One Hundred Thousand Tamils Missing After Sri Lanka War

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/frances-harrison/one-hundred-thousand-peop_b_2306136.html?utm_hp_ref=uk

Frances Harrison

Ex-BBC Correspondent, Ex-Amnesty International, Journalist & Author of 'Still Counting the Dead' - book on Tamils who survived Sri Lanka's 2009 war

World Bank population data from Sri Lanka indicates up to a hundred thousand Tamils are unaccounted for after the final war against the Tamil Tiger rebels in 2009, raising questions about whether they could be dead.

A UN report cited a death toll of forty thousand for the climax of the war in 2009 but a UN internal inquiry last month acknowledged for the first time that up to seventy thousand civilian deaths were possible.

The leaked World Bank spreadsheets broken down by village for the north of the island estimate numbers of returnees to the former conflict area in mid 2010. The Bank also cites Statistical Handbook Numbers for population in 2007 - before the fighting intensified. The two sets of data reveal 101,748 people missing from Mullaitivu District - the area that bore the brunt of the final fighting. This is the equivalent of 28,899 households. This number has been confirmed to me by the World Bank, though they add "other interpretations about the population data that are not included in the document can not be attributed to the World Bank".