India to allocate 5 billion rupees for Sri Lanka refugees
(July 11, 2009) “Money is not enough to solve Sri Lanka’s refugee problems,” said
Father Santhanam, a Jesuit priest and human rights lawyer at the Madurai High Court
in Tamil Nadu. He made the comment in response to a recent decision by the Indian
government to allocate five billion rupees (US$ 10 million) to projects to rehabilitate
Tamil refugees promoted by the Sri Lankan government. New Delhi has decided to set
aside the money for that purpose in its 2009-2010 federal budget, but for the Indian
priest however large the amount of money is “Sri Lanka does not have any real plan
to rehabilitate war refugees.” Father Santhanam is concerned in fact that “India
might use the funds to have a clean conscience” and “reiterate its hegemony over the
island” with little in it for the Tamil population. The conditions in which refugees
are forced to live are such that they continue to generate controversy. Even for the
Red Cross and the UNCHR the situation is still a humanitarian emergency. “I hope
India will not provide any money without clear guarantees by the Sri Lankan government
about their use,” the Jesuit priest said. “Many people still fear that refugees will
remain in the camps for an indefinite period. Some suspect that continuous delays
will help Sinhalese settlers come into the Vanni region and change its demographic
situation.” Meantime Sri Lanka has asked international aid agencies to scale
down operations as the island nation’s challenges are now different with the end of
25 year war, the minister of disaster management and human rights said Thursday, 9th
of July. The move comes amid increasing pressure from the international community
to relax restrictions on aid agencies’ access to camps which housed nearly 300,000
internally displaced people from one of Asia’s longest modern wars.