Lawlessness Grows in Strife-Torn Sri Lanka
Abductions, Killings and Disappearances Are Rampant as Civil Conflict Escalates

By Minelle Fernandez
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, July 28, 2007

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.

But in many abduction cases, victims say they are scared to go to the police.

Mano Ganesan of the Civil Monitoring Commission, which has documented 133 cases of abduction, is cynical about the government's handling of the matter. "The real culprits -- the big fish -- will not be apprehended," he said. "This government has been appointing committees and commissions to monitor the human rights situation, but there is no action on the ground."

The outcry over human rights violations prompted the government to appoint a Commission of Inquiry to look into 16 high-profile cases. Its first case is the killing of 17 aid workers employed by Action Against Hunger, or Action Contre la Faim.

But incidents continue. A recent move by the government to evict Tamils from temporary accommodation in the capital on the grounds that they posed a threat to national security stirred up huge controversy. The Supreme Court later ordered the suspension of evictions.

Tamils are not alone in losing basic rights, though the group is particularly vulnerable.

Vajira Dharmasena is a Sinhalese nurse in the main government hospital in Vavuniya, a garrison town in the north with a majority Tamil population. She lives in the Sinhala settlement of Mamaduwa and says people live in fear of attacks by the rebels, known as the Tamil Tigers.

"We try to avoid using the bus service that plies between Vavuniya and the village because we're afraid it will be targeted," she said. "We live in fear. At night people living near the forward defense lines come to the town to sleep. Schoolchildren can't study."

Eleven journalists have been killed since August 2005, according to an international media monitoring mission, which was in the country last month.

"Killings and attacks against journalists remained unsolved, leading to fears that media freedom is being deliberately and violently suppressed through threats, abductions and attacks," said Jacqui Park of the International Federation of Journalists.

Some countries have decided to withhold or suspend aid to Sri Lanka until they see the situation in the country improving.

Following the cease-fire, Sri Lanka was declared eligible for aid through Millennium Challenge Corp., set up under President Bush to reward countries that are well governed. But the U.S. ambassador in Colombo, Robert O. Blake, said in a recent television interview: "In the context of the collapse of the cease-fire and in the context of the decline of some of the indicators on governance, we unfortunately had to defer consideration of Sri Lanka for the Millennium Challenge Corporation.

"But we very much hope that the president will seize the opportunity to embrace peace now and the [Tamil Tigers] as well, since they are an important part of the process."

A senior official in Sri Lanka's attorney general's department said the state could not file criminal proceedings in cases of violence unless police provided sufficient evidence admissible in court.

Commenting on criticism that the government was violating the rights of Tamil citizens, Rambukwella, the government spokesman, said, "I'm not saying everything is perfect, but 39 percent of Tamils now live in the Western Province," which is controlled by the government.