Foreign Monitors Investigate Killings of 13 Tamils In Sri Lanka

The New York Times

May 16, 2006

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

NEW DELHI, May 15 — In the worsening conflict in Sri Lanka, truce monitors said Monday that they were investigating the killings of 13 Tamils near the northern Jaffna Peninsula over the weekend. Tamil rebels accused the Sri Lankan Navy of "slaughter." The government blamed the rebels.

"We can't say who's clearly responsible for the killings, as there are still many questions on who may have been behind it," said Helen Olafsdottir, spokeswoman for the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission. Two children, including an infant, were among those shot dead on Saturday in Kayts, an islet controlled by the Sri Lankan Navy.

The latest accusations follow the presentation to the government by the monitors, led by the Nordic countries, of a dossier of seven earlier cases in which security forces may have been involved in what the mission called extrajudicial killings.

The government has not responded publicly to the report. But in a stern statement last week, its chief negotiator in stalled cease-fire talks, Nimal Siripala de Silva, said it "condemns all forms of reprisal attacks against innocent civilians."

The monitoring mission's dossier revives the chilling specter of Sri Lanka's past. By the late 1980's, during the peak years of its 20-year conflict over the grievances of the Tamil ethnic minority against a government long dominated by the majority Sinhalese, Sri Lanka had become infamous for government-backed death squads, disappearances and unsolved killings.

Reports of disappearances and unsolved killings greatly diminished after a cease-fire was signed by the government and the main rebel group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, in February 2002. But in recent months, with near daily clashes between the military and the rebels and a swift escalation of distrust between the warring parties, little seems to be left of the cease-fire.

Neither side has officially broken off the accord. Then again, neither side has taken responsibility for the grisly killings either. Such abnegation of responsibility has been a hallmark of the conflict in Sri Lanka.

In an interview last week in his office in the capital, Colombo, Ulf Henricsson, the retired Swedish major general who commands the monitoring force, said it had received reports of killings in which the police or soldiers could be implicated, taking pains to note that it was not the job of his mission to investigate individual killings, but to present the information to the proper authorities.

The seven recent cases were all in government-controlled areas. In one case he cited as an example, the body of a girl who had been shot to death was found 100 yards from an army checkpoint in the country's north. The soldiers who staffed the checkpoint told the monitors that they had not seen or heard anything. The victim's family told the monitors that they had called the police, who never showed up.

"I don't know how the security forces are involved," General Henricsson said. "It could be individuals, it could be lower levels, it could be fundamentalist elements in the security forces." He said the police had promised to investigate.

At the moment, the monitoring mission's findings are not in the rebels' favor either. On Friday the rebels sent a letter to the monitors warning that if they were seen aboard ships and ferries carrying Sri Lankan troops, they, too, would be targets.

The warning came a day after a rebel boat blew up and sank a Sri Lankan Navy vessel. A ferry on which a Finnish truce monitor was accompanying navy sailors was nearby. The rebels accused the military of using the monitors as a shield. The monitors said the Tigers had no business in the waters, which the cease-fire clearly spells out as government-controlled.

On Sunday the mission announced that it would temporarily suspend monitoring activities at sea.

The European Union, long regarded in Sri Lanka as a confidant of the rebels, issued a stinging rebuke after the latest Tamil Tiger assault at sea. "The reckless behavior in the last days," the presidency of the European Union said in a statement, "can only contribute to a dangerous escalation that results in growing hostilities and jeopardizes any possibility for future peace talks."

The European Union is considering listing the Tamil Tigers as a banned terrorist organization in its member states, which would potentially restrict fund-raising among the Tamil diaspora in Europe.

In a report issued in March, a United Nations inquiry on extrajudicial killings criticized both sides.

"Endeavors to achieve peace which do not address human rights issues will fail, although the parties to the conflict do not appear to fully appreciate this reality," a special envoy, Philip Alston, said in the report, which was based on a weeklong visit to the country in December.

Shimali Senanayake contributed reporting from Colombo for this article.