DEATH IN THE SUNSHINE
Jeremy Gavron reports from
Sri Lanka, where there is fear on all sides
Sri Lanka THERE is something particularly brutal about killings in a beautiful land. In Sri Lanka, where the products of each Murderous night are dumped by the road- sides for the morning's viewing, this is expecially true. Every dawn reveals 20, 30 or 40 human corpses in villages throughout the south: crumpled, brown bodies against the lush, green paddies, shimmering palm trees and white, half-moon beaches.
This Prospero's isle — still in many ways full of sounds and sweet airs — is rapidly falling into the hands of the Calibans. The Janatha Vimukti Peramuna, the secretive Marxist-turned-Sinhalese extremist move- ment, known by its now chilling initials, JVP, has killed at least 2,000 government supporters and officials this year. Govern- ment death squads, with names like Green Tigers — after the colour of the ruling United National Party — and Black Cats, have probably accounted for even greater numbers of suspected JVPers.
Most of the victims are dragged from their homes at night, tortured and then shot in the back of the head. Sometimes the JVP leaves orders that the body not be buried. If the family disobeys, the corpse is dug up and decapitated. The Green Tigers, on the other hand, have taken to setting their victims on fire with petrol-filled tyres; in Soweto, this is called necklacing; here it is known as the 'pyre of tyres'. The continued presence of more than 40,000 Indian troops in the north of the island — and especially an incident in which Indian soldiers reportedly massacred 50 Sri Lankan villagers earlier this month — has stoked the flames of violence. The second anniversary on 29 July of the Indo-Lankan accord, which brought Indian forces to the island in 1987, provoked fierce confrontation between Sir Lankan security forces and Sinhalese protesters. More than 200 people were killed in a dozen different towns when the army and police fired to disperse mobs, some of them shot down in bursts of bullets from a helicopter gunship.
Dismissing the current round of talks between Colombo and New Delhi on the withdrawal of the Indian soldiers the JVP has stepped up its killings to unprecen- dented levels. Three senior television per- sonalities, accused of bias, have been among hundreds of government supporters killed this month. And the government death squads have reached new depths of depravity. In the southern town of Galle, severed human limbs have recently been appearing beneath posters warning, 'this is what happens to subversives.'
In the golden light of day, as I disco- vered on a recent drive along the south coast, Sri Lanka can give the appearance of a bustling, colourful normality. I drove south from Colombo along the old Galle road, dodging the thunderous buses and heavy trucks that are almost as much a danger to life as the JVP. Despite the troubles, this is still a glorious tourist spot — not one foreigner has yet been injured.
But this veneer of ordinariness is fright- eningly thin, the pattern of any day easily destroyed. At any time, the JVP could call a stay-at-home. At any hour, the Green Tigers might knock on your door. Whether Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim, Sri Lankans are a fatalistic lot and there are days when they seem to have come to terms with the fear and killings. One wise, sad Sri Lankan friend laments that his daughter has made a game of adding up the numbers of dead announced on the television each night.
It is easy to grow hardened, like this, and it sometimes takes a sudden jolt to make one see how deeply upset Sri Lankan society has become. On a previous trip into the south of the island, last December, I had already visited by late afternoon a family who had watched two sons killed the night before, and a crossroads where eight corpses had been dumped. Driving back to Colombo, I was stopped by a funeral gathering. Eight coffins, two child-sized, burned side by side. Learning I was a journalist, a young man took me aside to tell me his tale.
He was now the only living member of his family. Two mornings earlier, he had returned home to find the house in ruins and to discover, one by one, his dead parents, brother, sister-in-law, sisters and two nieces. All had been slashed to death with knives. He showed me blood spat- tered against the walls and a window. Clambering through the house, half re- duced to rubble by the fire lit by the killers, he pointed out where each of his family had slept, and died. It was all very matter- of-fact until he came to where his own bedroom had been. 'I slept there,' he said. 'I have my set of National Geographics. Complete set since 1977.' Gently, he began to cry, and I suddenly saw the horror.
Even in the few months since then, the mood in Sri Lanka has appreciably dar- kened. Fear now percolates all layers of society. What is uniquely awful in Sri Lanka is that no one is safe. Well-armed and highly efficient death squads are run by both the government and the JVP. In July, JVP assassins shot Thevis Guruge, the head of the Sri Lankan Broadcasting Corporation, on his morning walk in his smart Colombo neighbourhood. A week or so earlier, a young lawyer, Charitha Lankapura, who had filed many habeas corpus applications for suspected JVP sympathisers picked up by the security forces, was killed.
Amnesty International has protested at the killing of Lankapura, but there is little it can do. Human rights are crumbling in Sri Lanka. Thousands of young men have been picked up by the army or police driving cars with no number plates, and have not been seen since. I visited a small human rights centre, off the Galle road about 80 miles south of Colombo. This is where wives and mothers come when their men disappear. Below a poster celebrating last year's 40th anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the names of the missing are handwritten into school notebooks. It is a deed for which the workers in the centre risk their life: a brave chronicling of the island's bloody decline.
Until last month, Lankapura used to come to the centre every fortnight and collect the names. His law firm, run by the distinguished, 64-year-old Prins Guna- sekara, files two or three habeas corpus applications every day. Perhaps one in a hundred leads to a young man's release. Lankapura was the third of the firm's junior lawyers shot dead in the past year. Gunasekara himself is now under threat. The night his colleague died, he received a telephone call: 'We have killed Lankapura. Hereafter if you appear for one single habeas corpus application for JVPers you will be killed. Remember, one single habeas corpus application. This is the final warning we are giving you.'
Jeremy Gavron is South Asia correspond- ent of the Daily Telegraph.
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