About 3,000 Tamil civilians have braved flooded, mine-laden jungle paths to flee from separatist fighting into government-held areas in eastern Sri Lanka, officials and witnesses said.
Sri Lankan female soldiers also helped one of the refugees give birth to a boy at a military checkpoint, the military reported yesterday.
"We have set up camps and are trying to provide all facilities to these people who are escaping from the clutches of the terrorists," military spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe said on Saturday, referring to Tamil Tiger separatist rebels.
PHOTO: AP
Refugees who fled the area on Friday by sea said that they had been forcibly taken by the rebels, but had sneaked out when the guerrillas were distracted during artillery and gunfire exchanges with government troops.
The government accuses the rebels of holding civilians as human shields, a claim the Tigers deny.
On Friday, the UN urged the rebels to let tens of thousands of Tamil civilians leave.
The government said on Saturday that 17 camps had been set up and some schools had been turned into refugee centers.
There was no immediate comment from the rebels.
Calls to their headquarters in Kilinochchi remained unanswered yesterday.
Yesterday Samarasinghe said Sri Lankan women soldiers at a military checkpoint helped a fleeing Tamil woman named Latha give birth.
Like some Tamils, Latha uses a single name.
"Our soldiers noticed the woman in pain and called our women soldiers, who realized that she was in a very advanced stage of pregnancy," Samarasinghe said.
Samarasinghe said that Latha had become separated from her husband, Udaya Kumaran, as they fled, but that he had since been tracked down at another refugee camp and reunited with his family.
The refugees were fleeing rebel-held Vaharai village in eastern Batticaloa District, where there has been heavy fighting between government troops and Tigers in the past few weeks.
The UN call to let civilians leave came after boats carrying fleeing ethnic Tamil civilians capsized on Friday in the eastern sea, killing at least eight people, according to the Sri Lankan military.
The pro-rebel Web site TamilNet said as many as 18 were feared to have died.
The rebels claim the government has sealed the only road out of the area.
Some of the refugees did use the road on Saturday, but many did not, saying that they feared shelling.
Waterlogged jungle paths made the escape difficult.
One refugee said he had to abandon his belongings to wade through waist-deep water.
The military said that 2,790 civilians fled from rebel-held areas on Saturday.
``The total number of escapees, who were dismayed with the threats and harassment of the Tiger terrorists, is now 13,910 since Nov. 1,'' the Media Center for National Security said.
The UN said on Thursday that the 35,000 people trapped in Vaharai by the fighting were suffering under indiscriminate shell attacks.
The Tamil Tigers have been fighting the government since 1983, demanding a self-ruled homeland for Sri Lanka's 3.1 million minority Tamils, citing decades of discrimination by the majority Sinhalese-dominated state.
A Norwegian-brokered ceasefire officially still holds, but more than 3,500 fighters and civilians have been killed in renewed fighting this year.
More than 65,000 people died in the conflict before the ceasefire.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
RSS