UTHR special report on human rights

We publish excerpts of the latest report released by the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) UTHR(J) on May 15, 2006. (Special Report No. 21) without comment. Conflict absolves no side, but the LTTE provocations were pivotal to the violence:

1.0 A Menacing Triad

Spiralling violence and increased polarisation along communal lines are threatening to tear Sri Lanka apart. The situation is compounded by the state's inability to uphold the law, and its inept and disingenuous handling of the current political crisis. We are faced with a menacing triad of developments:

* The peace process had never come to terms with the LTTE's agenda and the South failed to demonstrate a tangible will for a political settlement that would have enabled the Tamils to challenge the LTTE.

* The mushrooming of killings aimed at curbing the LTTE was the second predictable development. The groups responsible are by the weight of evidence state sponsored, and their attacks have not just tripled or quadrupled the combined killing rate in the North-East they have taken on another sinister aspect, targeting unarmed political rivals. Hiding behind the cover of the LTTE's violence, these newly hyperactive killer groups have killed at least three senior Tamil political figures - Joseph Pararajasingham, Vigneswaran and Senthilnathan. These were persons who implicitly , justified and in turn legitimised the LTTE's terror, but also gave voice to some genuine Tamil grievances.

The State now pretends that the matter is one of Tamils killing Tamils and is out of its hands. This gives the use of killer groups a political colouring matching the LTTE's, both ultimately calculated to destroy the spirit of the people and plunge the country back into a war entailing an unimaginable human rights disaster.

The Government's sanctioning killer groups has adversely affected discipline and respect for the law down the hierarchy of the security forces, and has contributed, quite apart from provocations by the LTTE, to a readiness to kill unarmed persons (not infrequently bystanders) to suppress evidence of unlawful behaviour. Particularly disturbing was the appearance of bodies without heads in the Avissawela area east of Colombo in April, which were suspected to be of Tamil youths detained by the security forces. Opinion among Sinhalese in the areas concerned dismissed the Inspector General of Police's line that this is gangland rivalry (Sunday Island 30 Apr.06). The clean cuts on the necks resemble those on headless bodies and heads appearing on beaches south of Akkaraipattu during late September and early October 1990 (our Special Report No.3 and Report No.6). Then it was the work of the STF as also with about 20 corpses in lakes and waterways in 1995. Of the four new bodies so far identified, two were of Tamil youths from the Vanni who were working in Avissawela. Two others were of Tamil men picked up from Armour Street, Colombo, on the morning after the suicide attack on the Army Commander.

* The third and most threatening development for the prospects of peace and a political settlement is the violence in Trincomalee.

The Government and the media have pretended that there was a spontaneous burst of communal violence in response to the LTTE's provocation, but was quickly brought under control. But on the ground the loss of confidence in the security forces, and the motives of the Government and its respect for the law it is mandated to uphold, is almost total. Communal attacks by both Tamils and Sinhalese continued in the coming days in rural villages of the district with the poorest of both communities being displaced and rendered utterly helpless. However provocative the actions of the Tigers, they would have been exposed if the Government had been committed to enforcing the law.

Adding to the destabilisation of Trincomalee by the Tigers, ideologues with narrow communal agendas have gained dominance over security matters. For decades these forces had employed demographic gerrymandering to assert the alleged Sinhalese-Buddhist character of Trincomalee that they claim was being eclipsed by (Tamil and Muslim) interlopers.

This cause has been latent in all administrations from the 1960s, and was expressed very violently in the 1980s. It received new life recently as evidenced in the violence throughout Trincomalee District and the blatant and unchecked partisanship of the security forces since the murder of five Tamil students on 2nd January.

There is today a great deal of panic and indignation around, characterised by a refusal to consider how people from other communities or political affiliations see things, the context and the pressing dangers. Angry and pejorative epithets are flowing freely in the Press accompanying very one-sided reporting. These sentiments would sanction actions and impunity that have brought this country infamy in the past. Compelling arguments that seem to justify the use of killer groups to combat the LTTE (and earlier the JVP in the latter 1980s) come at the end of a series of political and moral failures, causing leaders to lose their judgment. Instead of taking initiatives towards nation building, the Government has remained unable to shed its ideological blinkers. Only then can it pay urgent attention to dismantling the accumulated institutionalisation of the effectively exclusive Sinhalese character of the state and its institutions, which brought half a century of instability and misery to this country.

The Government's initial lukewarm response to the recent communal violence in Trincomalee, failed to take to task officials of the security forces who failed in their duty. The Government remained silent as both the LTTE and vigilante elements of the State killed and stirred up communal tensions in rural Trincomalee that caused large scale displacement. Then for questionable reasons on 25th April, after the suicide attack in Colombo, it sanctioned aerial and missile attacks that were bound to kill Tamil civilians in the Sampur area across the bay from Trincomalee. Aerial bombardment and killing of soft targets in the Tamil community as the means of responding to the LTTE's terror is a sign of impotency on the part of the State, and indicates an inability on the part of its strategists to come up with creative political and military options.

