Colombo – With the end of the fighting in Mullaitivu district, a new influx of internally displaced people (IDPs) is flooding into Vavuniya, the district adjoining Sri Lanka's northern conflict zone.

Since Friday some 40,000 IDPs have arrived in Vavuniya and another 40,000 are expected in the course of this week, according to IOM Vavuniya Head of office Michele Cecere.

"IOM is working flat out with the government and our partners in the international community to provide these people with the basic essentials that they need to survive – shelter, water, sanitation and basic health care," he says.

At the Omanthai checkpoint north of Vavuniya town, where IDPs are screened by government forces, IOM staff distributed 20,000 bottles of drinking water at the weekend and deployed fourteen 1,000-litre water tanks. It is also supporting a field kitchen at the site with World Food Programme (WFP) and local NGO Sewalanka.

IOM has also deployed an ambulance to Omanthai, in response to a request from the government and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), to evacuate seriously injured people to Vavuniya Hospital. During the weekend the ambulance moved 71 patients triaged by MSF.

IOM engineers are also racing to prepare emergency shelters, water and sanitation to cope with the influx. Since last week, IOM has erected 1,450 tents and built some 80 emergency toilets on the newly cleared jungle site known as Menik Farm Zone 4. Fifty more toilets are under construction.

The tents are the first of a consignment of 4,000 shipped by IOM to Sri Lanka from China. The remainder are now in a warehouse in Vavuniya and will be erected in the coming days and weeks. A consignment of 560 tents, 30,000 jerry cans, 4,000 plastic sheets, 10,000 sleeping mats, and 1,000 mosquito nets donated by Japan will also be dispatched to Vavuniya shortly, following a handover ceremony in Colombo on Monday.

The new IDP arrivals are expected to bring the population of the Menik Farm and other displacement camps in Vavuniya to over 250,000.

International donors funding IOM relief operations in northern Sri Lanka include the USA, the UK, Japan, the Netherlands, Australia, the UN Central Emergency Response Fund and the European Commission Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO).

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For more information please contact: Aurela Rincon, IOM Sri Lanka, Tel. +94 11 5325 392 (Ext. 379), E-mail: arincon@iom.int; Passanna Gunasekera, Tel. +94 11 5325 300 (Ext. 341), E-mail: pgunasekera@iom.int  or Chris Lom, Tel. +66 819275215 (mobile), E-mail: clom@iom.int