Sri Lanka to resettle Tamils in six months

Sri Lanka plans to re-settle most of the 250,000 Tamils displaced by the war within six months, two Indian envoys said yesterday hursday after talks with the island's president.
Indian foreign secretary Shivshankar Menon and national security advisor M. K. Narayanan said Sri Lanka intended to take swift action over the civilians, whose fate has been the cause of widespread international concern.
"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 re-settle the bulk of internally displaced people," they said in a statement.
About 250,000 civilians who poured out of the island's war zone are detained in temporary shelters which the government calls "welfare villages."
International aid agencies have pressed for better access for relief workers to the tightly controlled camps.
The two Indian envoys who held closed-door talks with President Mahinda Rajapakse said both countries "emphasised the urgent necessity of arriving at a lasting political settlement in Sri Lanka."
Menon told reporters before leaving Colombo that Rajapakse was willing to go beyond the 1987 plan in order to consolidate peace in the ethnically divided nation where up to 100,000 people have been killed in three decades of war with the Tamil Tiger rebels.
Meanwhile, there are allegations of children are being abducted, with tacit government approval, from camps housing those displaced by Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict, human rights groups charged yesterday.
The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers said it had received verified reports of child abductions from camps in the main resettlement area of Vavuniya, often by paramilitary Tamil groups.
Children as young as 12 have been among those taken, the coalition said, suggesting that the paramilitaries -- who allied with the military in the fight against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) -- are being used to identify and weed out former Tiger child soldiers.
The paramilitary groups have been allowed "unhindered" access to the camps which are tightly guarded by government troops, it said.
The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers is an umbrella group of global organisations which includes Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
"The motive is slightly unclear," said Charu Lata Hogg, a spokeswoman for the groups.
"Some are being taken away for ransom, they've been kidnapped for ransom, and there've been certain negotiated releases where mothers had some jewellery and they could negotiate a release right within the camp," Hogg told the BBC.
Our Diplomatic Correspondent adds: The United Nations refugee agency yesterday expressed concern over conditions in the camps set up for people displaced by the recent fighting in Sri Lanka, including overcrowding and limited services.
Earlier this week, the Government of Sri Lanka declared that its military operation against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had ended, and that the remaining civilians that were trapped in the conflict zone in the country's north-east had left.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that up to 80,000 people have left the conflict zone in the last three days alone, bringing the total number of those displaced in the last several months to 280,000, according to a report of UN News Centre yesterday.