WORLD BRIEFING / SRI LANKA
Sri Lanka said it planned to return most of the nearly 300,000 civilians displaced by civil war to their homes this year, as the president called on the country to be magnanimous in victory.
The status of the ethnic Tamil civilians in overcrowded, fenced-in displacement camps has caused great anxiety among the minority community.
Two top Indian officials met with Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa to express their concern about the humanitarian situation.
Both governments said they had agreed that there is an urgent need to resettle the civilians.
“The government of Sri Lanka indicated that it was their intention to dismantle the relief camps at the earliest and outlined a 180-day plan to resettle the bulk of [the displaced] to their original places of habitation,” said the statement from the president’s meeting with Indian Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon and National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan.
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