Rights group urges Sri Lanka aid rethink

(July 20, 2009) Sri Lanka's government should be forced to rectify serious human rights abuses before it receives an emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund, a human rights group said on Thursday. The IMF has given initial approval for a $2.5 billion loan to help Sri Lanka with reconstruction after the end of its 25-year civil war with ethnic Tamil rebels. In a statement on Thursday, New York-based Human Rights Watch said the government was holding more than 280,000 Tamil civilians displaced by the fighting in camps and has failed to investigate attacks on journalists and civil society activists. «To approve a loan, especially $600 million more than the government even asked for, while they have hundreds of thousands of people penned up in these camps is a reward for bad behaviour, not an incentive to improve,» said Brad Adams, the group's Asia director. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had said in May that the U.S. might try to hold off the loan because of the government's actions at the end of the war. Human rights organizations have accused Sri Lankan forces of shelling densely populated civilian areas in its offensive against the rebels. The U.N. said more than 7,000 civilians were killed in the final months of the conflict, which ended in May.