Death Squads Tear at Fabric of Sri Lanka

The old woman was shrieking and wailing and beating her head with her fists as she wildly circled the bloodied body of her son, a local grocer known only as Simon.

“My God, can’t you all see?” she screamed to the crowd of villagers who had gathered around. “He is still alive. He is still breathing. Can’t you see it? My son is dying. Help him! Help him!”

But the villagers who had known Simon all their lives just stared at the grisly scene, paralyzed with fear. They couldn’t help poor old Simon, several of them explained. If they did, they said, they surely would be next.

The blood-red letters on a sign left in the mud near Simon and the bodies of his son and another village merchant who lay bound and hacked to death on the roadside explained why.

The three men had been helping the police, the poster stated. They had been identifying members of Sri Lanka’s insurgent People’s Liberation Front, who themselves are being slaughtered in record numbers these days by pro-government death squads.

“So we have punished them by killing them,” the insurgents’ poster declared.

Not quite all of them, though. Simon the grocer clearly was still alive. As his mother and his wife wailed and called for help, his chest rose and fell with his last breaths. His right hand twitched. His left had been chopped off. He was in shock and bleeding to death.

An army patrol, summoned by one brave villager, arrived in a jeep. The soldiers studied the dying grocer. Then they walked over to the poster. Expressionless, they picked it up and turned to leave.

“But this man is alive,” an outsider reminded them. “The poster said he was one of yours. Why don’t you help him?”

“This is not the army’s job. This is for the police,” an officer explained before driving away.

But the police never came. And old Simon, the grocer of Kiriwelgolla village, was left to die in the early morning sun as his wife and his mother wept and his village watched in silence.

It was a typical morning in Sri Lanka’s newest killing ground, the jungle villages surrounding the country’s historic Buddhist capital of Kandy. It is the latest chapter in a civil war that has grown so brutal and so all-encompassing that it is now consuming almost every institution of this island nation’s society--religion and family, as well as the islanders’ once sacred sense of community and justice.

It is here in Sri Lanka’s religious heartland, around the world’s second-most-important site of Buddhist pilgrimage, that the latest “front” has emerged in a guerrilla war that is now taking the highest toll of any conflict in the world--about 50 deaths a day.

Every morning, dozens of bodies are left strewn across the countryside around Kandy. Some have been beheaded or tied to burning tires. Those killings are the work of vigilante death squads that critics say are now sanctioned by the government under a new get-tough counterinsurgency campaign. It is an all-out effort to defeat the rebels, who say they are waging a grass-roots war against a corrupt and elitist government.

Others, like Simon the grocer, are hogtied and hacked to death, left as reminders from the hit squads of the People’s Liberation Front of the price to be paid for cooperating with the crackdown.

Lately, not even the region’s venerated Buddhist monks have been exempt.

Amid strong suspicion that some of them are aiding the insurgents, more than two dozen young monks have been killed in the last month alone, according to the high priest at Kandy’s ancient Temple of the Tooth, which is said to house Buddha’s eyetooth.

On the other hand, older monks, who have voiced public support for the personally devout President Ranasinghe Premadasa, say they are being killed by the insurgents.

“Imagine, we have seen monks still wrapped in their saffron robes floating dead in the rivers here,” said Amunugama Athadasi Nayaka Hamuduru, the head priest at the temple, which has been a world Buddhist center for centuries. “Yes, it is true, Lord Buddha teaches we are not to kill even an ant. But now, it is not safe even to be a monk.

“We are more worried than ever nowadays. Even the army says they do not trust any monk under 40. And when I cross the street from the temple, I never know if I will come back.”

What is more, rural temples suspected to be insurgent strongholds have been raided by the army, and their sacred shrines smashed, during searches for rebel weapons caches. And several young monks suspected of being guerrilla sympathizers have fled their temples and are now believed to be in remote jungle guerrilla hide-outs.

“It is a terrifying atmosphere at the moment,” said Shelton Ranaraja, a prominent Kandy political leader and Sri Lanka’s former deputy justice minister. He said the latest government crackdown is succeeding only in deepening the nation’s fears.

“We are taught not to kill even an animal or an ant, and here we are killing everything and everyone in sight. I don’t understand what is happening anymore. It is just violence met with violence.

“I don’t think the security forces have broken the back of the insurgents. They (the rebels) are going slow, and their ability to organize has been hurt badly. But they will regroup.

“I’m afraid all that has been broken is the spirit of the people.”

Behind the escalating carnage in Kandy is a new dimension to the war, a single man. He is the new police chief in the region, handpicked by President Premadasa to implement his new get-tough policy in the country’s key central regions. Even before he arrived in Kandy three months ago, Deputy Police Inspector General Premadasa Udugampola had become a national legend here.

