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IN the last week of May, a renowned physician in a well-known hospital in Colombo received a patient from Vavuniya, the volatile town in the Northern Province, with a swollen leg that needed surgery. After a successful operation, out of consideration for the patient, the doctor advised him to move to a cheaper place for the recuperation period. Much to his surprise, the patient insisted on remaining in the hospital despite the high room tariff. The patient reasoned: "Since I have come from Vavuniya, if I check into any hotel in the city, I will be a suspect in the eyes of the police and will be picked up for interrogation. It is safer to be in the hospital."The doctor volunteered the above information when this correspondent happened to meet him on May 30. The next day, documented local media reports, which the government has not contested, stated that at a meeting presided over by Defence Secretary Gothabaya Rajapaksa, who is President Mahinda Rajapaksa's brother, the police top brass decided to evict all Tamils hailing from the North and the East residing in lodges in the capital "without a valid reason" and pack them off to their places of permanent residence. On June 7, in an unprecedented move that virtually every quarter within and outside denounced as inhuman, unconstitutional and bordering on ethnic cleansing, 376 Tamils were packed off in buses to Vavuniya and Batticaloa in the name of national security. The authorities justified the evictions on the grounds that these lodges were the places where conspiracies were hatched for 90 per cent of the terrorism-related incidents in and around Colombo in the past few years. On June 8, in response to a fundamental rights application by the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), a Colombo-based think tank, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka passed an interim order asking the government to halt the evictions and not to prevent Tamils from entering and/or staying in any part of Colombo.
Wrongful
The petitioners argued that the evictions were wrongful and violated the fundamental rights guaranteed by Articles 12 (1), 12(2), 13(1), 13(2) and 14(1) (h) of the Constitution. Article 12 provides that all citizens are equal before the law and Article 14(h) provides for the freedom of movement and gives a person the right to choose his residence within Sri Lanka.
Quoting local media reports, the petition contended that in the early hours of the morning, police and Army officers visited various lodges occupied predominantly by Tamils and removed them forcibly. "It was reported that people were given less than half an hour to pack their belongings and board buses. Newspaper reports also raised the issue as to what the police considered as being a valid reason, given that a patient undergoing treatment and a woman who was to be married in a few days in Colombo were among those evicted," the petition stated.
Welcoming the interim order, the CPA said the evictions targeted a minority group that faced multiple security threats in the North and the East. "Forcibly evicting them from Colombo and transporting them back to areas in the North and the East, not only raises [the issue of] serious breaches of human rights, but further polarises the ethnic communities and marginalises the Tamil people of Sri Lanka," it said.
Hours after the eviction, Parliament erupted in chaos as members of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), a party that supports the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), demanded a debate over the issue. Suresh Premachandran, the member from Jaffna district, threatened to quit Parliament if the expulsions were not stopped. Opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe of the United National Party (UNP) compared the government's treatment of Tamils with the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), considered as ultra-nationalist, described the action as "high-handed and foolish".
Stung by the court order and the national and international outrage, President Rajapaksa directed Inspector-General of Police Victor Perera to submit immediately a report "on the manner in which the exercise to transport Tamil persons living in lodges in Colombo and its suburbs to their places of permanent residence in the North and the East was carried out and about reports regarding hardships and inconvenience caused to the persons concerned".
Meanwhile, a report, titled "`Forceful eviction of lodgers' - a deliberate misinterpretation of the truth - IGP", posted on the Defence Ministry website (www.defence.lk) said the IGP had rejected the "allegations" of forcible eviction of Tamils.
"No such evidence"
He had argued that those making these charges "have either misunderstood the process or [are] deliberately misinterpreting the truth". "The IGP further said that he had summoned all the inspectors in charge of Colombo police stations and inquired into the matter; but found no evidence on such forceful expulsion," the report said.
"The government on Thursday (07th) provided safe transportation to 376 people out of over 20,000 Tamil lodgers living in Colombo to their homes in North and East. The IGP explained that these people had expressed consent to go home if free transportation was provided. Some lodgers have indicated that they would have to pocket out at least Sri Lanka Rs.15,000 as transport cost for them and for their belongings," the report said.
