Sitting beneath a palm tree, Loganathan points to his new "house": a brown tent with blankets for a floor just outside Batticaloa, a town on Sri Lanka's east coast straddling a blue lagoon. The 34-year-old Tamil labourer says his family have been sheltering under the tarpaulin since November when a mortar shell landed in his garden, which was about 62 miles away from the refugee camp he now calls home.
His nine-year-old daughter lost her arm in the blast and his five-year-old son's back was scarred by the shrapnel.
"The army was shelling the town and we innocent people were caught in the firing. Now we are stuck here. These tents are too hot, there's too much sickness and no medicine and no jobs for us."
The father of two is typical of Batticaloa's newest residents. Displaced by an increasingly bloody civil war between Tamil Tiger guerrillas and the Sri Lankan army, more than 150,000 live under plastic tents or in hastily converted schools and warehouses.
Most have walked days to reach this sandy stretch of land, not stopping even when darkness fell for fear of being caught in the crossfire. The exodus began last summer after the Tigers and the government fought a war over control of a key dam outside the harbour town of Trincomalee.
No comments:
Post a Comment