Tamils queue to vote in Sri Lanka´s war camps

Many citizens of Sri Lanka queded for hours, inside Menik Farm, to cast their votes in the presidential elections.

Inside Menik Farm, a notorious internment camp for displaced Tamils after Sri Lanka's civil war, people queued for hours Tuesday to cast their ballots in the presidential election.

About 5,000 men and women, some nursing infants, lined up under a hot sun in front of a school building in the sprawling complex of makeshift huts and tin-roofed buildings that housed nearly 300,000 at its height last year.

- I'm very thirsty and tired and we've had little to eat but I'm here to vote. I'm voting for a new government - Vijaya Letchchami, 60, told AFP after waiting for four hours to have her say at the ballot box.

She, like the vast majority of Tamils that AFP spoke to in the highly militarised Tamil-dominated areas of northern Sri Lanka, said she was voting for former army chief Sarath Fonseka as she felt he offered a better future for the island's ethnic minorities.

Both Fonseka and President Mahinda Rajapakse, who is seeking re-election, were the architects of a final assault on Tamil separatists last year that the UN says killed 7,000 civilians in Tamil areas.

After the end of the conflict, which has been mired in allegations of war crimes, displaced Tamils were locked in Menik Farm until December. The media and humanitarian groups were excluded and access is still strictly controlled.

An estimated 80,000 people remain, the rest having been freed at the end of last year under pressure from the United Nations which described conditions in the camps as ''appalling.''

Many were frustrated at being unable to vote because they lacked the right form of identification or were not registered correctly on the electoral roll.

Ratnasigham Sitthambipillai, 52, a labourer, said he had lost his ID card when he fled the warzone in May and had been using a temporary welfare card since, which electoral officials refused to accept.

- Please help us. I want to vote but I don't know what to do. Nobody is willing to help me - he said.

In the Tamil-dominated town of Vavuniya, 250 kilometres (160 miles) north of the capital Colombo and about an hour's drive from Menik Farm, there were also signs that Tamils were determined to cast their votes, mainly for Fonseka.

The Tamil Tigers enforced a boycott of the last presidential election in 2005, which Rajapakse narrowly won.

Kandaswamy Wellarayanam, 73, walked six kilometres to vote from a nearby internment camp.

Now able to move freely, he said he and his wife, daughter and two grandchildren were eager to take part, even though buses that were meant to transport them never turned up.

- We walked to vote because we felt it was important after the war. I was keen to have a say in who should be our next president... We've not had free food and rations for two months and depend on odd jobs to survive - he told AFP.

Voting started slowly in Vavuniya but picked up during the day as locals filed into the makeshift polling booths in schools.

Among the Sinhalese population, there was solid support for Rajapakse, the scion of a political family known for his energetic oratory and popular touch.

- I voted for Mahinda (Rajapakse) to thank him for ending the war and allowing my children to grow up without fear of bombs - said Sinhalese tradesman Jagath Karunatilake, 42, in Vavuniya.

In the majority Sinhalese capital Colombo, turnout appeared to be high.

- I have been voting at this booth for over 20 years, but never saw a crowd like this - said Mohamed Sallel, a businessman casting his ballot in the city's Borella commercial area.

Soon after polls closed, the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV), an independent monitoring body, estimated voter turnout at 80 percent in the Sinhalese-majority south and 20-percent in the Tamil-dominated north.