By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Mar 22 2007 (IPS)

As fighting between Tamil rebels and Sri Lankan forces escalate into open war the losers are civilians, particularly some 200,000 refugees cramped into camps set up in eastern Batticaloa district.

&#39&#39We manage somehow, this is what we have,&#39&#39 Udyakumari Shanmugalingam, 28, told IPS as she sat listlessly in the unbearably hot tent that she shares with 12 others who walked through 20 km of paddy fields and forests to reach the relative safety of this government-held area.

Udyakumari said that, for the moment at least, food was not a concern thanks to the generosity of aid groups and the residents of nearby villages. But with the ranks of the refugees swelling by the day, sanitation facilities and water were getting scarce. ‘’We will soon have to use the jungles,’’ she said.

&#39&#39I walked for three days to get here but I will only go back when I feel safe," Sinnapillai (one name), a mother of three small children and heavily pregnant with a fourth, said. She was lucky to get shelter at a school in Kalawanchikuddi, a Muslim-dominated town south of Batticaloa, along with some 4,000 others.

The premises of the school, including the classrooms, are filled with refugees and the teachers are now functioning as managers of the refugee centre. But even here the refugees fear that unless some authority intervenes the situation could become unbearable and that diseases could break out.

"They (refugees) keep coming… someone with experience and the capacity needs to get a hold of this situation," Basil Sylvester, the local head of the Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies, told IPS pointing to the school premises overflowing with refugees. He said clothes, soap and other day-to-day material needed for sanitation was scarce. "Most of them (refugees) fled with the clothes on their backs, nothing else."

Arriving in government-held areas does not guarantee the refugees immediate relief. After being cleared through several military checkpoints they have to find their way to available centres and wait for relief. Sennathambi, who escaped intense shelling, had to wait for over two days under a tree with 15 others until a tent could be found for them. &#39&#39What to do? I can’t go back, the army is all over and they are still fighting," he said.

Marimuththu’s family has registered a complaint with the Red Cross that four youths who were with his group were detained by government forces. "They were first taken away by the Tigers and, after they escaped, the army arrested them because of their close-cropped haircuts," Marimuththu said.

The camp is bursting at its seams. Originally set up to hold 112 families, it was already holding 152 when Marimuththu and his group arrived. Their stay appears long and uncertain.

Fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), according to the fleeing civilians, have dug in and are ready to resist troops moving into their areas.

"We are ready, we will not run," Tiger military spokesman Rasiah Illanthanriyan told IPS. On Wednesday the Tigers launched offensives into Batticaloa in which at least 17 people were reported to have died.

"They attacked five camps with mortars and artillery but we retaliated and found the bodies of eight LTTE cadres,’’ said a military spokesman.

Caught in the fighting, the worst that this South Asian island-nation of 20 million people has experienced since a ceasefire forged in 2002 began to falter in December 2005, are civilians, mostly ethnic Tamils.

The new arrivals in Batticaloa are adding to the thousands displaced in December and January when the Sri Lankan army wrested large parts of the east from LTTE control.

At least 4,000 people have died in fighting over the past 15 months, compared with a mere 130 deaths in the three previous years according to the Norwegian-led Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM). This represents the longest spell of peace since Tamil rebels, claiming discrimination at the hands of majority Sinhalese, began fighting for a separate homeland in the north and east more than two decades ago.

The conflict has already claimed 65,000 lives and caused immense hardship to ordinary civilians and to the country’s economy.

The LTTE and government forces are currently separated by a 15 km line of control in northern Jaffna peninsula. But in Batticaloa the two sides regularly attack each other across a highway that acts as a rough border. This poses a problem for aid agencies trying to get supplies into Batticaloa through the highway. "It is putting severe pressure on an already dire situation," U.N. spokeswoman in Colombo Orla Clinton said.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said that local and international supply lines needed to kept open if the refugees were to gain access to food continuously. "This situation is not going to go away anytime soon so we need additional help," WFP regional head in Batticaloa Sacha Bouter told IPS.

The WFP has stocks that could last for a month for 100,000 people and Bouter said 50,000 more could be taken care of through government and NGO help. "The problem would be if the numbers go up and the situation takes a turn for the worse."

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) which is providing tents, sanitation and water supply has, in a statement on its website, reminded ‘’both parties to the conflict of their obligation to comply with international humanitarian law, especially of their duty to protect the civilian population and to grant freedom of movement to internally displaced people’’.

And the Washington-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) has written to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva accusing both the government and the LTTE of violating humanitarian law ‘’by directing artillery fire at military targets and civilians without discrimination, firing from populated areas, summarily executing persons and unnecessarily preventing the delivery of humanitarian aid’’. HRW has appealed for U.N. monitors to be sent to conflict zones.

While the military has gained ground in Batticaloa, it has suffered reverses in the north and lost close to 100 troops in battles on the Jaffna peninsula since October. An estimated 600,000 civilians in Jaffna, cut off by the fighting, are also reported to be severely short of essential supplies.

Excerpt: