tw news-features

The rapidly deteriorating security situation in Sri Lanka has already affected the ability of aid agencies to work in the conflict-ridden north.

In mid-December, all international agencies working in Mullaithivu District and parts of Kilinochchi District (both under the control of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka’s north) were asked by the Tigers to cease operations in those areas and move staff out.

According to officials with the UN and international aid agencies, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) informed them through the government agent in Mullaithivu, Imalda Sukumar, in mid-December that they could not guarantee the security of international staff based in Mullaithivu.

“We take the security of staff very seriously and we had to take the decision to move out,” Deputy Country Head of World Food Programme (WFP) Jean-Yves Lequime told IRIN. “The Mullaithivu staff were relocated to Kilinochchi after we received the information.”

The access restrictions affect 21 international agencies working in LTTE-held areas in Sri Lanka’s north. They include UN agencies and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

WFP unable to deliver food to 32,000

The WFP pullout has meant it has been unable to deliver food to 32,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Mullaithivu District over the past three weeks. The curtailment also meant no food supplies for other programmes, including Food for Education (FFE), Food for Training (FFT), Food for Work (FFW) and Mother and Child Nutrition (MCN), in the district, according to an Inter Agency Standing Committee (IASC) situation report released on 20 December.

“Movement restrictions within the Mullaithivu District over the past three weeks are affecting humanitarian activities such as FFE, FFW, FFT, MCN and other livelihood support programmes,” according to a 2 January IASC situation report. [LINK TO IASC REPORT/S]

The IASC report said the restrictions applied in areas east of Kilinochchi, the political and administrative nerve centre of the Tamil Tigers, 250km north of Colombo. The LTTE warning came as confrontations along the line of control southeast of Mullaithivu increased in mid-December.

Limited access

To respond to the impending food shortages in her district, the government agent in Mullaithivu, Imalda Sukumar, undertook to transport WFP supplies brought to Kilinochchi back to Mullaithivu. “I sent lorries to Kilinochchi to bring the supplies,” Sukumar told IRIN. “The agencies having to limit their work here due to security has already had a bad impact.”

The few international agencies, including WFP and ICRC, that continue any assistance projects in Mullaithivu now travel to the district during the day and return to Kililinochchi at night, according Sukumar. “No one stays here overnight any more.”

The WFP sends staff three days per week to oversee distribution of supplies in the district, WFP’s Lequime said. “We told the Tigers and the government agent that WFP officials have to be present when distribution of food supplies takes place,” he said.

Conflict set to escalate?

More fighting is expected in the coming weeks following the Sri Lankan government’s withdrawal from the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA), a truce with the Tigers signed in February 2002. The truce will formally end on 16 January.

“In my view, currently Sri Lanka [government forces] is trying to enter through the A-32 [highway] to Pooneryn [on the northwestern coast], or use the A-34 [south of Mullaithivu] to advance through Oddisuddaan,” senior Tiger leader K. V. Balakumaran said in an interview with a Tiger-run TV station two weeks ago. “One of these highways will result in being renamed the highway of death.”

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned of an escalation of violence and requested the fighting parties to ensure the safety of civilians. “The Secretary-General urges all concerned to ensure the protection of civilians and enable humanitarian assistance to be provided to affected areas,” the UN said in statement on 3 January.

International agencies, including WFP, are taking each day at a time and constantly re-evaluating the security situation in the north. “As in all areas of conflict we are constantly in touch with all the parties evaluating security; we will only work if there are security guarantees given on our staff safety, not otherwise,” WFP’s Lequime said. [irinnews.org]

Renewed fighting delays reconstruction in north and east:

Three years after the tsunami devastated Sri Lanka, the island’s eastern and northern districts which were hardest hit, lag far behind southern areas in post-tsunami recovery.

The rest of the country is showing impressive results, according to officials at the Reconstruction and Development Agency (RADA), who say over 90 percent of the intended new houses have been constructed. But reconstruction in the north and east has been delayed significantly by ongoing violence between government forces and the Tamil Tigers which began anew in December 2005.

