These are the big question at the end of the longest of wars. What will happen to the displaced Tamils, herded from the former conflict zone into huge sprawling internment camps?
Based around the town of Vavuniya, they are known as Manik Farms. Channel 4 News has been given video by the activist group War Without Witness which, they say, shows the deteriorating conditions inside these camps.
There are well over 200,000 people there. Most were originally meant to be resettled by December, but now that’s not going to happen, and the question lingers as to how long will they be held there and how long will the conditions sustain any quality of life.
One video shows a weak man lying on the floor of what War Without Witness say is a makeshift hospital in the camps. He has an IV drip in his hand, but is on the concrete floor, not a hospital bed. He’s too frail, it seems, to brush the flies that are swarming on his face. Other patients also lie on the floor, also attached to drips.
We were also given stills, also apparently taken in the last fortnight inside the camps. Some show adults in what appears to be a state of malnutrition. Another shows a child who is clearly very thin and weak. The images support figures from aid workers that eight per cent of children in the camps aged under five are suffering from acute malnutrition – in layman’s terms that’s one step from starvation.
The images are the only view we can get onto the camps as the Sri Lankan government jealously guards access to them. Conditions there are not expected to improve in the coming months. In mid-August, flash flooding over three days filled many parts of the camp with water, hampering its frail infrastructure.
There are fears among many aid workers that this will pale into insignificance compared to the damage they will see when the monsoon hits in about a month’s time. One told me they need massive resettlement, or a miraculous transformation of the camp’s basic conditions, before that rainy season if they are to avoid real trouble.
The pictures, as with most images from a conflict that has proven at times impossible to independently access, are not something we can independently verify. But they raise questions – real and troubling questions – about the kind of life the Sri Lankan governments seeks for its troubled Tamil minority.