A petrified woman scrambles to hide at the sight of a van, fearing the return of her husband's killers. A 20-year-old man won't leave his home, in case the militants who tried to abduct him are lying in wait. Gangs of gunmen demand exorbitant “taxes” from businessmen.
Months after driving the Liberation Tigers from eastern Sri Lanka, President Mahinda Rajapakse told the United Nations last week: “We have freed the eastern province from terrorism and restored law and order there.”
But people in Valaichchenai, Batticaloa, tell a different story. Killings, kidnappings and extortion continue to plague daily life as armed groups compete to control the territory.
In extensive interviews with The Associated Press, Sri Lankans describe a region paralyzed by fear, where gunmen shoot opponents in broad daylight, snatch new conscripts – some of them minors – from their homes and run a web of mob-like rackets to fund their militias.
“As far as the public are concerned, they are not liberated,” said S. Sugumadas, a 66-year-old peace activist in the eastern city of Batticaloa. The gunmen “still are taking ransoms, they are harassing people, they are abducting children.”
The worst of the new tormentors are said to be the Karuna Group, a faction of former Tamil Tigers who joined the government's fight against their old comrades.
The soldiers and police posted throughout the territory have done little to stop the violence, residents said. Their impression is that the government is unwilling or unable to confront the armed groups. The government denies it.
“Things cannot turn completely within 24 hours or 48 hours,” says government security spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella. “But certainly the law and order situation is improving. It is very much better. I am not saying that everything is perfect.”
Yet people are so afraid of retaliation from the militias for speaking out that many of those interviewed begged that their names be kept secret.
“If I talk, there can be danger to my children,” said one woman, who saw her husband killed by two masked gunmen in their courtyard in the coastal town of Valaichchenai on a May evening, well after the Tamil Tigers were pushed out of town.
The shooting underscored how freely the gunmen operate, while the aftermath showed how deeply terrorized the community is.
When the woman began screaming, her brother inside the house watching TV with her 8-year-old son begged her to stop so the gunmen wouldn't come back. They waited half an hour before calling relatives to make sure the attackers were gone for good, she said.
They called the police to collect the body, by then sitting in a pool of blood on the light blue tile of the living room floor. The police refused to come, saying the house was not safe, the wife said. None of her relatives would drive the body to the morgue for fear the attackers might shoot them.
So she spent the night sitting over her slain husband's body, mopping up his blood until police arrived more than 12 hours later.
The capture of the east this summer was a big military victory for the government after 24 years of fighting against the Tamil Tigers, who demand a homeland for the Tamil community in the north and east of the Indian Ocean island. The Tigers still control a mini-state in parts of the north.
From the mid 1990s, the LTTE also had directly controlled pockets of territory throughout the east – and held deep influence over other areas – running the economy, forcing each Tamil family to send one child to join their army and showing no tolerance for opposition.
But the Tigers, renowned for their discipline and fierce loyalty, suffered a setback in the east in 2004 when one of their top commanders, known as Col. Karuna, defected and formed his own militia.
When a cease-fire between the government and the LTTE broke down the next year, his fighters – officially called the Tamileela Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal but widely known as the Karuna Group – decided to join the government in the fight against their old comrades.
A military offensive that began last year drove the Tigers out of much of the area by early February. In July, the government declared the east fully liberated.
The Karuna Group, and to a lesser extent smaller paramilitary organizations, have taken effective control of wide swaths of the east, employing many of the same rackets they ran earlier, but now with the tacit support of a government focused only on eliminating the Tigers, residents said.
“Earlier they operated from jungles with fear. Now they are in the open with government license,” said Achchi Mohamed Ameer, 35, leader of a Muslim community group.
The government denies allowing Karuna's gunmen free rein, and in recent months soldiers and police have demanded they stop driving through the streets waving their rifles. However, no action has yet been taken to disarm them.
Spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella said Karuna's men are keeping their weapons out of a “reasonable fear” of attacks by their enemies. The government would disarm the group, he said, but gradually.
