Lanka to blame for 700 Jaffna deaths: activists

NEW DELHI: Sri Lankan security forces are to blame for the murder of 700 civilians in Jaffna, a rights body said yesterday, holding both Colombo and the Tamil Tigers accountable for the island nation’s misery.

The University Teachers for Human Rights (UTHR) also said in its latest report that “war-like ideologies” were leading the Sri Lankan government as well as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to a destructive future.

“Making due allowance for the LTTE’s share in killings, we estimate that the government and its security forces are responsible for murdering in cold blood upwards of a base figure of 700 unarmed civilians in Jaffna during 2006 and 2007,” said UTHR, a rights group led by a group of respected Sri Lankan Tamils.

“We make a large allowance for persons listed missing, but whose status is uncertain,” it said in a 42-page document, focussing on the situation in Jaffna, the Tamil heartland in the north of Sri Lanka.

The report comes amid rising turbulence in Sri Lanka, where some 5,000 people have been slain since 2005 in violence blamed mainly on the government, the LTTE and Tamil groups allied to Colombo.

“War-like ideologies (are) gaining uncontested primacy on both sides, holding in prospect a bleak future for the people of Sri Lanka,” it said.

“The LTTE having irretrievably bound itself in suicide politics would continue to plead the futility of a political settlement with Sinhalese governments bent on destroying the Tamils. Both sides would trot out seemingly logical arguments to back their stand. This is the tragedy of Sri Lanka.”

The UTHR accused Sri Lankan security forces of conducting “routine shooting safari on motorcycles”, targeting Tamils even remotely suspected of links with the LTTE.

“The absence of political engagement has left the army looking barbaric, ridiculous and stupid, chasing after schoolboys, peeping into school attendance registers, beating up boys, wives and mothers, shooting unarmed women on the street in cold blood and shooting old men and fathers before their wives and children.”

The report said the “government’s targeted killings of unsuspecting civilian Tamils significantly exceeds the LTTE cadres killed in combat”. As a result, it added, “a large number of people are now trying to go to India as in the mid-1980s”.

It added: “Under the present government’s direction there are no qualms about killing Tamils and one has an uneasy feeling that the effectiveness of the security services is measured by the number of Tamils they kill.”

Today’s counter-insurgency tactics, it went on, “treats the Tamil people collectively as the enemy”. The state-sponsored violence “might reduce incidents in the short-term but would not reconcile the Tamils to the Sri Lankan state”.

At the same time, the UTHR referred to “deep dissatisfaction among the people” in the LTTE-controlled Kilinochchi district and accused the Tigers of continuing to have an eye on children to be recruited for the war effort.

“Conscription has proved the LTTE’s Achilles heel in the Vanni (the LTTE-held region in the north), resulting in widespread resentment,” it said. “Resentment has been stirred, not just by the suffering imposed but also by the reckless use of new conscripts on the frontlines.”

It accused the LTTE of ignoring the very basic scruples of conscripts, forcing those brought up as strict Hindus to work in kitchens cutting beef and fish for the guerrillas.

It said the LTTE had launched a new round of conscription in late October 2007 after the successful Black Tiger attack on the Sri Lankan air force base at Anuradhapura air base that dealt a major blow to Colombo.

“The reality is that both sides are skating on thin ice, bleeding the people and holding out for ends that, if attained at all, would be an unbearable cost to the people and absolute infamy to the name of this country and its people.”–IANS

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