[New York Times]

Even after declaring victory in Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war, the country’s leaders seem unable to distinguish between the enemy — the brutal but apparently vanquished Tamil Tiger separatists — and innocent bystanders. Despite appeals from Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, and from others, the government has not given international aid organizations full access to government-run camps, where an estimated 280,000 civilians are said to be in desperate need of food, water and medical care. The Tamil Tigers have a history of using civilians as human shields and the government claims it must screen out rebels hiding in the camps. But aid workers suspect other motives, including a desire to deny access to witnesses who may have seen abuses by government forces.

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[ New York Times ]
The United States accused Sri Lanka on Wednesday of causing “untold suffering” among civilians in its push to win a 25-year-old conflict with Tamil separatists. People continued to pour out of the war zone, and the government announced the surrender of two prominent rebels.“I think that the Sri Lankan government knows that the entire world is very disappointed that in its efforts to end what it sees as 25 years of conflict, it is causing such untold suffering,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday.
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[ New York Times ]

Sri Lankan government has “rebuffed international appeals to protect civilians trapped in a war zone in its northeast.” Now some visual evidence of the damage that fighting has caused is coming to light. This bloody war, now possibly in its last throes, has been taking place largely out of sight of the international media. As in the final months of the war in Bosnia, the failure of the combatants to refrain from shelling encircled, densely-populated civilian pockets is producing shocking results. Since Sri Lankan authorities have barred journalists from the war zone, these images, shot by an aid group working with victims of the fighting, are a rare glimpse of the toll the fighting is taking on the civilian population in northern Sri Lanka.

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