Mercy Mission to Vanni

Objective

The main objective of this Mission is to send food, medical supplies, other relief items, doctors and humanitarian professionals to the Vanni area of Sri Lanka to provide vitally needed humanitarian relief to 250,000 Tamil civilians, especially children, who are dying due to starvation and a lack of medicine and medical care. This Mission will bring desperately needed humanitarian relief to the civilians enduring great hardship and suffering behind a humanitarian blockade and a media blackout.

Background

As part of the Government of Sri Lanka’s (GoSL) actions to beat the Tamil people into submission the Tamil people in LTTE administered areas are being deprived of food and medicine and subjected to daily targeted bombing and shelling. The war in Sri Lanka has, since August 2006, intensified due to a  GoSL military offensive into the NorthEast, resulting in extraordinary levels of civilian suffering and the deaths of an average of 80-90 Tamil civilians over the past two months.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay in a press release on 13 February 2009 stated that, “…2,800 civilians may have been killed and more than 7,000 injured since 20 January, many of them inside the no-fire zones.”

While the humanitarian crisis facing more than 250,000 Tamils in the Vanni is reaching unprecedented and catastrophic proportions, the International Community continues to make weak, ineffectual statements of “concern”. These statements have failed to motivate the GoSL to allow adequate quantities of humanitarian relief and humanitarian access to the displaced civilians. Consequently, these civilians, targeted by the GoSL and abandoned by the international community, are now struggling to survive without basic food, clothing, shelter and medical care in a 14 square km area designated by the GoSL as ’safe zone’.

Over the past 5 months, the GoSL has allowed less than 8% of required amount of food, medicine and medical needs to be taken in to the Vanni area. In addition, the civilians in the ’safe zone’ are being subjected to intense, indiscriminate bombing and shelling by the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) and Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF) on a daily basis, resulting in many deaths and injuries, over 700 children have been killed and thousands have been injured. These civilians have been displaced from numerous times, some 10-15 times, and have lost everything as they fled in the face of a military offensive. The have survived without food or shelter, living in snake infested shelters and bunkers, and witnessing the gruesome deaths and injuries of family members and friends from attacks by the SLA & SLAF. Many of the deaths have been due to the lack of adequate medical care following the injury .

The GoSL ordered all UN agencies and international non-governmental organisations (iNGOs) out of Vanni in September 2008. International and local media have been prohibited from entering the Vanni since January 2007, and have very restricted access to the rest of the Northeast Sri Lanka. Thus, there is no independent, international witness to the events unfolding in the Vanni and the NorthEast as a whole.

There are more than 250,000 Tamils from the island, living in Britain and over 1.5 million in the global Tamil Diaspora. Their utter despair at the inaction of the International Community and its inability to prevent the genocide of the Tamils in the Vanni has now driven British and other Diaspora Tamils to organise this ‘Mercy Mission’ themselves.

“This war against civilians must stop, Sri Lankan forces are shelling hospitals and so called safe zones and slaughtering the civilians there” - James Ross, Legal and Policy Director, Human Rights Watch

“The situation for civilians in the Vanni is unacceptable.  People cannot move safely even to collect the bodies of dead relatives, and the injured have no hospitals.  A quarter of a million people are suffering without adequate food and shelter while shells rain down upon them.  Most of those who have managed to escape the conflict have not received adequate hospital treatment” - Yolanda Foster, Amnesty International