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  INDICTMENT AGAINST SRI LANKA
The Charge is Ethnic Cleansing
TAMIL RESISTANCE MET WITH
STATE TERRORISM - 1979
"No one shall be subjected to torture
or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or
punishment" - Article 5, Universal Declaration of Human
Rights
[see also
Jayawardene's Mandate for Tamil Genocide - Satchi
Ponnambalam]
 "On the 11th of July
1979.. President Jayawardene appointed his nephew
Brigadier Weeratunga, as commander of the security forces
in Jaffna... On the same day, a state of emergency was
declared in Jaffna, and a Public Security Ordinance gave
the police and armed forces the power to dispose of dead
bodies without an inquest.
On the night of the 14th of July, six Tamil youths
were taken from their homes - three were never seen
again. The mutilated bodies of two others were found
the next day, and the sixth youth died later in Jaffna
prison hospital. By this time a Prevention of Terrorism
Act had been brought into operation...
This Act has been roundly condemned by Amnesty
International and the International Commission of Jurists
as a gross violation of human rights and an incitement to
torture. The state of emergency which Brigadier
Weeratunga supervised for six months in the North gave
Amnesty and the ICJ ample evidence for this
assessment.
During this period, the security forces - most of whom
did not speak the language of the people of the North,
and had been taught to look upon them as enemies who must
be subjugated at all costs - rounded up and tortured
Tamil youths. Houses were entered and searched,
relatives were taken into custody until wanted men
surrendered.
Villages were surrounded and the inhabitants flushed out
and interrogated. Frequent 'stop and search' operations
were carried on cars and buses. People who had absolutely
nothing to do with any type of political activity, much
less 'terrorism', were tortured with burning cigarettes,
with chilli powder and red ants applied to sensitive
parts of their bodies, by being hung upside down by their
feet, or suspended by their wrists, by having pins driven
into their toes and fingers, by being deprived of food
and sleep, and by being beaten repeatedly...
By the time the emergency was lifted in December 1979,
hundreds of people, mostly young men, had been through
the hands of the security forces. Many were radicalised
by this direct application of state power, and sought for
the first time to work for Eelam..." - Nancy Murray,
the State against the Tamils in Sri Lanka - Racism and
the Authoritarian State - Race & Class , Summer
1984
''In the period immediately after the emergency
declaration (in July 1979) a pattern of arbitrary
arrest and detention existed and torture was used
systematically... Six young men, reported arrested in
the days after the emergency declaration, died in the
custody of the police after having been tortured and
the bodies of three of them have still not been
found.
When the Emergency was declared, the President had
instructed the Commander of the Security Forces in the
Jaffna District to carry out his mandate before 31
December 1979...
In a subsequent letter to the President, Amnesty
International... said it had recently received
testimonies which indicated that serious violations of
the right of freedom from torture and from arbitrary
arrest, detention and punishment - rights also
guaranteed in the Sri Lankan Constitution - had
occurred in the months after the emergency
declaration...
Various methods of torture have been used by both the
police and the army in the period immediately after the
emergency declaration, including suspending people
upside down by the toes whilst placing their head in a
bag with suffocating fumes of burning chillies,
prolonged and severe beatings, insertion of pins in the
finger tips and the application of broken chillies and
biting ants to sensitive parts of the body and threats
of execution. After these and other methods of torture
had been applied, statements were extracted and
recorded'' - Amnesty International Report,
1980
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