another euphemism: idp. in the case of this man (and up to 200.000 others only in the eastern region of sri lanka) the government had decided that in order to have a free firing range against the tamil insurgents, everybody had to leave their villages.
so they were living in corrugated tin sheet buildings while everything they had was at the mercy of the army, the insurgents and the wild elephants. there is not much left now, as you can imagine. but idp sounds correct, nice.
this conflict is with 25 years and over 70.000 killed one of the longest and bloodiest in asia. silently, almost forgotten, as there are not states fighting against each other but “only” army and insurgents.
the violations of human rights are incountable, usage of child soldiers for example, to name only the worst. and both sides are equally abominable: the government for racist actions, under-cover-killings, the other side for forced recruition or using even kids as shields, again only to name examples.
with the looming defeat of the military arm of the insurgents, it now gets even worse. while the government deliberately arrests tamils in colombo (see these news on bbc), the rebels take up to 200.000 people hostage against the progress of the army. 200.000 kids, men, women of whom even the united nations have no information of where they are and in what status…
aah, did i ever say that sri lanka could be a paradise?
Congratulations to the “Random Excellence” on TOP! That’s a spike in your stats that I’d like to see 🙂
Very tragic indeed. This kind of strife exists in so many places all over the world and the stories are usually, seemingly, ignored. What can be done? If only someone had the right answer.
Powerful post.
Great documentation – both from a visual was well as a textual perspective – of a tragic situation.
Sometimes you really can’t shake the feeling that the saying that we are only covered by “der dünnen Tünche der Zivilisation” is more true that we would like it to be…
@andreas: thanks for the felitations. It came somewhat unexpected, because neither statistics nor number of comments gave me the feeling to show something extraordinary.
@laurie, thomas: one of photography’s most important aspects is this ‘bearing witness’, and as long as we just don’t take others misfortune as something inevitable, it for sure influences our daily decisions. Which is, in the end, why I do this.