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Sri Lanka + 8 more

Fund war victims better for lasting peace - UN

By Peter Apps

COLOMBO, April 7 (Reuters) - Rich countries that respond overwhelmingly to high-profile disasters such as the 2004 tsunami should do much more to help victims of lower-profile conflicts, a senior United Nations official said.

"The moral imperative is clear -- you have to build them a better life," said Dennis McNamara, head of the U.N.'s Office for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) internal displacement division.

"But there's also a political imperative. You cannot build on the peace process without a stable population base. You cannot build on the quicksand of displaced populations,"he told Reuters in an interview late on Thursday.

Four years after a 2002 truce halted two decades of civil war between Sri Lanka's government and Tamil Tiger rebels, some 330,000 people remain displaced within the island.

Living in temporary camps, they often lack the permanent housing being provided much faster to the tsunami victims by the U.N. and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

"Do we continue to just feed people in these squalid settlements that have no future?" McNamara said. "Or do we try and break out? Can we help them find work, get permanent shelter? The UN has not done enough for these people. The NGOs and the government have not done enough."

Money could not simply be ripped from the tsunami aid programme -- the best funded of modern times -- and given to conflict victims, he said, but in some cases it could be spent in a way that helped both war and tsunami victims.

RETURNING TO NOTHING

Some of the worst affected Sri Lankan communities hit by the disaster, which killed some 30,000 people around the island, were in the north and east -- the areas that had already borne the brunt of a war that killed some 64,000 people and which many fear could still re-ignite.

Across the world, the 24 million internally displaced -- people who have fled their homes but remain in the same country and so are not legally termed refugees -- remained the poor cousins of disaster victims, McNamara said.

Last year, three million of them returned home, he said, mainly in the aftermath of wars in Angola, south Sudan and elsewhere. But often they came back to nothing, which made building lasting peace very difficult.

"There's two million south Sudanese who are voting with their feet and going back home," he said. "But they're going back to nothing -- just to be on top of impoverished local populations. We're not supporting them enough. And if you don't support them, all they'll become is more refugees or militia."

And even as these returned to their villages, another two million people fled from new violence in Somalia, Uganda, Chad and parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as drought in parts of east Africa.

In Iraq, over a million people remained internally displaced, he said, mainly marsh Arabs and Kurds who fled after uprisings against Saddam Hussein. In Colombia, two to three million remained displaced and largely ignored.

"The total UN and NGO budget is about $8 billion," McNamara said. "The global defence budget is at least $800 billion. It's a non-equation. It's no contest. The guys who provide the guns and make the wars are onto a winning streak. We need to redress that balance," he added.