Ramesh Selliah, director of housing at RADA, told IRIN that housing reconstruction efforts in the rest of the island could be completed by mid-2008, the end of RADA’s tenure. He, however, was reluctant to give a time frame for completion of the work in the north and east.

“It might take some time in the north and east where there have been delays,” he said.

By May 2007, of the 19,700 new houses slated to be built in the six districts in the north and east, only 4,400, or 22 percent had been completed, according to RADA figures. In contrast, in the three worst hit districts in the south, Hambantota, Matara and Galle, over 60 percent of the houses had been completed by mid 2007.

Despite suffering over 60 percent of deaths and displacements from the tsunami, according to the Post Tsunami Recovery and Reconstruction report compiled by the Sri Lankan government and its donor partners in 2006 December, the rebuilding effort in the north and east has suffered greatly due to the eruption of conflict and resulting restrictions and security fears.

Transport restrictions

Some areas like the northern Jaffna Peninsula and the Tamil Tiger-controlled areas in the north face severe transport restrictions that have brought reconstruction work to a complete standstill in some instances, according to Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, a Colombo-based economist who specialises on the conflict areas.

“Naturally, with the intensification of the conflict, tsunami reconstruction has been put on the back burner,” he told IRIN. “Mullaithivu District [which is controlled by the Tamil Tigers] is lagging behind all other districts, but very little information is available about the actual situation,” Sarvananthan said. “I know for sure that housing construction for tsunami victims in Mullaithivu has come to a complete halt since the closure of the A9 [highway] in August 2006.”

“The reconstruction programme in the north and east is likely to take some more time due to the ongoing conflict-related issues,” the World Bank said in its latest update on tsunami reconstruction.

The effects of the slowdown in the reconstruction effort are not limited to housing only, as reports filed by agencies show.

Income disparities

World Vision found glaring income disparities between the south and the east in its Tsunami Response Final Report. “Incomes in the south are now higher than pre-tsunami levels, whereas in the east incomes have dropped 25 percent lower than pre-tsunami levels,” it said.

At least in the east, with relative calm returning in mid-2007, some of the suspended projects have restarted. However, the opposite is true in the north where the conflict has intensified.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Crescent Societies (IFRC), the single largest funder of new housing construction, said programmes in the north still remain in limbo due to the fighting.

“In the north of the country, the vast majority of IFRC operations have already been suspended and it is difficult to prepare future operations in the current political and military climate,” the IFRC said in its Federation-wide Tsunami Semi-annual Report on Sri Lanka released in December.

The situation is unlikely to improve any time soon, according to Bhavani Fonseka, a senior researcher at the Colombo based think-tank, the Centre for Policy Alternatives.

“It is very difficult to predict anything in the northeast, given what occurred in the last year; it will not change overnight, it is hard to give a time frame when things will improve,” she told IRIN.

ap/bj/cb

Monsoon flooding subsides, needs under review

Eastern Sri Lanka is beginning to dry out from heavy flooding brought on by monsoon rain during much of December which at its height caused the displacement of 250,000 people, according to government officials.

Farms, infrastructure and houses have been damaged, and public health and other concerns remain, but the majority of people displaced by the floods have returned home.

“We will need assistance for the reconstruction of houses,” N. D. Hettiarachchi, director at the National Disaster Relief Services Centre, told IRIN. “At the moment we are assessing the damage. And so far there have been no reports of epidemics or threats of them breaking out, but we are keeping a close look.”

Hettiarachchi said US$350,000 was available from the government to provide immediate assistance, including the provision to the affected communities of hot meals for several days and dry rations thereafter.

The flood-hit districts include Ampara, Trincomalee Badulla, Batticaloa, Jaffna, Mullaitivu, Kilinochchi, Polonnaruwa, Ratnapura and Anuradhapura.

Longer-term concerns

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) conducted an assessment mission on 27 December and cautioned that even though the water was subsiding there were longer-term concerns. They include contaminated wells, loss of household goods and health concerns associated with water-borne diseases and snakes.

