Civilians emerge, wounded and sick

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - The more than 100,000 civilians pouring out of Sri Lanka's war zone have included people with untreated blast, mine and gunshot wounds - prompting the U.N. chief yesterday to order an expert team to assess the "rapidly deteriorating situation."

Doctors Without Borders warned that civilian casualties are rising in the zone where the military is trying to finish off a 25-year-old insurgency. The government pleaded for humanitarian aid.

"I saw infants with dysentery, malnourished children and women, untended wounds, and people dressed in the ragged clothing they've been wearing for months," Neil Buhne, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator, said after returning from the northern town of Vavuniya, where tens of thousands of people are kept in overcrowded government camps.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, speaking to reporters in Brussels, Belgium, said he would immediately send in a team of humanitarian experts to monitor the situation and "try to do whatever we can to protect the civilian population."

The government says 104,862 civilians have escaped the conflict since Monday.

About 170,000 to 180,000 civilians now live in the government camps, said Gordon Weiss, the U.N. spokesman in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital.

An additional 15,000 to 20,000 civilians remain trapped in the coastal strip measuring just five square miles still controlled by the ethnic separatist Tamil Tigers. Reports on life there are limited because reporters are not allowed.

Weiss said no food has been delivered to the war zone since April 1.

"The conditions are absolutely awful. The people are living with a shortage of food and medicines and subjected to artillery and small-arms fire," he said.

The U.N. Security Council has asked the Tamil Tigers to lay down their arms and join talks to end the civil war.

The U.N. also urged the government to give international aid agencies access to those affected by the fighting. Since September, only the International Committee of the Red Cross has had access.

Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama said the government was working to grant more access to those who had left the war zone, depending on the security situation.

The Red Cross evacuated 350 wounded to a hospital outside the war zone Wednesday, and another evacuation was planned for yesterday, Red Cross spokeswomen Sarasi Wijeratne said.

Only two ill-equipped, makeshift hospitals function in the war zone. A doctor at one of them, Thangamuttu Sathyamurthi, said his staff was struggling with a medicine shortage as wounded patients continued to flood in.

He said 15 people were killed yesterday when shells hit a Roman Catholic church for a second time in two days, wounding a priest, whose leg had to be amputated.