Specter of Kidnappings Returns to Torment Sri Lanka

by Somini Sengupta, The New York Times, October 31, 2006

Like a revisiting ghost, a rash of mysterious abductions have come to haunt Sri Lanka once more.

Men and women are being snatched from their homes, sometimes after dark, sometimes in broad daylight. Ransom is demanded in some cases. In others, political intimidation seems to be the point. A few have been freed, but corpses have also turned up. With rare exceptions, the crimes remain unsolved. They are among the most terrifying sideshows in Sri Lanka's ever more terrifying ethnic conflict.

It is difficult to know who is responsible and exactly how many people have been seized. The International Committee of the Red Cross says it has received more than 350 reports so far this year of people who have disappeared. The Sri Lankan National Human Rights Commission logged 419 such complaints from last December to September. A private advocacy group, Home for Human Rights, has documented 203 cases of missing people in the first nine months of this year, using newspaper clippings and other reports. It lists another 965 victims of extrajudicial killings, some of whom may also have been abducted.

The victims come from all walks of life. A popular Tamil-language radio reporter says he was packed into a white van one early morning in August just outside his house. A trader at the fish market was also bundled into a white van as he returned home from work in September.

The latest abductions echo the terror of years ago. In the late 1980s, Sri Lanka suffered tens of thousands of disappearances. Many are still unaccounted for.

For the most part, the latest victims have been Tamil, the country's main ethnic minority, and many of the abductions have been carried out in government-held territory - sometimes in the heart of this highly fortified capital, at other times, in towns in Sri Lanka's north and east, close to Sri Lankan military installations.

The white van appears repeatedly in the recollections of the victims. Some have won release only after their families appealed to the highest echelons of the state. The kidnappings have brought a new cloud over the administration of President Mahinda Rajapakse of Sri Lanka.

The United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour, in September said there was an "urgent need" for foreign monitors to investigate rights abuses in this country.

For nearly a quarter of a century, the Sri Lankan state, dominated by the majority ethnic Sinhalese, has been locked in battle with the ethnic separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, known as the Tamil Tigers.

Lately, a third party has complicated the conflict: a rival rebel faction, which the Tamil Tigers allege to be operating with government support. The government rejects the charge.

That breakaway faction, known as the Karuna group, has surfaced repeatedly in the testimony of the kidnapped. So has the political nature of some abductions, even in cases where the kidnappers' identities are hard to pin down.

Nadaraja Kuruparan, the Tamil-language radio reporter, said he was not asked for a single rupee after he was yanked from his car early one morning in August. He was held overnight at what appeared to be a private house, he said, and told that he would have to "clarify" some of his reports. He was released near Colombo the following day and given taxi money to return home.

His station has appealed to the government to investigate his kidnapping. The government had previously warned the station about Kuruparan's popular talk show, on which he had interviewed a Tamil Tiger leader earlier this year. Since his kidnapping, the talk show has gone off the air.

Faced with calls for international monitors, the president has offered a counterproposal: a Sri Lankan commission, aided by international observers, to look into human rights cases. But questions linger about whether this proposed panel would meet international standards, including whether the government would be obliged to follow the commission's recommendations. The government is currently consulting with Arbour's office on the commission's mandate.

The human rights record of the Tamil Tigers has hardly been exempt from scrutiny. They have been repeatedly accused of abductions, including of children whom they draft into military service. The rebels are also implicated in a rash of assassinations over the past year, in particular targeting ethnic Tamils who work with the state. There seems to be little consensus within the Sri Lankan government on who is behind the latest abductions, let alone what to do about them.

A senior adviser to the president, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said references to white vans were false, exaggerated and designed to embarrass the government. White vans are an iconic symbol of the late 1980s, when Sri Lanka experienced a wave of abductions as its government fought a violent insurrection of leftist groups in the ethnic Sinhalese-dominated south.

The defense secretary, Gotabaya Rajapakse, who is the president's brother, said this week that "lots of people" had been apprehended in connection to the abductions. He did not have details on how many or in what period of time they were caught.

But his claim was flatly contradicted by a retired judge whom the president has appointed to look into the abductions. The judge, Mahanama Tilakaratne, said the police had made virtually no arrests. He also said he believed many of the recent abductions were the result of personal grudges and had little to do with the conflict.

Shimali Senanayake contributed reporting from Colombo.

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