Off the record claims or excuses by leading persons in the Government that the missile attacks on targets in Sampur were a necessary response to the LTTE's suicide attack on the Army Commander to prevent communal riots, were both contrary to experience, and a further signal that decision makers were not in their right senses.

The attack around Sampur finally left 13 Tamil civilians dead, a two year old child Meiyan Kishanthan and several women among them. Among the 4 Muslims killed were Moulavi Junaideen, his wife and sister. About 40 civilians were seriously injured. These did not seem to bother the Government and media. What did intensely was whether the actual number displaced was about 10,000 rather than 40,000 as originally estimated by some news sources. Matters were made worse by the Tamils injured in the LTTE-controlled area being cut off and denied help, despite the Navy, rightly, transporting the Muslim injured to Trincomalee.

In this environment the LTTE was well geared to harness the fears of the Tamils and the international press to display the Tamil people as victims of a hostile state. Given the constraints of reporting, factual discrepancies concerning any humanitarian disaster are to be expected. But what is crucial for the Government is to ask itself if current measures are the only options left to it at this juncture. The LTTE is on a well-tested strategy to further delegitimise the state in the eyes of the Tamil people. 23 years ago, on the eve of the July 1983 violence, a former president too said that he could no longer take into account the Tamils, their opinion or their well being, and must first do what it takes to defeat terrorism. Are we going to be stuck in the same groove, refusing to learn from the past? These are the paramount questions the President and his advisors need to address.

But, instead, President Mahinda Rajapaksa went on record at an all-party conference implicitly attacking the international media of having launched a media war.

These sentiments were eloquently reflected by sections of the local media. The vast gap between indignant denunciations by the Government and local media, and perceptions of the foreign media are disturbingly reflective of mid-1983. Blaming outside elements for the all the ills and refusing to look inward has been the bane of this country. Legitimate and necessary criticism of external actors is meaningless when the State repeatedly fails to represent significant cross sections of its own people and to check abuses by its agents.

1.1 Behind the Provocations

The LTTE suicide bomb attack on 25th April which injured the Army Commander and killed nine others brought forth a flood of indignation and statements of condemnation from powerful governments. It came in a sequence of violent incidents..

Two days earlier, the LTTE had massacred 6 Sinhalese farmers in Gomarankadawela in the Kattukulampattu West division of Trincomalee District. Like many other incidents, this too was represented as one in a series of provocations and responses. Whether it is provocation by the Government and response by the LTTE or vice versa is one of those partisan questions doing the rounds. The LTTE through a front organisation, the Resurgence Front, has claimed that it was a response for the murder of 5 Tamil students by the security forces on 2nd January. This is one instance that makes clear the meaninglessness of provocation and response where the LTTE is concerned.

The villagers of Gomarankadawela, a rural area well outside the city, had traditionally, for over a century, been well disposed to the Tamil people and had nothing to do with the killing of the students. Moreover, when the tsunami disaster struck, the villagers were among those Sinhalese who hastened to the aid of the Tamil victims after the generous spirit of bygone times.

For the LTTE it has long been a matter of provocation after provocation, targeting security personnel with landmines or killing Sinhalese, purely with the intention of plunging Sri Lanka into communal violence the only way they see of attaining their agenda of Tamil Eelam. This has long been clear to those who know the LTTE intimately, despite the elitist rhetoric about the LTTE alone helping the Tamils to hold their heads high.

A further instance of the LTTE's cynicism about avenging Tamil deaths surfaced ironically in Trincomalee on 1st May. At 9.40 a. m. a Navy vehicle went along Vidyalayam Rd. to give breakfast parcels to colleagues who were at the junction with Huskisson Road, a crowded Tamil residential area in Trincomalee. Shortly after the vehicle turned back, an LTTE bomb attached to a parked bicycle exploded. A professional lady who thought the roof of her house was collapsing, ran to her gate.

She found her neighbours Mrs. Chitra Thurainayagam, her daughter Vanitha, a nurse, and young son Thlasithasan lying dead along with the driver of the auto rickshaw in which they had just come home from Pillayar Kovil. The windscreen wiper of the auto was working. Mrs. Thurainayagam was folded in two due to the impact of the blast, which also killed a navy man.

The President of Sri Lanka, and even the leaders of the JVP and JHU did some of the right things after the attack on the Army Commander in appealing to the people to remain calm and not to harm the Tamils in their midst. It appeared that the Government had won the diplomatic battle and occupied the high moral ground. The media reflected new confidence. Reporting that had earlier been cautious about blaming the LTTE for killings and readily used 'unknown persons' or 'paramilitaries', were quite reckless in accusing the LTTE, including of things they did not do. There was almost one-sided blame of the LTTE for the ongoing violence, and expressions like barbarism used for its violence alone.