The contrast is stark. A little more than a year ago Action Contre la Faim (ACF), a French charity, was one of the biggest relief agencies in Sri Lanka’s war-torn north and east with 200 employees on its rolls. Today there are only nine.
ACF operated in four districts in the Tamil-dominated conflict areas: Jaffna, Trincomalee, Batticaloa and Ampara, but is now reduced to just an office in the capital city.
Everything changed for ACF on Aug. 4, 2006 when 17 of its local staff, working at its sub-office in Muttur town, Trincomalee, were ‘executed’ with bullets in the back of their heads in the charity's premises.
They were caught in a battle for control over the coastal town between Sri Lankan government troops and the militant Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
Eye witnesses, who recovered the bodies three days after the massacre, said that the men, all ethnic Tamils, appeared to have been lined up outside the office and shot at close range.
The murders are the worst single attack against aid workers since 23 U.N. employees were killed in Baghdad in August 2003.
ACF was forced to close down all its district offices and only operate from Colombo soon after the murders. Though it did return to Batticaloa earlier this year, its office there had to be closed down due to security reasons.
"We have pulled out of Batticaloa for various reasons, security being one of them. The prevalent situation would not have allowed us to properly implement new programmes in resettlement areas," ACF country head for Sri Lanka Loan Tran-Thanh told IPS.
The situation is such that ACF has no immediate plans to return to areas of former operations or increase staff strength.
"Rights now there is no decision to move back into these areas. We are based in Colombo and following the judicial process (of the investigation) and the humanitarian situation in the country," Tran-Thanh said.
Investigations into the murders, including one by a Special Presidential Commission of Inquiry (CoI), assisted by a group of international eminent persons, have progressed painfully slow.
No suspects have been arrested or identified despite wide international condemnation.
"Despite the serious nature of these crimes and their repercussions, insufficient attempts have been made to hold the perpetrators accountable,” United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said in a recent report on protection of civilians in armed conflict.
“In Sri Lanka, there is still little progress in the work of the government-established commission investigating human rights abuses, including the murders of 17 staff of ACF who were killed in a single, abhorrent act in August 2006," he said.
The International Independent Group of Eminent Persons (IIGEP), headed by former Indian chief justice P.N Bhagwati that is assisting the presidential commission, has criticised the slow pace of the investigation.
"The IIGEP remains concerned about the speed of the Commission’s investigation process. The first investigation into the ACF case commenced on May 14. Since that time only a few witnesses have been examined," it said in its latest public report.
Critics of the investigations also say that none of the civilians present in Muttur at the time of the massacre has been interviewed and that the lack of a witnesses protection programme has also prevented anyone from coming forward to give evidence.
Some witnesses who have been interviewed by the CoI were in fact threatened.
Rights activists in Colombo see the massacre as part of a wider deterioration in the rights environment in the country since December 2006.
The Law Society Trust (LST), a Colombo-based advocacy forum, says that in the first seven months of this year 662 persons have been killed and 540 disappeared.
LST counts nine local aid workers among the disappeared and said the total worked out to five victims per day in the first eight months of 2007.
The Colombo-based Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies said as of August over 30 local aid workers have been killed since January 2006.
"This is a continuing trend where we have seen abuses taking placing and no one held accountable. There needs to be some new mechanism for the situation to change, the continuation of the status quo will not help in any way," LST’s Rukshan Fernando told IPS.
LST analyses show that majority of the victims were young men from the Tamil minority in the northern Jaffna peninsula.
While most of the disappeared (84 percent) and killed (78 percent) were Tamils, LST data found that one in every five abductees was a young male from Jaffna.
"That itself should tell us something,’’ Fernando said.
Agencies which have seen local staff members fall victim to the rising wave of violence agree with Fernando that they had become victims of an environment of impunity. Last week an employee working with Halo Trust, a demining agency, was shot and killed in Jaffna.
"I think young men are a target here, much more than demining agencies," Steen Wetlesen, country manager for the Danish Demining Group, told IPS when one its own staff members was shot and killed in Jaffna in August.
In that incident the victim appeared to be specifically targeted by the assailants as he was riding on a motorcycle with a colleague. The colleague escaped with injuries and two others traveling on another motorbike were not harmed. The gunmen had fired and chased after the victim and shot him.
Even U.N. agencies have felt the dangers created by an environment of animosity against relief agencies, especially in the south of the country.
"The accusations levelled against UNICEF and its staff could seriously compromise our ability to carry out our work, and could endanger our safety and security," UNICEF said this month soon after a nationalist parliamentarian accused it of aiding the Tamil Rehabilitation Organisation (TRO).
TRO funds were frozen in the United States this month over charges that it was a front for the LTTE, which is banned in that country as a terrorist organisation.
For the situation to change and for crimes like the ACF murders to be properly investigated, activists like Fernando say a drastic change, far more radical than anything the country’s human rights bodies have seen in the past, is required.
"One year after the appointment of the CoI and with an extension of another year, there is no tangible improvement in the human rights situation in Sri Lanka," Bhavani Fonseka of the Centre for Policy Alternatives said.
“If anything there is an increase in the number and nature of violations, with limited progress in investigations, indictments and convictions exacerbating the prevailing culture of impunity.”
The imperative change, according to Fernando, is the setting up of an international human rights mechanism in the country with a powerful mandate. "Past experience shows that local bodies are insufficient and inadequate."
President Mahinda Rajapakse’s nationalist government has, however, shut the door to any international intervention in the monitoring of human rights. It has repeatedly denied that its security forces are involved in human rights abuses and said it is only looking for technical assistance and capacity building from international bodies.
John Holmes, U.N. under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs, during a visit to Sri Lanka, in August, said there is concern about the safety of humanitarian workers and that ''the record here is one of the worst in the world from that point of view''.
