Welcome to OfERR’s newly revamped website. OfERR has been around 25 Years. And the Old OfERR website developed by our refugee Staff has been around for quite a while. But we were definitely in need of some professional assistance to make our website more user friendly and up to date, making it a virtual office for OfERR. Dot Com Infoways an Indian web services company came forward to help OfERR by designing and developing our new website.  We would like to thank our long standing Partner agency Christian Aid and Mr. Laurent Viot, who provided OfERR with the necessary funds to accomplish this process. We would also like to thank the CIO and COO of Dot Com Info ways Mrs.Shakthi Girish and Mr.Girish Ramdas and the team of Designers and Programmers and who have worked with dedication towards making this website what you see today.

Now we’ll stop talking websites and start talking War or rather what concerns us… the ramifications of the war on innocent civilians. I went to Rameshwaram recently. A trickle of refugees have managed to get across in January, February and a handful in March. Most of them are from Vavuniya.  Earlier the boatmen would charge them 8,000 to 10,000 for ‘the passage to India’ in little fishing boats. They pack them (the refugees) in like sardines, 25 people or more   to a tiny boat, and brave the seas at the dead of night. Now that the war has intensified the boat men have decided that inflation is the way to go. They’ve up the price of ‘the boat ride to safety’, cashing in on the desperation of the people due to the escalating War and Mortality rates. I heard the figures 30,000 for a mother and small child, 69,000 for a family and I just thought how?... How do they pay this mighty sum, these are poor people. I asked them this. They’ve sold everything they had down to the traditional gold earrings the women wear on their ears, and some even their Thalis (eastern equivalent to a wedding band). Most of them come to India with nothing more then the clothes off their backs. This lady I was talking to was breast feeding a tiny infant. She had just newly arrived. Her husband and nine year old son were caught in the so called “Welfare camps”. She has no news of them. She cannot phone them, write to them, have any contact with them. The government of Sri Lanka claims that all persons escaping/rescued from the recently cleared, LTTE controlled areas will be kept in these camps for 3 years. A little girl in a pink dress, and big shinning eyes was part of our workshop. She is 12 years old and full of fun. But when I spoke to her she bust in tears that never seemed to stop. She described how she had seen a young man with his head severed off his body lying on the road, she told me how her brother had been taken away in the “White Van”…. Another young girl of 14 began to sob at the mention of the dreaded “White Van”…. She told me that her best friend and she were cycling down the road to school, the White Van drove past… she watched helplessly as they kidnapped her friend. The next day they found her body. She had been raped and mutilated. Rape, Murder, Extortion, abductions, torture, child recruitment…. It’s an old tale for this community, living in a bleeding Island, living through a war that has ravaged for almost 30 years. Yet if the situation was bad before it is now twelve times worse. The recent escalation of the conflict is ending in an unprecedented and bloody climax. The Rebels who were supposedly fighting for the people are now holding the civilians as ransom to save their own lives. The Government is heralding all the civilians who escape from the rebels into “welfare camps”. The international community is insisting on transparency. The government is digging its heels in and trying to refuse access to the international Ngos and the World Media. In the midst of this 300,000 people are being held behind barbwire fences.

It makes me think of a drawing done by a little girl called Shakrika, who is 7 and was born a Refugee, in a Refugee camp in Tamil Nadu. She had drawn the sun setting over the mountains and she had written in Tamil, “Like the sun goes home in the Peaceful evening time, when will we go home to our motherland?

- Poongkothai Chandrahasan