COLOMBO, Nov. 20 (Xinhua) -- The Sri Lankan government said Friday that its target of resettling the war displaced Tamil civilians are well on the way of being achieved and most of them will be resettled before Jan. 31, 2010.

    "In May we said that by Jan. 31, 2010 a majority of them would be resettled. We will have resettled 50 percent of them in the next few days," Mahinda Samarasinghe, the minister of Human Rights told reporters.

    Some 288,000 Tamil civilians displaced by the final battles between the government troops and Tamil Tiger rebels were housed in government-run camps in the northern district of Vavuniya when the civil war ended in May.

    With increasing international pressure, the government has speeded up the resettlement program recently.

    John Holmes, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator who ended a four-day visit to the island on Thursday expressed his satisfaction over the resettlement progress.

    The government said 130,000 war displaced civilians have been resettled to their original homes so far.