Death squads run by Sri Lanka’s military are killing dozens of Tamil civilians in the Jaffna peninsula each week. Many more are being killed in all the Army-controlled districts. People are disappearing and bodies are being dumped every day in Trincomalee, Batticaloa, Amparai and Vavuniya.Masked Army-backed paramilitaries and troops in plainclothes are knocking on doors in the middle of the night and calling their victims out. Many people are being dragged off the streets in broad daylight in the unmarked minibuses and vans, collectively referred to as ‘white vans’.
Many of those abducted simply disappear. The bodies of others are found dumped by the road side or secluded spots, bearing the signs of torture and riddled with bullets or single, execution-style gunshot wounds.
Emboldened by a new-found sense of battlefield superiority over the Liberation Tigers, Sri Lanka’s military has unleashed a campaign of terror amongst the Tamil community, mirroring a similar campaign unleashed against the Sinhala youth during the late eighties.
The counter-insurgency campaign was directed against the Marxist insurrection launched by the Janatha Vimukthi Perumana (JVP).
This campaign is directed by Sinhala unltranationalists in the Sri Lankan military and state sympathetic to the JVP’s hardline anti-LTTE, anti-Tamil politics.
An average of six people are being abducted or killed each day in Jaffna.
In August alone, at least 67 Tamil youths and young adults disappeared in the Jaffna peninsula, according to Thurairaja Surendraraja, the coordinator for Sri Lanka’s Human Rights Commission (HRC).
The HRC puts the number of the disappeared alone from the Jaffna peninsular since December last year at over 400.
Press reports say the targeting borders on the indiscriminate. People who put up posters for political rallies supportive of the LTTE or even supporters of political parties sympathetic to the LTTE are being murdered.
In Batticaloa, a vicious shadow war between Military Intelligence-backed paramilitaries and the LTTE has escalated with many people being killed. Terror has gripped residents.
Even in Colombo, scores of Tamils have been abducted. Many are businessmen, from whose families millions of rupees are being demanded as ransom. Some are released on payment. Others are turning up dead.
In Vavuniya paramilitary groups backed by Sri Lankan military intelligence are stepping up the terror campaign also.
And as in Jaffna and Batticaloa, the gunmen here are also robbing houses at will.
A United Nations investigator said Tuesday that ‘political killings’ continued in Sri Lanka and called for international human rights monitors to be sent to the island.
Philip Alston, U.N. special reporter on extrajudicial, arbitrary and summary executions was addressing the U.N. Human Rights Council, which is holding a three-week session to examine abuses worldwide including in Sri Lanka.
"Many people are killed for the purpose of keeping them from speaking freely, assembling freely, participating in politics, and so on," he added.
Despite the involvement of Tamil paramilitaries, many residents have no doubt who is behind the masked campaign. As one family told the Asian Human Rights Commission: “the men spoke irregular and unfamiliar Tamil but fluent Sinhala”
Whilst they have reached new highs for recent times, ‘disappearances’ are not a new phenomenon in Sri Lanka’s conflict.
Earlier this year reporters with The Toronto Star visited Jaffna to investigate the rising numbers of killings and disappearances - which the paper subsequently reported, had “created a culture of fear among Tamil civilians.”
“It’s schematized killing,” A Roman Catholic priest told the Toronto Star newspaper.
“To threaten the people. To keep them under pressure. To send the message that the government can save the life and the government can destroy the life.”
“There is very good evidence that the security forces have once again started killing civilians and quite indiscriminately,” a Western diplomat in Colombo, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told The Toronto Star.
“Things are switching back to their old ways and tactics,” an international analyst who also spoke on condition of anonymity told The Toronto Star.
“Maybe it’s too far to say it’s a calibrated strategy, but the signals and so forth come from the top.”