The government agent in Batticaloa indicated that the government would cover the district’s main food needs but requested support from Batticaloa-based agencies to address urgent non-food relief items, according to an OCHA situation report released on 27 December.

Batticaloa District dealt with a massive influx of internally displaced persons between March and June 2007, and some of these still in camps were displaced once again by the floods, according to Batticaloa District officials.

Most families have returned home

A break in the rains after 24 December resulted in the return of the majority of families, with only 252 individuals remaining displaced by 27 December, according to OCHA.

According to some relief agencies parts of the main access roads to Batticaloa have been damaged and so have hundreds of houses in Batticaloa and adjoining districts.

“Farms, roads, and other infrastructure have been heavily damaged, and there have been reports of one death and 3,924 fully and partially collapsed homes,” the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) said. JICA sent relief material worth 14 million yen ($120,000) to Sri Lanka last week.

Hettiarachchi said reconstruction work would only begin after damage assessments had been completed. “The water has subsided and now we are assessing the damage,” he said. [irinnews.org]

Over US$500 million in tsunami aid given to Sri Lanka has gone “missing”, an anti-corruption organisation has charged.

Transparency International Sri Lanka (TISL) said its investigations had revealed a gap between the amounts disbursed by foreign aid agencies and what has been spent on relief and recovery projects since the 2004 tsunami.

“The difference between the disbursed and the expended (amounts) has been a controversial issue that does not have a credible explanation,” said TISL in a statement released to mark the third anniversary of the disaster. “There is no precise evidence to explain the missing sum of Rs 53,597,253,625 [about US$535 million].”

The government, however, has consistently said its recovery programme has been a notable success. Government spokesman and Information Minister Anura Priyadarshana Yapa said last week that Sri Lanka had performed better than other tsunami-stricken nations, and that there had been “an overall 80 percent success” rate.

According to figures TISL said it obtained earlier this year from the Development Assistance Database (DAD) - an official website which tracks tsunami aid inflows - donor agencies gave about $1.2 billion (having initially pledged about twice as much).

Of this approximately $1.2 billion, the amount spent on tsunami projects is Rs. 68,533,124,662 (about US$685 million), according to the DAD.

TISL said it had reason to believe that some of the funds “have been utilised by the government for other purposes”, but did not elaborate on to what these “other purposes” might have been.

Government dismisses allegations

A government official overseeing tsunami recovery dismissed the allegations: She said the figures were misleading because they were entered into the database by bilateral and multilateral agencies themselves.

“The government has no check on what figures have been entered into the database because the donors enter the figures themselves,” Shanthi Fernando, a presidential adviser on post-tsunami reconstruction and rehabilitation affairs, told IRIN. “This is not money that the government has received directly.”

No government audit of tsunami aid

TISL said there had been no government audit of tsunami aid since an interim report issued in 2005. “Thus, the overall picture on finances is ambiguous and left for speculation,” its statement said.

However, presidential adviser Fernando said individual ministries which had undertaken tsunami projects had conducted their own financial reviews and, as such, there was no need for the government to conduct an additional review.

Among the other issues raised by TISL were political interference in the allotting of housing and allegations of corruption against village level officials which have yet to be investigated. “Large-scale reconstruction processes… need a system to receive complaints relating to corruption,” TISL said, recommending that the government establish a formal complaints procedure. [irinnews.org]

PERELIYA, 19 December 2007 (IRIN) - The giant Buddha statue at Pereliya gazes out to sea. The noise of the waves slapping the shoreline is broken only occasionally by the sound of passing vehicles on the nearby highway.

The village, 90km south of the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, has returned to its former anonymity after the 26 December 2004 tsunami when giant waves crashed ashore and the international media flowed in right behind.

A south-bound train, filled with passengers from Colombo - and scores of others who climbed aboard in a panic seeking refuge from the first huge waves - was quickly derailed, just near the Buddha. The train was flipped over repeatedly by the waves at around 9am.

