Sri Lanka News Updates with Discussions

Sri Lankan starves to death in north, first on record

hu Nov 16, 1:35 AM ET

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka (Reuters) - An odd-job man has starved to death in Sri Lanka's war-torn north, officials said on Thursday, the first such death since state records began in 1991.

But officials said the death of Muthiah Chandrapala, 50, was not linked with food shortages in the northern Jaffna peninsula due to renewed civil war.

Chandrapala died on Wednesday near the town of Point Pedro in the army-held Jaffna peninsula, where around 500,000 Tamils have been cut off from the rest of the island by Tamil Tiger rebel lines for months.

'This is the first time a person has died of starvation,' said Nadarajah Thangarajah, acting judge at the district court of Point Pedro, who conducted the inquest and signed the death certificate.

'But please don't try to connect this death to the shortage of food in Jaffna,' he added. 'It is not relevant, because this person was almost like an orphan. He didn't have a permanent home, he was a daily wage earner doing odd jobs. He lived like a vagabond.'

Sri Lankan state authorities have not kept records of starvation deaths prior to 1991. However a Tamil Tiger fighter starved himself to death in a protest in 1987.

Food is in short supply in the Jaffna region because the military has shut down the main north-south highway that runs through rebel territory, saying it was unsafe because of rebel artillery fire. Food is being shipped in by boat.

Residents receive rations, but say they are not enough.

Local government officials say that between August and September, Jaffna peninsula was short 11,055 tonnes of essentials like rice, flour and sugar.

The price of staples like fish and vegetables have soared and some goods, like matches and mosquito coils, have gone up 10-fold, in turn coinciding with a suspected outbreak of hundreds of cases of mosquito-borne Chikungaya fever.

- http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061116/wl_nm/srilanka_starvation_dc_1

Rights panel backs UN child soldiers charge against Sri Lanka


Nov 16, 2006 (AFP) - A New York-based rights group asked Sri Lanka's government Thursday to arrest security force members allegedly involved in forcibly recruiting child soldiers on behalf of a Tamil rebel faction.

Human Rights Watch said its investigations supported the findings of a top UN official who charged Monday that Sri Lankan security forces were involved in rounding up children for enlistment by a pro-government rebel faction.

Sri Lanka's army has flatly rejected statements made on Monday by UN ambassador Allan Rock that government soldiers rounded up Tamil children to be recruited and that troops gave photographs to the rebel faction known as the 'Karuna group' to choose potential recruits.

'The president said that if there is credible evidence of such incidents he would have them investigated,' the government said in a statement Tuesday, a day after Rock's statements.

It was the first time the UN has made such a charge against the government.

The Tamil Tigers have long been under fire for using child soldiers in the ethnic separatist war.

Human Rights Watch, which last year stepped up a campaign against child recruitment by the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), said it will publish a detailed report on child recruitment in the island's east next month.

'Human Rights Watch investigations in the east and elsewhere fully support Ambassador Rock's findings that the Sri Lankan military is involved -- both directly and indirectly -- in child abductions by the Karuna group,' the group's director Jo Becker said.

Human Rights Watch, in a statement reacting to Rock's remarks, urged immediate action to investigate and arrest those responsible and to end all involvement in the Karuna group's abductions.

'We also urge the Karuna group to immediately end all abductions, and release all abductees from its forces,' Becker said.

The faction is reported to be supported by the military in a wider ethnic war with the LTTE.

The conflict has claimed more than 60,000 lives since 1972 and more than 3,300 have died in the past year despite a ceasefire in place since 2002.

Rock said he was sending a final report to the UN Security Council by January and hoped the Tigers, the Sri Lankan government and the Karuna group would have by then responded favourably to the issues he raised.