All Sinhala relief team to assist TAFOR in East

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 15 March 2005, 19:31 GMT]
None of the forty four relief co-ordinators hired by the Commissioner of General Essential Services and Chairman of the Task Force for Relief (TAFOR), Mr Tilak Ranaviraja, is Tamil speaking, attendees to a meeting called by the Commissioner held at the Ministry of Defense 14 March, said. Relief co-ordinators are recent graduates selected to assist TAFOR in finding land for transitional housing for the tsunami displaced, sources said.

The meeting was called to discuss Sri Lanka Government initiated Transitional Accommodation Project (TAP) for the Tsunami affected districts. Several representatives from local and international Non-Governmental Organizations attended the meeting, sources said.

Acknowledging that none of the new hires could speak Tamil, an aide to the Commissioner said that there were no Tamil speakers in the “batch” and that they were trying to find some to fill the need.

“The Government officials did not even have the required statistics available on the number of people who will require transitional housing. Many of the attendees also complained that TAP has made little progress after the last meeting held two weeks earlier,” an NGO representive who attended the meetng told TamilNet.

Sri Lanka’s President disbanded the Center for National Operations (CNO), established on the 29th of December 2004, to coordinate the rescue and relief operations and transferred its functions to TAFOR.