‘Society Crumbling’ Amid Fear and Bloodshed in Sri Lanka

The gruesome remains smoldered outside the tea shop for more than 12 hours before finally being removed by police. It was the body of a young man with a gasoline-soaked truck tire bound to his chest and set ablaze.

The flaming body was dumped along Sri Lanka’s main coastal road for all to see, as a message from the nation’s security forces, the old man who runs the tea shop explained, adding that to give his name would be to risk his life.

The message: Don’t fight us, or you will be next.

It was not the only such message along the palm-lined road this week. A few miles to the north, three similarly bound bodies also smoldered in the summer sun, symbols of the violence that is driving this Indian Ocean island nation to economic and political ruin.

As Sri Lanka faces a deepening confrontation with India in a desperate effort to put down an ethnic insurgency in the island’s northern region, an even bloodier counterinsurgency continues to consume the government in the south.

In the last six weeks alone, at least 1,500 people have been shot, beheaded or tortured to death. An estimated 10,000 have been jailed since President Ranasinghe Premadasa declared a state of emergency last month to crack down on the leftist counterinsurgency.

“Everywhere you look, everywhere you go, there is this fear psychosis,” a Sri Lankan diplomat said. “A tiny rumor paralyzes Colombo (the capital) for an entire day or more. And everywhere, you hear the same thing: ‘There is no future here.’ ”

In the words of another diplomat: “The country really is falling apart. It’s a society that’s crumbling.”

Lines at Embassies

Soldiers carrying automatic rifles are seen everywhere on city streets, country roads and village lanes. Lines of people trying to get out of the country form daily at the U.S. and European embassies, and the visa seekers tell horror stories of being wounded or threatened.

The most immediate crisis in a nation once so idyllic that Mark Twain dubbed it “Serendip” is in the north, where the six-year-old war with armed members of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority has divided the island in two.

Premadasa, in a fit of anger and frustration, last month demanded that India withdraw its 50,000 troops from the northern third of the island. They constitute a “peacekeeping force” that Premadasa’s predecessor allowed into Sri Lanka in a desperate effort to end the Tamil struggle for a separate homeland.

Premadasa set this Saturday as the deadline for the withdrawal, which he believes is crucial to putting down the potentially more devastating counterinsurgency by the majority Sinhalese in the south--a guerrilla war that has been fueled in part by India’s military presence in the north.

Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi has flatly refused to pull out. Gandhi, who is facing an election this year and hopes to win the support of the 60 million Tamils in India, insists that if the troops withdraw, Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese-dominated security forces will slaughter the island’s Tamils. Many analysts here agree.

Although the controversy has bolstered charges that India is acting increasingly like a regional bully, Premadasa has been criticized by diplomats, Sri Lankan analysts and his own party leaders for acting rashly and hinting at war.

Few analysts in Sri Lanka believe that war is possible between the two mismatched countries. India has the fourth-largest army in the world, and Sri Lanka’s combined military forces are smaller than India’s peacekeeping contingent.

But diplomats and many Sri Lankan officials said Premadasa’s stubborn stance illustrates a streak of irrationality that is helping drive his country into chaos.

Indian officials insist that Premadasa, who emphasizes his grass-roots origins and Buddhist beliefs, has gone mad.

Citing recent speeches in which Premadasa pledged to publicly immolate himself in an effort to save his nation, one senior Indian official said: “It’s more than odd. It’s crazy. We can’t help but come to the conclusion that the man is touched. And no one accepts the fact that Premadasa is in control. The (Sinhalese insurgents) are more in control than he is.”

On that point, it seems, nearly everyone in Colombo agrees--on that and the fact that the Sinhalese insurgency by the leftist People’s Liberation Front that began in the south will continue to be Sri Lanka’s most critical issue regardless of the outcome of this week’s conflict.

Isolated From Society

Some of Premadasa’s Cabinet ministers say privately that he has become isolated from every major element in Sri Lankan society, including members of both ethnic groups, his own party members and senior military commanders.

Even Buddhist monks, traditionally the conscience of Sri Lankan society, have turned on Premadasa in large numbers. More than 5,000 of them took to the streets Monday, carrying signs attacking the government and pledging to fight alongside the Sinhalese rebels. The Sinhalese are predominantly Buddhist; the Tamils are Hindu.

Clearly, the principal beneficiary of the political vacuum has been the People’s Liberation Front, a highly secretive movement that is structured along Marxist lines but is a populist insurgency that uses fear as a method of control.

In the south, where the Sinhalese rebel movement began, it is the front that imposes curfews, adjudicates disputes, punishes criminal offenders, taxes businesses and, in general, is the government.

With such dramatic growth of what the Sri Lankans now call their “sub-government,” the Sri Lankan economy--once so promising that analysts expected this to become another Singapore--is now a disaster area. Unemployment is nearing 40% in the south and 50% in the north.

But it is in the area of human rights that the desperation of Premadasa’s policies can be seen most starkly--instances such as the body burnings that have become so commonplace in recent months. On the average, diplomats and Sri Lankan officials say, there are 40 political killings a day, many of them carried out by government security forces.

Kalutara, a 45-minute drive south of the capital, is believed to be on the cutting edge of the People’s Liberation Front’s steady march toward Colombo.

At the tea shop where the body smoldered, the old shopkeeper summed up the nation’s reaction to the deepening turmoil.

“It is fear,” he said, nodding toward where the corpse lay. “Fear of both sides, all sides. We cannot speak. We cannot even pick up such a thing and give it a decent burial. If you pick it up today, it will be you tomorrow.”

At the local police station, the deputy superintendent said his officers had no choice but to leave bodies at the roadside.

“We are a poor country,” he said, “and we lack the facilities.”

When asked who had burned the bodies, he smiled and shrugged, looking away from the half-dozen truck tires stacked beside two large gasoline drums a few feet from the front door of his police station.