Sri Lanka evicts refugees from Catholic town Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit source - CJEPsa Sri Lanka evicts refugees from Catholic town 03:37 a.m. Jun 08, 1999 Eastern COLOMBO, June 8 (Reuters) - Some 10,000 Tamil refugees living in an open camp in a Catholic town in northwestern Sri Lanka have been shifted out after the military captured the area, a senior government official said. Half of the refugees had been sent back to their homes, which they had fled in the fighting between government troops and Tamil Tiger rebels, N.A. Obadage, chairman of the Resettlement and Rehabilitation Authority of the North, told a meeting of the local Foreign Correspondent's Association late on Monday. Refugees from regions still under rebel control were moved to welfare centres in other areas, he said. The government runs several refugee camps or welfare centres in the northwestern coastal town of Mannar, northern Vavuniya and and the eastern port city of Trincomalee. He said some 4,500 people had been sent to the former Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebel stronghold of northern Jaffna peninsula from Trincomalee. Government troops captured Jaffna in 1996.Since then hundreds of thousands of people who fled have returned and the government has been making efforts to revive civilian administration in the region. Obadage said the latest movement out of Madhu, home to a famous Catholic shrine, was to make space for several thousands of pilgrims who were expected to attend next month's feast there. Christians from southern Sri Lanka had been unable to attend the feast for several years since the area was under LTTE control. In the late 1980s, it attracted as many as 200,000 devotees. Troops captured the area in late March. The 16-year war has made hundreds of thousands of people homeless in Sri Lanka's northern Wanni region and the government, after gaining fresh territory has been making efforts to send them back to their homes. But international relief agencies said the rush to evict the refugees from Madhu, some of whom had been living there for nearly 10 years, had led to a sharp increase in the number of people living in welfare camps in the north. `It is a very sad situation in Vavuniya and Mannar. We find ourselves as victims of a decision in which we had no hand,'' said an aid official, adding that relief agencies had distributed plastic sheets and other shelter material to those displaced from Madhu. Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytas-06.10.99-01:51:22-31367