India sending special envoy to assess rehabilitation in North

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 03 August 2010, 23:41 GMT]
A special envoy from the Indian government is scheduled to arrive in Sri Lanka shortly to monitor the progress of the rehabilitation work and resettlement of internally persons in the northern province, the state run Dinamina newspaper said in a front page news article. The visit has been announced subsequent to an appeal made by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi who wrote to the Indian Premier Manmohan Singh to send a representative from the Indian government to scrutinize the work being carried out in the north and to ascertain whether the work is on schedule.

“Out of the 286,000 internally displaced persons in the north, approximately 90 percent of these IDPs have been resettled,” the news Dinamina said.

The article also claimed that a large number of former LTTE cadres have been already rehabilitated successfully.

Karunanidhi’s letter to the Indian premier follows a meeting he had with members of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) last month.

During the meeting, the TNA appealed for assistance from Karunanidhi to help influence the Sri Lankan government to speed up the resettlement of the thousands of IDPs and to speed up the development in the north.