WUNRN
SRI LANKA - CIVILIANS
DISPLACED BY CONFLICT
FACING SEVERE HUMANITARIAN CRISIS
Women
and children are believed to make up over 80 per cent of the IDP -
internally
displaced persons - population in Sri Lanka.
Full Article - Internal Displacement
Monitoring Centre - IDMC:
1 May 2009
Crisis
Situation of Sri Lanka Displaced Women & Children
Women and children are believed to make up over 80 per cent of the
IDP population in Sri Lanka.
In
the conflict zones of the Vanni, the inadequacy of latrines and washing
facilities has increased the danger of sexual and gender-based violence against
displaced women, as they have been forced to use open-air facilities (HRW, 23
December 2008, p.32). Thousands of pregnant women caught up in the fighting
between government forces and the LTTE have urgently needed health care, at a
time when health services have been disrupted or are unavailable (IRIN, 6 April
2009).
An estimated 33,000 women have been widowed in the Eastern Province during
nearly three decades of war and displacement, and a majority are under the age
of 30 (BBC, 18 December 2008). The widows in the east are in urgent need of
employment and livelihoods opportunities (Hindu, 26 March 2009).
In Puttalam, changing conditions due to displacement have opened up new
possibilities for women and led to their becoming more active in paid
employment than prior to displacement. Women are paid less than men as casual
labourers, and have therefore found work more easily than men, causing some to
become the breadwinners of the family. Further economic migration from Puttalam
to countries in the Middle East has also largely been a female phenomenon,
particularly in cases where male members of the family have not been able to
find work after displacement (Brun, 2008, pp.205-208).
The LTTE has systematically recruited and used children as soldiers. In 2008,
with the army advancing into the Vanni, the LTTE went beyond its long-standing
“one person per family” forced recruitment policy and required two or more
family members to join its ranks, depending on the size of the family. After a
significant decrease in reported LTTE use of child soldiers in recent years,
the recruitment of children may have been on the increase since September 2008
(HRW, 15 December 2008, p.3). According to reports from IDPs in Vavuniya who
have recently fled the Vanni, by April 2009 the LTTE had resorted to forcibly
recruiting children as young as 12 and, in some cases, four to five people from
the same family (BBC, 6 April 2009).
Children have been killed, maimed and wounded in the areas of conflict in the
Vanni (UN News Centre, 20 February 2009). Casualties since January 2009 are
believed to include hundreds of children killed and more than 1,000 injured
(OHCHR, 13 March 2009). UNICEF has called upon the LTTE to guarantee the free
movement of the civilians trapped in the north, including up to 75,000
children. Many of these children have been displaced a number of times (IRIN,
23 January 2009). The conflict has additionally disrupted the education of at
least 60,000 students in the north (IPS, 6 April 2009).
At least one in four children displaced by ongoing fighting between troops and
the LTTE is malnourished, according to the Sri Lankan health ministry.
Malnutrition among children below the age of five in Mullaitivu district has
reached 25 per cent, the highest in the island. The results are believed to be
indicative of malnutrition among children still trapped in the war zone (AFP,
11 April 2009). Eastern Sri Lanka’s Trincomalee and Batticaloa districts, which
went through large-scale conflict and displacement in 2006 and 2007, are among
the districts outside the conflict zone in the north with the highest number of
children underweight for their age. Despite numerous initiatives to alleviate
malnutrition, the condition was in 2008 still entrenched in areas of Sri Lanka
affected by the conflict (IRIN, 15 August 2008).
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