Colombo, Oct 17, 2009 (Xinhua via COMTEX) -- The Sri Lankan government said Saturday that another batch of 2,500 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) were resettled to their original places on Friday.
They were displaced by the recently concluded war between the government troops and Tamil Tiger rebels in the northern part of the country and were staying at the fully packed IDPs camps in Vavuniya, around 250 km away from the capital Colombo.
They were resettled in their native places in northern Jaffna peninsula.
Government officials said 450 IDPs from the Vavuniya and Mannar districts were also resettled on the same day.
Minister of Resettlement and Disaster Relief Services Rishad Bathiudeen said that the government has accelerated the resettlement program providing all facilities to those civilians under the guidance of President Mahinda Rajapakse.
"By the end of the war in May 2009, there were about 280,000 civilians gathered into the IDPs camps in Vavuniya, Up to now, the government has resettled about 25,000 civilians from those camps. We planned to resettle about 50,000 IPDs in their homelands by end of this month," Bathiudeen said.
Earlier this month, Human Rights and Disaster Management Minister of Sri Lanka Mahinda Samarasinghe said that the government released 22,668 IDPs from the camps in Vavuniya.
According to Samarasinghe, there are some LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) cadres still staying in IDP camps.
The government has already identified about 9,818 LTTE cadres. The government made all arrangement to rehabilitate them in coordination with 13 relevant ministries.
The Sri Lankan government has designed a special identity card for IDPs which was now available. There are 178,000 IDPs registered for these ID cards and up to now 150,000 cards have been issued.