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This blog post is taken from Michael Kleinman's change.org blog on humanitarian relief
This is a special, WTF version of the Wednesday awards - namely, reports in The Times that 1,400 civilians are dying each week at the Manik Farm displaced person camp in Sri Lanka.
Come again? 1,400 deaths per week?
Long, uncomfortable moment of shocked silence.
Let's put those numbers in context:
- Heavy fighting in Mogadishu has killed over 380 people since May, not counting at least 43 this past weekend.
- There were 527 deaths due to violence in Darfur from January through May of this year.
- Massive inter-tribal fighting in Jonglei State, South Sudan, killed roughly 1,000 civilians in March and April.
- The Lord's Resistance Army in Congo - the poster boys for mass atrocities - have killed around 1,200 civilians in eastern Congo since January.
Granted, to a certain extent this comparing apples and oranges - the people in Manik Farm are not dying of violence; instead, as UPI reports: "the majority of the deaths resulted from water-borne diseases, particularly diarrhea."
Still, in terms of overall civilian casualties, more people are apparently dying each week in Sri Lanka than anywhere else in the world. By far.
Manik Farm is one of the world's largest displaced person camps, holding 230,000 Tamil civilians who fled the fighting between the Sri Lankan army and the rebel Tamil Tigers earlier this year.
As the UN Resident Coordinator explained back in June:
"The fundamental issue is that there are too many people in too small a place. We think it is the largest IDP camp in the world."
Sanitation is a particular concern - World Vision has described the situation as "woefully inadequate". Not to mention that a quarter of displaced children under the age of five suffer from acute malnutrition.
The Times gives a sense of what it's like in the camp: "Witness testimonies...described long queues for food and inadequate water supplies inside Manik Farm. Women, children and the elderly were shoved aside in the scramble for supplies."
The Sri Lankan Government has not been particularly, ummmmm, helpful. Aid agencies have only limited access to the camps; meanwhile, Sri Lankan authorities are calling for aid agencies - including the Red Cross - to limit their operations.
According to an excellent article on Reuters AlertNet: "Many aid workers view the government's call for a scaling down of aid operations as a deliberate move to prevent outsiders from witnessing conditions inside the camps."
Of course, there are two sides to every story. According to Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, Manik Farms is really just a displaced person's wonderland:
"I would say the condition in our camps is the best any country has. We supply water. There is a problem with lavatories. That is not because of our fault. The money that comes from the EU and others, it goes to the NGOs and the U.N. They are very slow; disbursing money is very slow.
We supply the water tanks. We have spent over 2 billion rupees. Giving electricity, giving water, now we are giving televisions to them."
No pithy comments from this end. Just what a fucking mess.
For a detailed breakdown of IDP locations in northern Sri Lanka, please see here.
Reuters AlertNet is not responsible for the content of external websites.
Michael Kleinman is an aid worker, lawyer, and consultant. From 2004 to 2007 he worked for CARE, first as the organization's Advocacy Advisor in Afghanistan, then covering Sudan, and finally as CARE's Regional Advocacy Advisor for East and Central Africa. He left CARE in early 2007 to take a position with International Relief & Development in Iraq. Prior to going overseas, Michael worked for the Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research, providing assistance to the United Nations. He is a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School. He runs change.org's blog on a 
