After UnitingWorld’s the Rev. John Barr returned from visiting the war-torn north of Sri Lanka in June, he described his journey as one of the most challenging and confronting trips he has ever experienced. Here is his reflection.
The island of Sri Lanka is likened to a tear drop in the Indian Ocean. This is, perhaps, a most apt image given the country’s tumultuous history. In 2009, we all cried and opened our hearts to over 280,000 Tamil civilians that were interned in detention centres run by Sri Lankan security forces. Humanitarian aid was severely restricted and ‘unexplainable disappearances’ were frequent.
My recent journey to the north of the island gave a chilling insight into the issues that thousands of Tamils continue to face. While much of the conflict is over, it is clear that many people have been unable to access their most basic needs. My experience left me questioning whether Tamils are truly safe from harm today.
During the one week trip to assess the situation, I visited several holding centres for Tamils who have been released from detention camps and await permission from security forces to return to their homeland.
These holding centres are extremely dire places. Food is scarce and access to basic health care is minimal.
One of my strongest memories is my visit to a centre located in the grounds of the former Killinochchi Central College, where some 335 families reside today.
The top floors of the main building have been blasted by artillery and mortars during the war. The people who live there receive food from the United Nations World Food Programme, but access to basic health care remains extremely limited.
A doctor from the Jaffna Diocese Green Memorial Hospital in Jaffna visits the centre for a few hours whenever possible to perform medical checkups. During this visit I met Annamma, a young mother of three children. One of her legs had been blown off during the recent war. Her husband was incapacitated due to a bullet lodged in his spine.
Annamma’s family were Tamils that had fled Jaffna in 1995 to rebuild their lives in Vanni, an autonomous Tamil region. Their future now remains in serious jeopardy.
Annamma told me she is “sick of being here”. She is “sick of waiting… all we do is line up and wait… for food, for water, for a shower…”. Thousands of others are in this same situation. There was a depressing sense of hopelessness in this holding centre.
These families are waiting here for land to become available where they can resettle, but much of the land remains riddled by land mines and is as such uninhabitable.
At another centre, the people were in no better condition.
I met a man who had lost both his legs. Another man suffered shrapnel wounds in his stomach. Then a woman next to me collapsed to the ground and gripped her head tightly, convulsing on the ground. People tell me that this happens to her frequently, a result of shrapnel lodged in her brain.
Today approximately 45,000 people have no choice but to continue to live in these centres scattered throughout the country’s north.
Back here in Australia, we hear little more than reports that we war is over and that conditions are improving in Sri Lanka. But my first hand view highlights that the Tamils there continue to experience a real sense of subjugation and humiliation.
Many queue for hours to access to food and health care. They wait for months on end, uncertain of when they will be able to return to their land and start rebuilding their lives. There are no places for Tamils to mourn, and many do not know what has happened to their loved ones. Trauma is a massive issue, and there is no closure for so many people.
An urgent question in Australia concerns the wellbeing of Tamils from the north and the east of Sri Lanka seeking asylum in Australia. Many are detained in terrible conditions with limited access to their most basic needs.
Are Tamils truly safe in Sri Lanka today? From what I saw the answer in no. We have a responsibility to continue opening our hearts to the many thousands of Tamils who face danger in Sri Lanka today.
John Barr is Associate Director for Church Solidarity (Asia)
Tags: Sri Lanka
Dear John,
You article really touched my heart and I forwarded it to Bishop Daniel.
We cannot stand and do nothing about it. If we do we become as bad as the Tamil oppressors. How can we live in privilege and freedom with food to sparewhile others starve? Help us make a change in the world.
[...] Click here to read his reflection from this experience [...]
Dear John,
Thank you for this report, it really opened my eyes to how desperate the situation still is over there, much of which is never mentioned on the news. Now I feel that I have a more informed view of why we still have asylum seekers coming to our shores illegally, and that turning them around is definitely not an option. I pray that more articles like this will come to the public’s attention, and more will be done to help these people.
Thank you.
Thank you so much Rev.John Barr for having taken the effort to visit Vanni and report to the world of the continuing pathetic plight of a people simply because of their ethnicity. Hope the media will take note of this account and would take effry effort to expose the terrible oppression of the Tamil people by the Sinhala political establishment in Sri Lanka. When is the so called international community going to wake up and come to the assistance of such hapeless people in failed states?
