|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
May 2009
Tamil children as young as 11 were forced at gunpoint to fight for the Tigers in Sri Lanka's civil war. Survivors talked of their ordeal to Gethin Chamberlain in Ambepusse
A British woman who was working at a hospital helping victims of Sri Lanka's civil war has been interned in one of the island's detention camps, prompting her family to plead for urgent diplomatic help to secure her immediate release.
Many thousands died in final days, says diplomat: Army 'used heavy weapons in no-fire zone'
The three children standing in the dirt outside the tent in Sri Lanka's newest internment camp have not seen their mother for weeks, ever since a shell exploded next to the bunker where they had taken cover, ripping a hole in her stomach.
Lying howling on a torn mattress, in a cot by a window overlooking the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, the wounded toddler was a pitiful sight. A female relative fretted, trying to calm the girl down as the medics worked around her. The 18-month-old had been shot in the stomach in the final stages of the fighting in the north-east of the country and there was an ugly line of stitches across her abdomen where doctors had operated to remove the bullet.
"My face and clothes were splattered with the blood of this boy. I never knew blood was warm." The Observer, May 24
SOPIKA had only ever known war. It had always been there, part of the scenery, part of her very existence. Yet for the first nine of her 10 years, it had seemed to visit only those on the edges of her life. Now, as the bullet passed through the body of the young boy ahead of her on the edge of the lagoon on the north east coast of Sri Lanka where she and her family had sought refuge from the killing, it finally found her. In the darkness, she felt a sudden dampness on her face and on her clothes as the boy's blood splashed onto her.
British say involvement was indirect at most: Two were killed despite cautious negotiations
Reports of bodies found in camp with throats cut: Paramilitaries abducting children, say observers
Priority is to find Tamil Tigers, says government: UN concern grows over 'shocking' conditions
The first accounts of the suffering of civilians during the final stages of the war in Sri Lanka began to emerge from the camps where as many as a quarter of a million Tamils are being held behind barbed wire. Men and women described how they were shot at by the Tamil Tigers as they tried to escape the so-called no-fire zone and how a hospital was repeatedly shelled inside an area designated by the government as a safe zone.
Military sources say Tamil Tiger commanders dead: EU urges Colombo to let UN groups in to care for refugees : Fears that guerrilla attacks may continue
Fears are growing for the safety of up to 80,000 civilians still trapped with the remaining rebels in an isolated coastal strip
Tamil Tigers accused of using phosphorus bombs: Red Cross warns of humanitarian catastrophe
At least 47 people were killed today and more than 50 injured when a shell struck the last hospital inside the so-called no-fire zone in north-eastern Sri Lanka, where casualties of the country's brutal civil war are being treated.
This is really a disaster. I don't know really how to explain it. At the moment, it is like hell..., The Guardian, May 12 "The most terrible thing that I have seen was when a mother had a bullet go through her breast and she was dead and the baby was still on the other side of the breast and the baby was drinking her milk, and that really affected me. I was at that place where it happened...I'm talking to you now, but maybe tomorrow I'll be dead." Vany Kumar, 25, speaking by telephone from a shelled hospital in Sri Lanka's no fire zone.
A doctor working inside the no-fire zone in Sri Lanka today told the Guardian that more than 1,400 people were believed to have been killed in two days of air and artillery attacks.
Hundreds of civilians are reported to have been killed when the Sri Lankan army launched a concerted assault on an area it had just designated as a safe zone.
____________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ |
|
||