The exact casualty figures from the train wreck have never been confirmed, but at least 1,500 died when the eight carriages and locomotive were tossed around like matchboxes.

The painful images of the train and the grief-stricken community were beamed repeatedly around the world. However, Pereliya’s 15 minutes of media attention has long since past.
“There is no point in talking about what happened, the waves came and went back,” R. K. Malith, who works in a coir pit making twine from coconut hemp opposite the giant Buddha, told IRIN. “We got something, others got more, now it is the past,” he said, and quickly waded away into the foetid water to collect coconut husks.

The building where the coir mill now operates was a house constructed after the tsunami with funds from two Sri Lankan expatriates, Mangala and Ruwani Rathnasinghe from Pupakara, New Zealand. No one lives in the building with its windows nailed shut and the toilet pit overflowing. Malith told IRIN the house construction was of such poor quality and the toilet pit so inadequate that the structure was never used as a home.

Disillusionment

As the massive post-tsunami reconstruction effort gradually winds down , a general sense of apathy and disillusionment pervades the aid beneficiaries along the southern coast , according to multiple interviews in the region.

Aid workers understand the frustrations. “There has been a disconnect between intended efforts and what has actually materialised,” Maria Kristensen, Donor Participation team leader for ActionAid in Sri Lanka, told IRIN. “Costs have gone up, there have been other bottlenecks, adding to difficulties in project completion,” she said.

Sri Lanka’s annual inflation rate of 17.7 percent has aggravated the situation, creating budgetary shortfalls on projects, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said in a report released on 10 December.

At beneficiary level, questions remain as to what happened to the massive amounts pledged. “There was so much money, but where did it go?” 17-year-old Ravi Wijesinghe from Hambantota District in the deep south, asked IRIN. “We have a house, but my father still does not have a job. He was promised one.”

No jobs

The Wijesinghes now live in a fairly large two bedroom house in Siribopura, Hamabantota District. It was donated by CARE International.

“We have a house, but my father has no job. How is he going to feed us and pay for care and repairs of our home? We have no money for such things,” he said.

Some beneficiaries just receiving relief are disappointed that it has taken so long and is insufficient. A. G. Priyarathana of Wakwella, in Galle District, told IRIN he was pleased to have received seeds, fertilizer and barbed wire from Caritas, a Catholic charity, but worried that it was not enough to cover his losses. “Even though we have recovered now,” he said, “we already lost at least one year of farming, if not more.”

Damian Arasakularatne, the head of Caritas in southern Sri Lanka, told IRIN the agency had been providing assistance to the village since the tsunami, but this was now winding down. “There are other problems that we need to look at and others who need our help.”

ActionAid’s Kristensen believes that some of the criticism is due to assistance not meeting beneficiary needs. “There have been instances where it is a supply-led operation rather than a demand led one,” she said.

Some success claimed

For its part, the Reconstruction and Development Agency (RADA), the main body that oversaw the reconstruction effort on behalf of the government, claims some success in tsunami reconstruction. RADA has now wound down most of its operations and in March 2007 released, jointly with the International Labour Organization (ILO), a survey stating that over 80 percent of the over 100,000 new houses were on track to be completed by the end of 2007 and 90 percent of the affected families had returned to earning an income two years after the tsunami.

Sugala Kumarie, coordinator of the Peoples’ Planning Commission, a Sri Lankan non-governmental body funded by ActionAid, told IRIN: “Sometimes all we hear are the frustrations of the people,” and she fears that numbers alone will not be enough to convince the angry coastal inhabitants.

“The third anniversary of the tsunami is getting closer and they feel the attention of the world is not here any more. The problem is that no one is looking at these frustrations and they are very real.”

COLOMBO, 5 December 2007 (IRIN) - The Omanthai crossing point 190km north of the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, is the only gateway currently open between areas controlled by the Sri Lankan government and those controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and traffic through this key transit point falls off sharply each time the security situation deteriorates.

