Focus on tsunami overlooks Sri Lanka's war refugees

VAVUNIYA, SRI LANKA � Kandya Parwathy and her family live in abject poverty and discomfort in a sprawling camp in northern Sri Lanka. They are refugees, not from the tsunami 12 months back, but from battles years ago in the island's civil war.

"We want to leave this place as quickly as possible," says Mrs. Parwathy, gesturing at the small room she and nine others have subsisted in for nearly a decade. "There's only one water well and one toilet in our unit for hundreds of people."

The record aid that quickly targeted Sri Lankans displaced by the tsunami has highlighted the predicament of roughly 90,000 longer-standing war refugees like Parwathy, posing, some suggest, an obstacle to Sri Lanka's struggle to achieve peace.

Aid workers say these war refugees have received nothing like the speedy help delivered to tsunami refugees, even though some war refugees have languished in camps ever since the onset of hostilities between the government and separatist Tamil Tiger rebels in 1983.

The war refugees come mainly from the Tamil community, the biggest minority in Sri Lanka, which feels it is discriminated against by the majority Sinhalese community. The civil war flows from this claim of discrimination. Refugee experts worry the aid disparity could exacerbate Tamil ethnic grievances.

The advocacy group Refugees International took up the issue in a recent report based on an inspection of Sri Lankan refugee camps. It labels the disparities in aid as "unjust." The report also describes the aid funds available to war refugees as "meager" compared with the "generous outpouring" for tsunami survivors.

SOURCE: Christian Science Monitor

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