Massacres, Reprisals, Looting Send Civilians Fleeing Sri Lanka Conflict : Asia: At least 183,000 have become refugees since Tamil rebels resumed their war for an independent state. More than 800 people have been killed.

When Tamil Tiger guerrillas abandoned this historic seaside city last week without firing a shot, residents rejoiced that they would be spared the horrors of war.

Then came news that 32 police officers had been massacred in a nearby town. Local police snapped into action.

“I saw the police set fire to our homes and shops,” said a Tamil shipping clerk in an account confirmed by scores of residents. “I saw with my own eyes. I saw the police looting our homes.”

Hundreds of Tamil-owned homes, shops and businesses were burned and gutted. At least 20,000 terrified Tamils and other refugees fled the city. Streets are eerily empty except for dogs and military patrols.

At least 10 people were shot to death, medical officials say, and four burned to death in their homes. And 39 others, hauled from the local hospital June 14 by an army patrol, never returned.

“We believe they were put in the tire,” said Dr. E. G. Gnanakunalan, hospital director and secretary of the Sri Lankan Red Cross. “That means they were burned to death.”

Despite the deaths and destruction, such civilian reprisals are but a bloody footnote in the increasingly brutal ethnic war that tears at this beleaguered Indian Ocean nation.

More than 800 people are reported to have been killed in the two weeks since a Tamil separatist army called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam attacked up to 30 police posts in northern and eastern provinces, resuming a seven-year war for an independent Tamil state in this mostly Sinhalese country.

The Tigers are a fierce, even fanatical, fighting force. With an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 troops, their army includes a so-called “baby brigade” of armed boys and girls as young as 9.

“They all carry cyanide tablets on a necklace,” said Neelan Tiruchelvam, a Tamil human rights lawyer in Colombo. “If they’re captured, they’re expected to take it.”

Moreover, Tigers apparently are using suicide squads for the first time. Four youths who strapped explosives to their bodies were killed trying to run into two army posts, the military said.

“The children make good soldiers,” noted a Sri Lankan army general in Colombo, the capital. “They follow orders. And they don’t know right from wrong.”

Despite government claims to the contrary, rebel troops still control key villages, bridges and road junctions in the Batticaloa district in the east.

Visitors to the area Thursday found teen-age Tigers patrolling the road east from Maya Oya, armed with still-shiny machine guns and AK-47 assault rifles taken from police posts. Guerrillas waited in roadside ditches and elephant grass, ready to detonate mines at approaching vehicles.

Batticaloa itself was mostly deserted, visitors said. Two French doctors from the relief group Medecins Sans Frontieres left the city after rebels built bunkers by the hospital, turning it into a military target.

A two-day, 750-mile drive through the east also found refugees desperately crowding schools, churches and mosques. Government officials say the fighting has created 183,000 refugees.

In Amparai, 1,005 villagers from Deegawapiya filled the floors at the Gamini Maha school. They fled their farms after Tigers shot and killed a woman washing clothes.

“They shot her because she was Sinhalese,” said her son-in-law, surprised at the question.

Fierce fighting also raged Saturday in the northern city of Jaffna, a Tigers stronghold where about 400 army troops and police were under siege in a 17th-Century Dutch-built coastal fort.

Rebels used bulldozers and rocket-propelled grenades to try to break the fort’s 14-foot-thick walls. Helicopters trying to drop food and ammunition to the surrounded troops also drew heavy fire, the military said.

Earlier, army reinforcements had reached Ft. Kiran, near Sri Lanka’s east coast, where 60 soldiers survived a punishing nine-day siege with little food or water. From there, the troops advanced to Batticaloa, a main point of the fighting.

Military officials said Saturday that they are making steady progress in that eastern region.

“We’re pushing them back to the jungle,” the army general said. “Now it becomes traditional guerrilla war. And that’s bound to last for some time.”

It already has. After years of unrest, Tamil Tigers first went to war in 1983 to demand a homeland for Sri Lanka’s 3 million Hindus, who make up 18% of the population.

More than 11,000 militants, soldiers and civilians died in subsequent massacres and fighting between the Tamils and Sinhalese Buddhists, who make up 75% of the population and control the military and government.

An Indian army peacekeeping force arrived in 1987 in an attempt to quell the uprising. The force left in March with more than 1,200 Indians dead and a fragile cease-fire in place.

Just why the Tigers resumed their war on June 11 is unclear. Analysts say they had moved into a political vacuum left by the flight of rival Indian-backed Tamil groups and had won vast concessions in peace talks with President Ranasinghe Premadasa’s government.

“They were given virtual control of one-third of the country,” said one diplomat in Colombo. “They instituted their own system to tax residents. They forbade police from carrying out criminal investigations of Tamils. They got the government to relocate police stations and close one army base. They even demanded the army ask permission before any troop movements.”

In exchange, the government wanted the Tigers to surrender their arms, drop demands for sovereignty and join elections. The Tigers refused and began constructing bunkers and stockpiling food and ammunition instead.

“The attacks clearly were premeditated,” said another diplomat. “Political solutions don’t attract them. They believe in military solutions.”

Another analyst said the problem was more complicated. “You had two armies competing on the same terrain,” he said. “One had cadres 14, 15 and 16 years old. The other was from the government. The relationship was fraught with conflict and contradiction.”

That was clearly the case in Trincomalee, where a nearly even mix of Tamils, Sinhalese and Muslims lived in uneasy peace. Until the Tigers fled on the night of June 13, their attempts at civil control in the city won few converts.

“There was no law and order,” complained a Roman Catholic shipping agent. “They demanded money. They took our vehicles. They went into shops and took what they wanted. People were living in fear.”

Like others here, he held little hope for the future.

“Since independence in 1948, we’ve had ethnic problems between Sinhalese and Tamils,” he said with a sigh. “And I don’t think we’ll ever solve it. The hatred is too deep.”

BACKGROUND Tamil Tigers first went to war in 1983 to demand a homeland for Sri Lanka’s 3 million Hindus, who make up 18% of the population. More than 11,000 people died in massacres and fighting between the Tamils and Sinhalese Buddhists, who make up 75% of the population and control the military and government. An Indian army peacekeeping force arrived in 1987. By the time the force withdrew in March, more than 1,200 Indians had died and a fragile cease-fire was in place.