Lawlessness Grows in Strife-Torn Sri Lanka

Abductions, Killings and Disappearances Are Rampant as Civil Conflict Escalates

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka -- The men who came to the shop April 7 identified themselves as police officers, from the Criminal Investigations Department. Come with us to the station, they told the proprietor, a member of Sri Lanka's Tamil minority. He got into their van, tricked into what turned out to be a kidnapping.

A demand for $500,000 in ransom arrived a few days later, the man's daughter recounted. After two months of negotiations and threats, the kidnappers let the man go for $20,000 but have continued to terrorize the family with demands for more money and threats to abduct the man's son.

The family went to the police to seek help following the abduction, the daughter said, and again after the new threats, but authorities took no visible action.

The case is one of a string of abductions, extrajudicial killings, disappearances and detentions that have proliferated in Sri Lanka during the past year as the rule of law breaks down amid escalating civil war. The government of the majority ethnic Sinhala nation is fighting rebels who want an independent homeland for the ethnic Tamil community.

This kidnapping, like many others, remains unsolved, the family said. It's unclear whether the kidnappers were real police officers or impostors, but in today's environment, either explanation is plausible.

Violence has increased despite a 2002 cease-fire agreement, which exists mainly on paper. International observers say both sides are committing atrocities in a conflict that has raged off and on since 1983.

The rebel army has "continued its deliberately provocative attacks on the military and Sinhalese civilians as well as its violent repression of Tamil dissenters and forced recruitment of both adults and children," the Brussels-based International Crisis Group wrote in a recent report.

At the same time, "the government is using extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearances as part of a brutal counter-insurgency campaign," the group said.

Human rights groups have alleged state complicity in common extortion and kidnapping rackets as well, given the ease with which gangs have operated in the capital, Colombo, and in the north and east, the main conflict zones, which are under tight military security.

Human rights workers here complain that the government's initial response to the abductions was indifference. Leading politicians assert that the opposition was exaggerating the situation for political gain. One politician claimed that businessmen were going abroad clandestinely or dropping out of sight "to free themselves from their wives to enjoy with their pretty ones in unknown locations."

But a statement by an opposition lawmaker accusing specific individuals of involvement in the abduction racket appeared to spur the authorities into action. The Criminal Investigations Department has since arrested several former and current military and police personnel, and the investigations are ongoing.

In an interview, government spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella said that "abductions and extortions are not new to Sri Lanka and were common during the southern insurrection of the '80s." He said the government and President Mahinda Rajapaksa took the issue very seriously and carried out a crackdown June 18. In a July 10 interview, he said there had not been "a single case reported to the authorities" since the crackdown.