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Sri Lanka

It would be remiss in starting this Adjournment debate not to welcome the Sri Lankan cricket team to this country and to wish its players the best of luck, because I think that they may need it. The primary reason why I have called the debate this evening is to report to Parliament on a recent delegation to Sri Lanka that the hon. Member for Northampton, South (Mr. Binley) and I headed at the beginning of April this year. I shall report what we saw on our visit and some of the issues and concerns that were raised with us. I want to focus on the rapidly deteriorating situation in Sri Lanka and on the action that both the UK Government and, through them, the international community are taking to address the increased number of suicide attacks, random killings and assassinations and to move towards the resumption of the talks that were cancelled in April. I thank all those who were involved in arranging our visit, of whom there are too many to mention in this debate. I particularly want to thank those who were involved in facilitating our visit to the north—we flew to Jaffna and visited parts of the north that are under Government control. Before we made the visit, my constituents and members of the Sri Lankan community throughout the country expressed their concern to me, as chairman of the all-party group on Sri Lanka, that tsunami aid was simply not getting through to the north and east of the country. As a result, I raised two questions with Ministers in the Department for International Development. Despite the reassurances that I received, people still expressed concerns that nothing was happening in the north and east. I was thus relieved to receive a letter from the Sri Lankan high commissioner, who detailed at some length several of the projects that were being undertaken in the north. I shall cite a representative example from the letter. She wrote that the World Bank was spending just over $32 million"““to rehabilitate small irrigation schemes damaged by the tsunami””" and providing support for ““community capacity building reconstruction”” in the north and east. Even with that letter, it was still difficult to persuade those who made representations to me, so our visit to the north was welcome because it allowed us to see three sites, two of which were just outside Jaffna and one that was at Point Pedro, which is the most northerly point of the Sri Lankan island. During our visit, we saw the work of an Italian non-governmental organisation called Movimondo, which had completed work on 36 houses and built a school just outside Jaffna. Right adjacent to that was a World Bank scheme involving 111 houses. A lot of the houses were in the early stages of construction, but quite a few had roofs on. I have no doubt that they will have been completed by now. We also visited a site that was organised by Caritas, another NGO. There were to be 68 houses on the site. Although they were in the early stages of development, we could at least see the foundations of the houses that would be there.