Grim scenes at Sri Lankan camps
Updated on 05 May 2009
Channel 4 News reports from a camp in the northern Sri Lankan city of Vavuniya, where Tamil refugees have been taken.
Channel 4 News reports from a camp in the northern Sri Lankan city of Vavuniya, where Tamil refugees have been taken.
Shocking claims have emerged of shortages of food and water, dead bodies left where they have fallen, women separated from their families, and even sexual abuse.
This programme obtained the first independently filmed pictures from the internment camps set up by the Sri Lankan government to house Tamils who have fled the country's civil war.
There are at least a hundred thousand Tamils from the country's north held in these camps, and while the government insists their stay there is temporary, aid workers say there is not as yet a concrente plan for their resettlement into the country's north.
As access to the camps is prohibited to journalists, unless they are under military escort, independent information about conditions inside is hard to come by.
But Channel Four News managed to send a cameraman into the camps who filmed, without army escort, who filmed these scenes.
The cameraman also interviewed a number of relatives of people held inside and, importantly, a number of aid workers.
They gave the first independent testimony of life inside. Stories of children trampled in the rush to get food; of three women's bodies found in a bathing area in the open.
The information emerges at a time when the camps are the subject of great controversy. The international community, through the UN and aid agencies, are helping to build and organise aid inside the growing camp network which may one day need to hold 230,000 people.
Critics say the UN money is in effect being used to help the Sri Lankan government build a huge internment camp system.
One aid worker we speak to says he has been told by government officials, the camp system may need to last for over 3 years.