Wellington Kalingan, the Karuna Group's political leader in Batticaloa, says the group is a convenient target because its members used to be rebels, but it is now a peaceful political organization waiting to contest promised local elections.
“Our main aim is development, to maximize the resources of this province and for the people to live in peace,” he said, sitting inside the group's regional headquarters, a compound protected by a concrete bunker out front, an army post blocking the road off to one side and a militant resting a heavy machine gun on a pile of tires off to the other.
The group will give up its weapons when it no longer fears attack from the Tigers, he said.
In an August report, Human Rights Watch accused the Sri Lankan security forces of “a clear pattern of complicity” in Karuna's abuses.
And the Sri Lankan Monitoring Mission, an international group that monitors the tattered cease-fire, reported an increase in abductions and assassinations in the east in September, including the daylight killing of a member of the Eelam People's Democratic Party, a rival Tamil group accused of similar abuses of its own.
Standing outside the Valaichchenai morgue where the body was stored, local EPDP leader Vijayaraja Siva demanded the government disarm the Karuna Group – even as his own gunmen milled about undisturbed by nearby police.
“The government had one thing in mind, to defeat the (Tigers), and for that they needed the support of the Karuna Group,” he said. “Now things must change.”
On a recent sunny day, young men played volleyball and cricket at a Karuna-sponsored sports day in honor of the militia leader's slain brother.
Karuna militants with rifles and machine guns stood guard, oblivious to the police jeeps patrolling a few hundred yards away on the dusty main road of Kathiraveli, a fishing village flattened by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and battered again in fighting between the government and the Tigers.
Those gunmen, who live in a nearby beach compound of small huts surrounded by a wall of corrugated tin, are the hidden rulers of the village, residents said.
They said fishermen can no longer sell their fish at the market for roughly $0.60 a pound, and instead have to sell to Karuna militants for less than $0.40 a pound.
The militants then retail the fish, making up to $5,000 a day by one fisherman's estimate, while many villagers still live in ramshackle temporary housing nearly three years after the tsunami.
When one woman tried to smuggle shrimp past the gunmen, they beat her, residents said.
“Police come, but they don't interfere with what Karuna does in the village,” said a fisherman too frightened to let his name be published.
Businessmen say they have to pay massive ‘taxes’ to the Karuna Group for everything from building a house to selling liquor. One large-scale importer in Batticaloa took several minutes on a calculator to figure out that he paid more than $10,000 a month to the group.
Ameer, the Muslim leader who agreed to speak because the gunmen have less sway over his community, said the Karuna Group charged Muslim truck drivers about $1.30 a day to operate in Tamil areas. They also block Muslim fishing boats from returning to shore and hijack their catch and fuel, he said.
Its gunmen routinely abduct new recruits for their militia, many of them underage children, according to human rights groups and residents.
Some parents have stopped sending their sons to traditional all-night festivals at Hindu temples because the militants swoop down on the boys gathered there to replenish their ranks.
When men in a white van snatched Thayananthan Kailayapillai, 19, and his cousin, police told their parents to find their sons by themselves, said Kailayapillai's mother, Thamayanthi.
The men were held captive for 11 days before being released in early September amid growing public protests. Kailayapillai refused to identify his assailants.
“I don't know who they are. I don't want to say who they are,” he said.
Another family in a small village south of Valaichchenai said two dozen armed men from Karuna's group arrived at their home at about 8:30 a.m. on Aug. 8 and tried to snatch a 20-year-old inside to join their group. His wailing mother and sisters encircled him in a protective hug and refused to let go, even when the militants fired in the air and into the ground at their feet, the family said.
As the frustrated invaders finally turned to leave, their target's 23-year-old brother walked in, so they took him instead, the family said. Several days later, he managed to flee and is hiding in a relative's house, while the brother initially targeted has not left his house in a month and plans to take a job in Qatar, 2,300 miles away, to escape the threat.
The family members said they feared that if they went to the police, the Karuna gunmen would shoot them and justify the killings by saying they were Tamil Tigers.