The report on the Defence Ministry website, which is under the charge of the Defence Secretary, said the "police taking similar security measures to reduce potential terrorist threats to a country's capital is nothing uncommon or unusual for any country. Particularly, after the two bomb attacks at Pettah and Rathmalana that killed seven innocent civilians and three security forces personnel, no government can be expected to further delay stringent defensive action against terrorism."
The IGP said that under the Public Security Ordinance the police had the authority to arrest any person who could not prove his/her identity. "Earlier, the police have conducted many search-and-arrest operations without harassing any of the Tamil civilians permanently living in Colombo. The suspects were detained and questioned at Boossa camp and those who were found innocent were later released," the report quoted the IGP as saying.
Most Tamils in these low-budget lodges have either escaped from the clutches of the Tigers in the North and the East or are there for medical, educational or employment reasons.
Confirmation of the identity of most of the victims came from the government itself on June 10. The Media Centre for National Security (MCNS), a Sri Lanka government outfit that disseminates news about defence-related issues (http://www.nationalsecurity.lk), said in a report that people arriving from the North and the East lived "in appalling conditions" in lodges in Colombo.
A series of pictures alongside "captured the condition of some of the lodges in Pettah and Kotahena". It included views of rooms and toilet facilities.
The report quoted K.C. Lechchimi of Ratnapura in the south as saying: "The Army comes quite often around 4-30 a.m. in the morning and check IDs and bags. The police also come and check the records in the lodge. They ask what we are doing in Colombo. They say the LTTE is all over and bombs are exploding in Colombo. So they have to check. "I think they have to do their duty. They check us quite often. They are doing that to ensure the security of everybody. There is no problem for us.
"It's more than four days coming to Colombo. I returned from Saudi recently and I am in Colombo to collect my luggage. Many people from the North and the East come to Colombo to find jobs and for other matters like obtaining passports, national identification cards and birth certificates. Some come to Colombo with the hope of going abroad. Some have problems in the North and the East. They come here to protect their children."
In a damage-limitation exercise, Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremenayake, on June 10, atoned partially for the "big mistake" of his regime by an expression of unqualified regret and an assurance that it would never recur. But less than 48 hours later the Defence Secretary not only defended `operation eviction' but also suggested that the 376 evictees should be happy that they were not behind bars.
"Bullying by the West"
In a rare, combined interview to Reuters and the BBC, a defiant Gothabaya Rajapaksa complained of Western countries bullying Sri Lanka over human rights. He accused foreign powers of applying double standards when it came to human rights violations and said all measures were fair to defeat "terrorists".
He said: "Without understanding the problem, they are trying to bully us, and we won't be isolated. We have all the SAARC [South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation] countries, the Asian countries... . Britain or Western countries, E.U. [European Union] countries, they can do whatever. We don't depend on them."
He added: "It is a good example where the whole world was misled... . Everyone knows the LTTE is infiltrating... We can't arrest 300 people and detain them. What is the best option? So you can tell them, if you don't have any legal business in Colombo... we don't want to detain you, you go back to your homes. In fact this operation was much better. We could have put all of them in detention."
"When the US does operations, they say covert operations. When something is [done] in Sri Lanka, they call it abductions," Rajapaksa said. "This is playing with the words." He complained that British Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells, who visited the island on May 11, was "completely misinformed". "Howells did not talk a single word against the LTTE, a single word against terrorism," Rajapaksa said. "They are threatening isolation, they are stopping aid. They want us to suffer," he added. "When America is attacked... every country [calls it] war against terrorism, but why are the terrorists being treated in a different way in Sri Lanka? Is Britain talking about isolating America?"
"For 30 years or so, the LTTE planned this, they infiltrated the UN," the Defence Secretary told the two foreign correspondents. "The problem is the UN organisations, they took a lot of locals [on]."
Coming close on the heels of an unsatisfactory set of proposals by the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) for the resolution of the ethnic strife and serious human rights concerns, the government's ill-conceived eviction move and its military-centric approach raise disturbing questions. The move is oxygen to the Tigers' propaganda that Tamils have no place in Colombo and that a separate state consisting of the North and the East is the only alternative.
It is time the government reworked its strategy in the fight against LTTE terror and approach to a resolution of the ethnic question.
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