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The Guardian England Friday February 23 1990
Sri Lanka’s Opposition leade last night blamed the government for the murder of a foreign correspondent. Sirimavo Bandaranafke, of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, appealed to reporters not to be frightened or feel pressurised by the government.
Richard De Zoysa, a Sri Lankan who represented the Rome-based Inter-Press Service, was dragged from his Colombo home in the early hours of Sunday by armed men and driven away. His naked body was found floating in the sea two days later. He had been shot in the head and neck.
Mrs. Bandaranaike said the journalist had written a play called "Who Is He? What Is He Doing?"-- a reference to a ruling United National-Party slogan during the 1988 election campaign for President Ranasinghe Premadasa.
The producer, Lakshman Perera, has also been abducted by armed men and is missing feared dead.
Source: The Guardian England Friday February 23 1990
John Colmey - INTHESETIMES Vol 13 No.34 September 13-19 1989
The next morning, according to area residents, the Sri Lankan army brought 15 young men, suspected leftist insurgents, to the same spot. They lined the boys up around the crater left by the blast and shot them one by one in the back of the head; their bodies fell into the pit. The petrol threw tires and plastic utensils on the pile of corpses and set it ablaze. The smell of burning flesh filled the air for most of the morning.
One hundred and twenty miles south, in a small Sri Lankan village, 33 men and women including a local medicine man, gathered in the home of an ill man for a devil dance, a Sri lankan ritual to drive away evil spirits or illness. Shortly after midnight an army patrol surrounded the house. Those inside turned the lights off and huddled in fear. The patrol opened fire, killing 14 and wounding 19. The news paper reported that the dead were hard-core subversives. But according to survivors, those inside had no weapons.
These victims are just a few of the hundreds killed during the last three weeks in southern Sri Lanka. Travellers find bodies everywhere- washed up on the beaches, lying beside main roads, floating down the rivers.
"We hear the shots at night" said a young woman outside Kandy. "and find the dead bodies in the morning". In the past three months more civilians have been killed or reported missing - estimates range as high as 4,000 - than in the last nine months in Beirut. Human rights lawyers said another 10,000 are being held in hotels, universities and sports stadiums now being used as makeshift internment camps. Under state of emergency regulations in effect since June, suspects can be held indefinitely.
The dead are victims of a spiralling duet of death. It pits the Sri Lankan security forces, including government-supported hit squads, against the People’s Liberation Front, or JVP, a Marxist-inspired insurgency trying to topple the government. Human rights workers believe the government is pursuing an unofficial policy to eliminate an estimated 4,000 hard-core JVP members before the middle of the month. Last week Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa announced he would hold a peace conference on September 13 to end the crisis. Analysts say the current military operation is intended to force the insurgents to the conference.
……But on August 22nd the government announced a new campaign to eliminate the JVP. "We will pursue the JVP insurgents relentlessly". Deputy Minister of Defense Ranjan Wijeratne told the Parliament. "It’s inevitable that innocent people will be caught in the cross fire".
The Government operation now underway works something like a cluster bomb. If the security forces arrest 50 suspects, they presume at least 10 are JVP members. Thus, according to this logic, if they kill 10 people, they’re sure to have killed at least one JVP member.
Opinions here differ about the campaign’s effectiveness so far. One member of the Parliament said he thinks the forces have taken out 60 percent of the hard-core JVP members in his district. A student in close contact with the JVP said that only the lower-level members, runners and messengers are being hit and the rest are innocent bystanders. If the news reports are accurate, the number of small arms captured by the forces is increasing. And, as a Colombo professor said "With every gun goes a guerrilla".
One innocent person killed last week was human right lawyer Kanchana Abhayapala, the forth lawyer gunned down this year for filing habeas corpus applications. Death threats have also been issued to Prins Gunasekara, who is now hiding, as well as to a member of Parliament heading a special commission to investigate human rights and several others.
With the small team of human rights workers out of the way, the government has a free hand to complete the operation. The press is heavily censored to killings of suspected JVP members. Amnesty International is banned from Sri Lanka and appeals by the opposition to the United Nations’ Commission on Human Rights and Red Cross have so far gone unanswered.
Source: John Colmey - INTHESETIMES Vol 13 No.34 September 13-19 1989
SUN -1989 Sri Lankan News Paper
Industries Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe said that AI money had been used for terrorist activity including propaganda for the JVP.
Foreign Minister Ranjan Wijeratne yesterday sharply criticised Amenstly International (AI) and said that it was "another terrorist movement".
"You can say that I said" he told a Colombo news conference.
The minister who charged that there were terrorist sympathisers and terrorists in the AI said that it came in sheep’s clothing and did diabolical things to destabilise democratic governments.
Copyright © 1997 LankaWeb News
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