“There is no one more feared in this entire nation of 16 million,” said one of the president’s top aides, who asked not to be identified by name. “Everywhere he has gone, death has followed. Now, he has been turned loose in Kandy, and it is having some effect. Everyone is scared, and the (insurgents) are lying low.

“Whether it will work or not in the long term, who knows? But, in the meantime, Mr. Udugampola clearly is a man with a license to kill.”

And, just as clearly, the new police chief is as proud of that license as he is of his image. He has prominently placed a poster of Timothy Dalton as James Bond in the movie “License to Kill” behind his desk. He uses hand grenades and machine-gun bullets as paperweights. And his office is cluttered with Uzi submachine guns, automatic pistols and even small artillery pieces.

What is less visible is Udugampola’s motivation. That is something of a Sri Lankan version of the Charles Bronson series of “Death Wish” movies.

Udugampola’s mother and sisters were raped and massacred by the insurgents in his home village several years ago. Their bodies were left in pieces as a message.

The police officer heeded the warning. He moved his wife and children to Los Angeles. But ever since, Udugampola has led an elite squad of similarly motivated men on a singular mission--to wipe out the insurgency at whatever human cost.

He already has been posted in three major Sri Lankan cities, and, within weeks of his arrival in each region, vigilante death squads sporting such names as “Black Cats,” “Green Tigers” and now, in Kandy, “Eagles of the Highland” have appeared on the scene.

The squads work only at night, rounding up rebel suspects from their homes, killing them as brutally as possible and leaving their bodies by the roadside as a message.

There are no accurate or official counts of such deaths in Kandy’s Central province since Udugampola arrived. But there are scores of stark illustrations.

Two weeks ago, for example, a People’s Liberation Front hit team assassinated an assistant registrar of Kandy’s main university. The next morning, the death squads answered. They neatly arranged 15 severed heads of rebel suspects around the traffic circle outside the campus. And the next day, there were 18 more.

And Wednesday, the day after Simon and the other victims were found, the bodies of 24 young men, their throats slashed, were strewn across a road near Kandy. Residents and police sources said a poster near the bodies claimed responsibility for the Eagles vigilante group and made clear they were in retaliation for the deaths of Simon and the others.

Military sources said 20 other people were killed in separate incidents in Sri Lanka in the 24 hours ending Wednesday morning.

Udugampola has insisted several times that he has nothing to do with the vigilante squads, but one of his own officers indirectly confirmed it: “It is tit-for-tat now. They kill one of ours at the university, we answer with 15 of theirs. That is our slogan--15 of yours for each one of ours.

“But this man, Mr. Udugampola, is the greatest patriot of our nation. The politicians sit and talk while he is out ending this war. He is the only one who is fighting like this to save his country.”

Diplomats and neutral Sri Lankan politicians are not so sure.

Referring to the government’s crackdown, which began in earnest after the insurgents put up posters nationwide announcing plans to kill the families of police officers and soldiers, one Western diplomat in the capital of Colombo said it has been a success, but only in the short term.

“I have a feeling we’ve seen the worst for a while,” the diplomat said. “The (insurgents) are really hurt badly. Their ability to move around has been crippled. They can no longer stage nationwide strikes. And they’re on the run.

“But what you have left behind is a crippled country. And how you recover from that, I just don’t know.”

Ranaraja, the former deputy justice minister, doesn’t know either.

“Our entire society is disintegrating,” he said on the balcony of his Kandy home, which he said he now leaves only for emergencies. “There are no institutions left. The courts are at a standstill. . . . Not even murder is tried in the courts. The security forces and the (insurgents) just go out and kill. Everything is extrajudicial now.

“The universities have been closed for two years. No one goes out after 7 p.m., not even to visit family. And people are now becoming physically and mentally sick from the tension. The children are sick. It’s tormenting me, and I am getting sick.

“In a sense, things are working now. The security forces have pushed it all underground, and some things have the appearance of normalcy. But it is all on the surface. Behind it, the spirit of our people has been broken, and it will take years for us to recover. I know it is not possible I will see it in my lifetime.”

BACKGROUND The Organization of American States was established in 1948. Based in Washington, D.C., it has 32 permanent members and 24 permanent observers. As outlined in its charter, the organization’s purpose is to achieve “an order of peace and justice, promoting solidarity among the American states; (to strengthen) their collaboration and (defend) their sovereignty, their territorial integrity and their independence . . . as well as to establish . . . new objectives and standards for the promotion of the economic, social and cultural development of the peoples of the hemisphere, and to speed the process of economic integration.”