"Staff (at Jaffna
General Hospital) told me they see many victims of army
beatings. Typically, boys emerge from interrogation and
spells in custody with multiple bruises caused by
thrashings with PVC pipes filled with sand. Some have
heel fractures, having been suspended and beaten on the
feet."
"A doctor said: 'I see about five of these cases
a week, but remember that many victims do not seek
treatment because they are afraid... The Army is
behaving atrociously. Troops think they have been sent
here to make us submit."
Recently one of the medical staff escaped with her
life when troops opened fire on two buses in Jaffna,
killing five people, the doctor said. And a man and his
ten year old son were shout out of hand on the street
last week..." (Trevor Fishlock reporting in the
London Times, 2 January 1985)
"We do feel... that the Tamil minority is under
threat. Certainly the Tamils, of all classes and
from all parts of the country, believe that to be the
case. Whilst we would not wish, at this stage, to lend
support to the view that there is a deliberate and
coordinated plan to reduce the rights and status of the
Tamils, there is little doubt that the sum total of
separate measures taken in respect, for example, of
university entrance and colonisation in the north and
east, amongst others, in fact, achieves such an
objective. We see no possible justification for such
measures... The consequence we saw was that of an
increasing alienation of all Tamils from the Sri Lankan
state." - Robert Kilroy-Silk, M.P. and Roger
Sims, M.P United Kingdom Parliamentary Human Rights
Group Report, February 1985
"...The President conceded that 'terrible things'
were happening in Sri Lanka. Asked if he would set up
an inquiry commission to go into the atrocities
committed by the army against the Tamils, he said: 'Did
the British appoint a commission during the war?..."
- President Jayawardene - interview with Kuldip
Nayar: Island, 17 February 1985
" The (Sri Lanka) Special Task Force of police
commandos was created last year and trained by British
experts who are former members of the (British) Special
Air Services (SAS)...
"....a 23 year old man described from his hospital
bed how he was arrested by police commandos (belonging
to the Special Task Force) and accused of being a
terrorist. He was tortured for two months before being
released without explanation and dumped at the local
hospital.
Mahendra Kesivapillai, a second year science
student from Jaffna University, told me nails were
driven into his heels to force him to confess. Chilli
powder was rubbed into sensitive parts of his body and
he was hung up by his handcuffed wrists for upto eight
hours a day in his prison cell...
Doctors at Batticaloa hospital, where
Kesivapillai has been a patient since last month, say
he has been subjected to unbelievable cruelty.There are
many burn marks, they say, on his buttocks and arms.
Two bones in his arms, the radius and the ulna, have
been so badly damaged after being ripped apart, he will
never recover the use of his arms.
...Kesivapillai thinks he was released because he
managed to smuggle out a letter to his father, a
retired teacher, telling him where he was...
Kesivapillai's horrifying experience is not the only
example of commando brutality according to the local
citizen's action committee. Prince Casinader,
headmaster of a Batticaloa school and chairman of the
action committee said there were other cases of young
men picked up by unmarked commando vans and taken to
unknown destinations.
Last month unable to trace three of his missing
school boys, he went in desperation to the local
mortuary. 'I saw three horribly mangled bodies with
bashed in skulls. I don't know who they were, poor
wretches, but they were not my boys.'
The commandos also use tactics that were first
made popular by the army... They burn the homes of
families harbouring suspected 'terrorists'. Last month
after a mine killed seven members of a police patrol
outside Batticaloa, commandos surrounded the three
nearby villages of Koduwannadu, Tamanavelli and
Kayankadu, where they set fire to 27 (Tamil)
homes.." (Shyam Bhatia reporting from Colombo in
the London Sunday Observer, 14 April 1985)
"It took me two days to come here (to Jaffna) from
Colombo, the capital, just 400 kilometres away...
Our Tamil bus conductor was beaten up by an army
officer who punched him repeatedly on each side of the
head, then kicked him in the shins with his heavey army
boots. The apparent reason for the beating was that
the bus was over crowded, although in fact it was the
least crowded bus I travelled on in Sri Lanka. A
diplomat in Colombo later suggested the real reason was
that the conductor had allowed me, a foreigner, on the
bus to Jaffna... I felt outraged as the conductor was
beaten, but didn't interfere, and everyone else seemed
to accept the beating as a routine event..."
"...The stories people have been telling me
explain the passiveness of the Tamil passengers. I was
told of innocent bus passengers being shot by soldiers,
of 1,000 young men arbitrarily arrested and held as
suspected terrorists in a detention camp near Galle on
the south shore, of a priest shot by soldiers near
Mannar on January 6, of a Methodist minister shot the
week before, of 100 youths who have disappeared..."
(Howard Adelman, Sri Lanka's Agony writing in
Refugee, Canada's Periodical on Refugees, May
1985)
