“Too many people are dying in the camps, but it’s certainly not 200 a day. What I hear and have seen is more like 5-6?

5-6 a day which will be roughly 40 deaths a week by your own admission which is almost 3 times the SPHERE standards. That’s about 160 a month.

Sensationalist bullshit. The emergency CMR is 1-2 per 10000 people per day. Even you should be able to do basic arithmetic, someone can help if you have difficulty using a calculator.

You seem envious of the soon to be Hon Mr Samarajiva. If you don’t want to do what he’s doing, I hear the LTTE leadership has plenty of vacancies. You will even get a fake military rank with your new post.

the link you wanted has been shown. you havent even bothered refuting what can be seen by anyone else. racists like you are the new blight on the tamils you proudly claim to speak for.

the fancy latin and constitutional arguments are just to fool people, just like the ltte always insisted they were really the good guys.

This applies to a lot of Tamils who seem to be whining these days. Hid like chickens when the LTTE was around, never condemning them or taking steps to nullify the LTTE, now out it force crying and bellyaching. Tamils need to pull themselves and their community together before screaming at the Sinhalese, the Muslims, India, Brahmins, Hindians, China, Pakistan and the whole world.

if your brotherhood of tamils had the balls to stop the ltte from hijacking your “aspirations”, you wouldnt have to deal with this shit now. easier to blame the sinhalese than your own spinelessness i guess

typical. you define the goalposts carefuly and you still cant hide. where is my prize? you are already a liar and racist. are you a idiot too?

btw did the LTTE commit legitimate acts of violence?

You quoted the real figure being 5-6 a day because the Ministy of Health stated it is 5-6 a day. Have they substianted to you as to how they have got that figure?

personally, i think the government has little credibility and they have an incentive to keep the death figures low. Has the government made lists of who is inside the camps yet? if this happened, it would be easier to know how many people die, and would give, at least my mind, the ministry of health more credibility.

“Too many people are dying in the camps, but it’s certainly not 200 a day. What I hear and have seen is more like 5-6″

5-6 a day which will be roughly 40 deaths a week by your own admission which is almost 3 times the SPHERE standards. That’s about 160 a month.

As for Tony this was what he heard from a meeting of NGOs/INGOs on the subject. Mr Samarajiva wants to claim more expertise on the matter with his ACT visits i suppose. My speaking to Vavuniya based local workers and relatives of IDP inmates is that the figure is higher than 60 a week. All statistics except those from the Hon Nimal Sripala de Silva would be unreliable for Mr (who the Govt should soon make the Hon) Samarajiva. The Govt indeed can greatly benefit from Mr Samarajiva’s relentless campaign for them.

Additionally, I’m sure you can appreciate that when one receives sensitive information, they would have to protect their sources. If he named names of doctors working in camps as his sources, what do you think would happen to those indivuals?

They could be right, but just cause the head of a housing organization says them doesn’t make it so.

i wonder if you are really anything more substantive than the amoral hatemonger you play on this blog. a classy bit of ethnocentric hate to round off your comment by the way. nice.

Times online hasn’t made any effort to show it has credible sources and in a major story such as this one it is absolutely essential they do so or shut up and sit it out. My few contacts tell me those figures are not correct and they are well connected in the NGOs they work for. There are many ways to let the reader know a reporter has credible sources without naming people – an experienced journalist would know how.

Nevertheless, Aadhavan I get where you are coming from. Northern Tamils are a community that have gone through horrendous trauma for decades and especially in the last two years. If you speak to some and they don’t make much sense right now, I get that. I wouldn’t make much sense if I saw a hundred people die around me on one day.

In any case, the fact remains that unless the government allow independent monitoring they don’t have a leg to stand on and therefore deserve every bit of sensationalism that is thrown at them – be it fantastical or possibly some reflection of the truth. Unless unfettered access is allowed, we can only assume that the government is lying and that these fantastical speculations may in fact be true. If they have nothing to hide, why not be open? It is a very simple question that has yet to be given a satisfactory answer. It is up to the government to dispel the “myth” convincingly, not vice-versa as they are the ones suppressing access to the truth.

my ‘sources’? Oh, you mean the doctors/aid workers who know certain things but don’t talk about them openly. Yes, i do suppose they are cowards. That’s a high bar, but that’s cool.

“neither of you see the real tragedy” – come come now. get off your high horse, stop this self-righteous speechifying and show me how disputing a government number is mutually inconsistent with ”seeing the real tragedy”. Again, if you want to claim superior perception, I’m cool with that, just don’t think I can accept it.

you are an unaccountable and irascible contrarian. there, i struck at the foundation of your claims of truth-value. it’s not ad hominem at all, you disengenuous prat.

your ‘sources’ are cowards. if the times story is true, then they will be remembered as the selfish fools who failed to manifest a backbone when ‘the facts’ had not yet made it into cannon.

Indi is probably wrong about “5-6.” The times is probably wrong about 200 a day. That neither of you see the real tragedy, not knowing the real figure, is most disconcerting of all.

same goes for not questioning the character of the quasi witness. When the quasi witness is set up as a proof for demonstrating the veracity of the facts claimed, there’s nothing wrong with questioning that credibility. When the government says there is no sexual abuse in the camps, we don’t buy their account of things wholesale, do we?