"Disappearances" on rise in Sri Lanka's dirty war

COLOMBO, Sep 14: ''Disappearances'' have risen along with fighting in Sri Lanka's two-decade civil war, an international human rights group said, blaming the military for kidnapping many innocent civilians in unmarked white vans.
While human rights groups also accuse Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of kidnapping and killing civilians, as well as forcibly recruiting young people, the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) said this did not excuse the government.

''In Sri Lanka a white van without a number plate is a symbol of terror and disappearances that have occurred in all parts of the country,'' it said in a statement. ''Now such vans have reappeared and do so frequently in the Jaffna peninsula.'' People are disappearing almost every day in the besieged government-held town of Jaffna, still scarred by years of past shelling and cut off behind rebel lines in the island's far north, residents say. Few reappear alive.

AHRC said forced disappearances were seen by the state ''as a legitimate means by which to deal with terrorism,'' and said there was a culture of impunity.

''The failure to investigate and to take appropriate legal action is also evidence of the state's involvement in such matters,'' it said.

Last week Sri Lanka President Mahinda Rajapakse said he would invite ''an international group of eminent persons'' to Sri Lanka to act as observers of the government's investigations into alleged abductions, disappearances and extrajudicial killings.

''The decision ... is reflective of the government's commitment to fully investigate such allegations and bring the perpetrators to justice,'' the president's office said.

''It is also a response to attempts at discrediting the government of Sri Lanka, the security forces and the police with regard to human rights violations, and allegations of lack of adequate investigation into such violations.'' President gesture comes in the wake of international outrage at the murder of 17 local staff of foreign group Action Contre La Faim in the island's east -- killings Nordic truce monitors have blamed on government troops.

HUMAN RIGHTS TRAINING

Army spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe said anyone arrested by the military was immediately handed over to the police. But some aid workers and diplomats believe the government is intent on covering up abuses. ''We are training our people in human rights,'' Samarasinghe said. ''If we find anybody from the security forces has committed (human rights abuses), then they would be court-martialled and punished.'' AHRC Director Basil Fernando welcomed the president's move, but said he feared observers would not have enough influence to ensure credible investigations.

''This may be one more gesture which doesn't really address the problem,'' he told Reuters, calling for the United Nations to open a human rights monitoring mission in Sri Lanka as they did in Nepal last year.

''The fear of the white van is killing everyone (with fear) in the peninsula,'' AHRC quoted one family as saying.

In Jaffna, families of the missing said the occupants of the vans had been recently identifying themselves as members of a breakaway faction of the LTTE believed to be backed by the army.

The National Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka has recorded 419 missing people in Jaffna since December 2005, the AHRC said.

Mr Fernando said AHRC had the names of 16,000 people who disappeared in Sri Lanka at the height of the civil war in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and had published them on its Web site www.disappearances.org.

REUTERS