Colombo: Saudi Arabian Police has arrested over 70 Sri Lankans, who have remained in the country illegally without visas, being detained at 91 camps in Dammam, ‘News First’ reported on Monday 15.
The Sri Lankan detainees in the 91 camps said that due to the lack of facilities, they are greatly inconvenienced and though the Sri Lanka Embassy in Saudi Arabia has been informed regarding this, they are yet to get a positive response from the Embassy.
The detainees further said that one of their fellow Sri Lankans died at the camp last Saturday after falling sick and when the ‘News First’ contacted the Sri Lankan Embassy in Saudi Arabia, Ministerial Advisor Anura Muthumala said a group of officials visited the camp to look into the grievances of the Sri Lankans.
He added that permission has been granted to the majority of them to return to Sri Lanka.
8,000 Sri Lankan nationals in Australian refugee camps
Since May 2009, when the bloody war ended in the island nation, at least 8,000 Sri Lankan nationals including refugees from camps in India have reached Australia, ‘Mirror’ reported on Monday 15.
According to an official in the Australian Immigration Department, between May 2009 and April 10, 2013, nearly 8,170 Sri Lankans has arrived in Australia.
However, she declined to specify the ethnicity of the illegal immigrants from Sri Lanka and the manner in which they arrived on Australian shores.
Influx of Sri Lankans has increased after the end of the ethnic war, according to the statistics, whereas, the year 2012 saw the highest number of 6,428 asylum seekers, while in 2008 only 16 people arrived in Australia.
So far, only about 1,000 both Tamil and Sinhalese Lankan migrants have been issued settlement visas.
Sri Lanka faces 20% US aid cut
A 20 per cent cut in the American aid to Colombo has been proposed by US Secretary of State John Kerry, a move echoing the unease in their relationship over issues related to human rights, reconstruction and political integration in Sri Lanka after the end of the civil war, ‘The Hindu’ reported on Monday April 15.
In Kerry’s budget proposals, which were sent to the US Congress last week, this is believed to be the highest drop for any South Asian country.
A senior State Department official said that Kerry has proposed $11 million in aid to Sri Lanka, which is a “drop of 20 per cent” from the fiscal year 2012.
“This reflects both the fact that we had a difficult time in programming a lot of our money in Sri Lanka. We tried to do a lot in the north to help the IDPs and get back to their normal life and support reconstruction efforts there. But in several cases we had programmes that we were trying to support in which the Sri Lankan government and the military got quite involved and so we were not able to pursue those programmes,” a senior State Department official told PTI.
“So we made a decision that Sri Lanka as a middle income country, and in a country where we are having difficulty in programming, that is a place where we should probably cut,” the official said requesting anonymity.
Kerry has proposed about $6 million for 2014, while the actual US development aid was $8 million to Sri Lanka in 2012.
Kerry has proposed increasing aid to Bangladesh from $81.6 million in 2012 to $80.9 million in 2014. He has also proposed a substantial increase in US aid to the Maldives.
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