army-sexually-abusing-tamil-female-combatants-during-bloody-blood-bath-on-vanni-beaches&catid=40:photo

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