[AFP]

Sri Lanka said on Wednesday it would open up its war-torn north to international scrutiny, days after the UN said it suspected war crimes were being committed in the fight against Tamil rebels. A foreign ministry official said talks were under way to give a European Union fact-finding mission access to the area, which has been almost totally off-limits to diplomats, aid workers and journalists. “We are in the process of finalising the dates and the agenda,” Sri Lanka’s Foreign Secretary Palitha Kohona told AFP.

[Full Story]

[AFP]

Tens of thousands of people trapped by fighting in Sri Lanka’s north are facing serious risks of disease due to shortages of clean water and sanitation, the Red Cross said Tuesday. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said the humanitarian situation was deteriorating fast as civilians still living in the rebel-held territory endured daily attacks and an increased danger of epidemics. “The area is affected by shelling every day, and the cramped conditions and the lack of water and proper sanitation are putting people at risk,” it said in a statement.

[Full Story]

[Toronto Sun]

Tens of thousands of Toronto Tamils took to the streets today to protest attacks by the Sri Lankan military in that country’s bloody civil war. Waving the red and gold flags of the Tamil Tigers alongside Canadian flags, the protesters mixed chants for a separate Tamil homeland with calls for the Canadian government to take action to help stop what they call a genocide in their homeland.

[Full Story]

[ICRC]

“Water, sewage and electrical power systems, along with medical facilities, are usually the first things to be disrupted when a war breaks out,” said Robert Mardini, who heads the ICRC’s water and habitat unit. “They can be damaged or shut down completely by shelling and explosions, or overwhelmed by influxes of displaced people. Such incidents are often followed by massive shortages and by rapidly spreading disease that can result in loss of life.” Mr Mardini cited Iraq, Gaza, Sri Lanka and Somalia as examples of places where the delivery of water supplies and sanitation services has been severely hampered by recent armed conflicts.

[Full Story]

[MSF]

MSF is ready to assist the population of the camps by providing independent and confidential mental health services and we are discussing access with the authorities. The civilian population in the Vanni are suffering heavily as a result of the violence. Out of the 953 admissions of wounded and sick people evacuated from the Vanni between February 11 and the March 8, 584 were in need of surgery. The majority of the surgical cases (92 percent) are violence related. The wounds are predominantly caused by shrapnel and shooting. MSF remains extremely worried about the situation for approximately 150,000 civilians remaining in the Vanni.

[Full Story]

[VoA]

In Sri Lanka, the government has rejected an appeal by the European Union for a cease-fire with Tamil Tiger rebels. Intense fighting is under way in the northeast, where the military is trying to capture the last strip of territory held by the rebels. The government’s outright rejection for a truce with Tamil Tiger rebels came a day after the European Union said the situation of civilians trapped in the war zone is dangerous and called for a cease-fire to allow humanitarian aid into the region.

[Full Story]

[AFP]

Sri Lanka needs true devolution of power to minority Tamils if it wants to permanently end its long-running ethnic war, Indian Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon said Wednesday. Menon, who was in Washington for talks, said the U.S. and the Sri Lankan government itself both agreed with regional power India on the need to quickly restore daily life in war-torn areas. The Colombo government says it is on the verge of crushing the Tamil Tigers, who have been waging a campaign since 1972 to create a separate Tamil homeland on the Sinhalese-majority island.

[Full Story]

[Inner City Press]

For two weeks, Inner City Press has asked at the UN whether international aid funds will be used for detention camps in which those fleeing the conflict zone in Sri Lanka will be detained, until the end of 2009 or longer. Holmes on Monday confirmed that the UN has “offered to assist transit camps” or “semi-permanent camps,” and as to funding as so far “make no links between the two.” He said that in the long run, the UN would be hard pressed to fund camps that violated international standards. But he said the UN wouldn’t want to “punish those in the camps.” So would the UN just keep on paying, for detention camps?

[Full Story]

[Human Rights Watch]

“It is time for concerned governments like Japan, India, and the US to ensure that President Mahinda Rajapakse’s government and the Tamil Tigers allow the victims of this conflict to live with justice and dignity. Both sides should agree to a humanitarian corridor and otherwise respect the laws of war.” Our latest research shows that up to two thousand civilians have been killed by the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil Tigers since early January in the most recent round of fighting. We got reports of many civilian deaths, which have occurred in areas that the Sri Lankan government has declared to be “safe zones”, where the Sri Lankan army has repeatedly and indiscriminately shelled. Hospitals have been frequently hit.

[Full Story]

[Committee to Protect Journalists]

The Sri Lankan government should release a journalist and his two colleagues who have spent a year behind bars on terrorism charges for publishing magazine articles, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Terrorist Investigation Division forces arrested Vettivel Jasikaran, manager of the news Web site OutreachSL, and his companion, Vadivel Valamathy, both ethnic Tamils, on March 6, 2008, according to local and international news reports and press freedom groups. Their colleague, Tamil columnist and OutreachSL editor J.S. Tissainayagam, was detained when he visited them the next day.

[Full Story]