For example, in the aftermath of two Colombo bombs on 28 November that killed 21 civilians, security was quickly tightened throughout the island. At the Omanthai crossing point civilians in Tiger-controlled areas were not allowed through, although government officials and humanitarian workers have continued to travel in both directions.

“It is not a new restriction, but only those with a legitimate need will be allowed into government-held areas for the time being,” Sri Lankan military spokesperson, Brig Udaya Nanayakkara, told IRIN. There were also no restrictions on supplies moving north, he said.

The Omanthai crossing links Tiger-controlled Vanni in the north with the rest of the country in the south. According to government statistics, over 400,000 civilians in Vanni depend for basic provisions and medicine on goods from the south and on the ability to travel south for official or personal reasons.

A smoothly functioning Omanthai crossing point is critical to their lives and livelihoods. Included in this 400,000 population, according to a 22-30 November situation report of the Inter Agency Standing Committee (IASC), are 93,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) in urgent need of food, non-food items and livelihood assistance.

“There is no other way, it is only through Omanthai that we get supplies,” Nagalingam Vedanayagam, the government agent in Tiger-held Kilinochchi district, told IRIN. “We can get rice and vegetables here… but everything else comes from the south.”

His counterpart in Tiger-held Mullaithivu District, Imalda Sukumar, said that the day after the new restrictions were applied at Omanthai on 29 November, trucks intending to sell rice in the south found it impossible to cross over to government areas. “They returned with the drivers saying they were granted no access.”

An essential route

The World Food Programme (WFP) transports over 300 metric tonnes of supplies through Omanthai every week, officials in Colombo said. Jean-Yves Lequime, WFP deputy head in Sri Lanka, told IRIN the WFP was constantly in touch with government military officials over security at Omanthai, acknowledging how important it is to maintain access through the critical gate.

“We do not have any alternate method, we have to keep this humanitarian gateway open to keep supplies moving,” he said. Along with supplies for civilians and IDPs, WFP now transports the bulk of the supplies for humanitarian agencies working in Tiger areas.

During a four-week period from 27 October, 26,000 people and 8,900 vehicles had passed through the crossing point in both directions, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) monthly bulletin for November.

“It is an invaluable conduit for the transport of commercial items and allows humanitarian action to be taken to meet the needs of people on both sides,” ICRC delegation head in Sri Lanka, Toon Vandehove, said in the report.

Situation “tense”, access restricted

Escalating fighting in the area and tightened security regulations have nevertheless resulted in frequently restricted access and sometimes total closure of the crossing point.

“The situation in the area remains tense. The ICRC hopes the entry/exit point can remain open,” Vandehove said. The ICRC pulled out its staff from Omanthai on the morning of 6 November due to nearby fighting, but returned that afternoon when both the government and the Tigers gave security guarantees.

ICRC officials maintain a monitoring presence at the gate to facilitate the movement of vehicles and persons through the narrow no-man’s land between government-and Tiger-controlled areas.

Closure of other transit points

The Omanthai crossing point has become even more critical with the closures of other transit points in the north. “Heavy fighting in early September near the Uliyankulam crossing point in Mannar District, 60km west of Omanthai, led to both ICRC monitoring staff retreating and to the indefinite closure of the transit point. It has remained closed ever since, putting additional stress on Omanthai.

In late September, the UN High Refugee Agency (UNHCR) had to re-route supplies to IDPs near Uliyankulam in Tiger areas through Omanthai after the former ceased to function.

“With the closure of the Uliyankulam entry/exit point, the UNHCR office in Mannar was not able to respond to an emergency in Manthai West, and instead assistance was provided by the UNHCR Kilinochchi office,” UNHCR information assistant in Colombo Sulakshini Perera told IRIN.

Fighting has escalated along the front lines near Omanthai since the 28 November bombings in Colombo and had claimed the lives of 48 LTTE rebels and five government soldiers just between 1 and 2 December, according to the Sri Lankan Defence Ministry.

“It has to remain open regardless of the fighting,” Vedanayagam, the government agent in Kilinochchi, said. “There is no other option or route available at the moment.” [irinnews]