Ethnic violence surges in Sri Lanka

PESALAI, Sri Lanka – Nearly everyone in this seaside hamlet – the old women bent from a lifetime of toil, the fishermen weathered from days at sea, the children in tattered hand-me-downs – fled to the church Sunday as soon as they heard a police patrol was coming.

“I thought they were going to come to shoot us all,” said L.R. Peiris, a 58-year-old woman crying hysterically at the thought of government forces returning a day after five villagers were killed by Sri Lankan troops.

Like nearly everyone else in Pesalai, all the dead were Tamils, a minority on this South Asian island nation dominated by Sinhalese.

Five deaths are unexceptional these days in a land of seemingly endless ethnic conflict, a land where the use of suicide bombers was pioneered by the insurgents of the Tamil Tiger movement.

With violence again surging, the rebels have grabbed headlines for targeting civilians – they allegedly staged their bloodiest attack in years Thursday, detonating land mines next to a packed bus and killing 64 people.

Saturday’s killings, however, put a rare spotlight on what critics charge is the brutal treatment meted out to Tamil civilians by security forces of the Sinhalese-dominated government, despite official denials.

“There is new phase here of both sides targeting civilians,” said Jehan Perera of the independent National Peace Council. “The government is now following a strategy of an eye-for-an-eye.”

War is once again on the horizon in Sri Lanka, where four years of relative calm didn’t wash away memories of bitter ethnic conflict that killed more than 65,000 people over the two decades before the 2002 cease-fire.

Discrimination against the 3.2 million Tamils, most of whom are Hindu, led the Tigers to take up arms in 1983 in hopes of creating a Tamil homeland. The spark was anti-Tamil riots by Sinhalese, mostly Buddhists who make up nearly three-quarters of the island’s 19 million people.

Talks to build on the truce faltered, and in the past year sporadic shootings and bombings have escalated into near-daily violence.

Since April, nearly 700 people, more than half of them civilians, have been killed, according to a cease-fire monitoring mission from Nordic nations.

Violence continued Sunday when an explosion killed three policemen in the northern district of Vavuniya, police said, blaming the rebels.

Officials blame nearly all civilian deaths on the rebels, and Saturday’s killings in Pesalai were no different. Cmdr. D.K.P. Dassanayake, a navy spokesman, said the deaths occurred when rebels attacked a police station in the hamlet. “We do not target civilians,” he said.

Witnesses and international aid workers told a very different story.

“We were packed into the church and all we heard was guns firing right outside,” said V.P. Cruz, a 28-year-old fisherman, snapping his fingers rapidly as he spoke of the gunfire.

He and numerous others said government forces – a mix of army and navy troopers – then tossed a grenade into the church, killing an elderly woman. Four fishermen were seen shot dead near the boats that line the beach, more than two dozen of which were burned.

The belief in Pesalai is they were killed for being Tamils.

“To the government, we are all” rebels, said Cruz, standing in the shadow of the impressive church, its four-story steeple towering over swaying coconut palms and dwarfing tin- and tiled-roofed homes.