John,
I can’t thank you enough for writing about your experience in Sri Lanka and the plight of the Tamil people. Most people do not know of the horrors Tamils face in SL and why they are fleeing the country.
God Bless
first of all i thank Rev. John Barr for this article.same situation everrywhere in srilanka for tamils. i want to ask everybody in this world that if someone who dont speak like u,whos culture is different,religion is anather,and everythink is diferent than you, how can you accept to living under there rule? and when they stand in front of your house and tell you what time you have to go out and when you have to sleep.afterall they dicede everything. oh man is better to die.
Yes…There is no safe for Tamils in Srilanka
Dear John
Thank you for publishing the truth of the ground realities. The world shold be made aware of the TRUTH before it is too late. Action is needed immediately to address the problems.
With respect to Rev. John Barr
I thank you very much for bringing the truth about the living tamils in their Tamil home land where there are no protection for tamils, left with nothing, but take orders from the ruthless Govt.It is important that the International Govt. do something about this and bring political solution for the Tamils to lead a better life.
I thank you from my bottom of my heart for writing the truth as you saw.
Thank you thank you thank you …..
http://www.oecumene.radiovaticana.org/en1/Articolo.asp?c=412164
Ethnic Tamils Still Facing Hardship in Sri Lanka – Vatican Radio, 30 July 2010
Dear Rev. Barr,
A dear friend forwarded the URL link to your post, and I am so glad she did. Your first-hand experience and account of the deplorable, inhumane conditions the Tamils who survived the horrific civil war live in to this day is, to say the least, heartbreaking.
It is a situation so tremendously tragic and outrageous for a country advertising the fact that, though they’re still recovering from this war, they’re opening their “gates” to tourists and building houses after houses for their military, while literally kicking and/or keeping Tamils off their homeland. The few gestures of “kindness” the SL regime bestows upon some of the “poor” in SL is only PR for the benefit of the international community. Much of their actions scream of covert, sinister scheming, considering they prevent most NGO’s and the UN from providing humanitarian aid as they’d like.
I realize it sounds cliché, since I seem to use the term “heartbreaking” quite often these days when it comes to the Tamils’ overwhelming plight, but your descriptive account makes my heart bleed. It is a most frustrating emotion when one feels helpless to be a voice for those who cannot be heard, and who are helplessly subjected to the totalitarian control of a government whose only priority is the wellbeing of its military and it’s military prowess, as well as promoting the image of a country who conquered terrorism like no other.
As has been reported in several excellent articles, the impunity of the Rajapaksa regime is unbelievably atrocious.
Thank you so very much for sharing your experience to allow the world to see that conditions for Tamils, and even some Sinhalese whom the SL government considers traitors and Tamil sympathizers, are most certainly not safe and their lives are definitely not normalized. My view is that unless the international community keeps pressuring the UN into stepping in, by force if necessary (which no one would wish to be necessary), life for Sri Lanka’s Tamils will, without a doubt, continue to be in grave peril without hope for liberation.
Sincerely,
Heike Winnig
Dear Rev Burr,
Thank you, but we must do more to safeguard the Tamil population. Please request you Prime Minister/Foreign Minister to request the Commonwealth to send afact finding mission to find out what is truly happenning to the Tamils. Is this Silent GENOCIDE?
Bos Tamilan
[...] Uniting World - Tamils in Sri Lanka seeking asylum: A need no more? [...]
[...] “Tamils in Sri Lanka seeking asylum: A need no more?” – a personal account by Rev. John Barr of his visits to several IDP camps in Sri Lanka this past June (two months ago). His account is unbelievably sad and disheartening in its emphasis that the government is not taking care of its people, i.e. the Tamils. The lack of food and water, the basic human necessities are not provided, no one has privacy, not to mention standing in line for hours to hopefully get a shower in the community shared bath, and medical care is almost non-existent. [...]
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Definitely are in agreement with whatever you stated. Your explanation was certainly easy and simple to grasp. I show you, I usually get irked when folks discuss conditions they plainly do not know about. You managed to kick the nail close to the pinnacle and explained out everything without complication. Will most likely be back.