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Lankan govt pulled up for human rights violations

A law-maker accused the Sri Lankan government today of jailing hundreds of ethnic Tamils without trial for as long as five years while 200 Tamil prisoners continued a hunger strike demanding that they be released.

There are over 1,000 Tamil detainees still in prisons, detention camps and police stations for years without their cases being investigated, or they being released if there are no charges, said Joseph Pararajasingham. Of these, about 300 detainees have been incarcerated for the past four to five years, Pararajasingham a member of the moderate Tamil United Liberation Front wrote in a letter to Justice Minister Lakshman Peiris.

Soldiers and police detain hundreds of young Tamils every week, in the war-torn northeast and in the capital, while hunting for Tamil guerrillas who have been fighting for 14 years to carve out a homeland for the Indian Ocean island's minority.

Most of them are freed when relatives visit police stations and vouch for the prisoners's identities. Those suspected as rebels are sent to overcrowded prisons until detectives probe their cases.

There was no immediate response from the government to the law-makers's letter.

On Thursday, Amnesty International accused the Sri Lankan military of killing nearly all 600 people reported missing after their arrest in northern Sri Lanka during the past 18 months. But the foreign ministry dismissed the Amnesty report as unbalanced.

"Nearly all have died as a result of torture or been deliberately killed in detention,'' the human rights group said. A team of Amnesty investigators visited northern Sri Lanka recently, the main battleground in the 14-year war pitting government troops against ethnic Tamil separatists.

Amnesty also accused the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, recently branded a terrorist group by the US government, of indiscriminately killing civilians when they attack military checkpoints or patrols, and of summarily executing suspected informants.

The government has pledged to improve its human rights record. In September, officials allowed a United Nations team into Jaffna, which has been under army control since troops wrested it from rebels two years ago, to assess the army's treatment of civilians. The UN report has not been made public yet.

More than 50,000 people have been killed in Sri Lanka's civil war.

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