Rights Group Condemns Political Killings by Governments : Report: Amnesty International says the number of countries where such deaths occur has increased worldwide.

Despite the global push toward democracy, the number of countries engaged in political killings has increased worldwide, according to a report to be issued today by Amnesty International.

Tens of thousands have been murdered or have disappeared after being abducted by government and government-backed groups in the 1990s, the London-based human rights organization charged.

Amnesty said this was its first report on such disappearances in a decade and is part of the group’s first campaign in several years organized around a theme. The report does not include responses from the governments accused.

But it said the primary violators are no longer just military dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, which were held responsible for similar waves between the 1960s and 1980s. The culprits, Amnesty asserted, increasingly are governments supposedly committed to human rights, including U.S. allies.

“Hopes that human rights would be respected in the much-heralded ‘new world order’ have been shot down,” the group said. “Instead, old regimes, newly formed governments and armed opposition groups are turning their streets into killing grounds or causing their opponents to vanish without trace.”

The use of “death squads” and paramilitary groups also has spread, Amnesty said. A decade ago, the trend was largely limited to Latin American dictatorships, but it is pervasive now in Asia and Africa too, said Pierre Sane, the organization’s secretary general.

The governments of the Philippines and Colombia sponsor covert operations, death squads and armed paramilitary groups that engage in abductions and murder, the report alleged.

In the Philippines, government-controlled death squads--used in the rule of dictator Ferdinand Marcos--were retained by the governments of former President Corazon Aquino and current President Fidel V. Ramos, Sane said.

At least 3,000 people have been murdered in politically motivated cases in Colombia since 1990, the group said. The Colombian government is hiding behind the struggle against drugs to explain the deaths--when in fact it is “using death squads to get rid of opponents and political or social undesirables,” Sane charged.

In South Africa, at least 10,000 people have been murdered by security forces or armed groups acting with the tacit support of government officials since 1990, the year negotiations began to end apartheid and white minority rule, the report said.

Other violators include Turkey and India, which “pay lip service to human rights on the one hand but kill on the other,” the report said. Both countries have repeatedly pledged human rights reforms.

Governments in Peru, which restored democracy in 1980, and Tajikistan, which broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991, “allow security forces to violate human rights with impunity,” the report said.

Besides new state abuses, the growth of conflicts based on ethnic, national and religious differences has also contributed to the killings.

“The world must wake up to the continuing mass slaughter,” the report urged. “Unless both individual governments and the international community take action soon . . , the rising tide of carnage could overwhelm the institutions set up to protect international human rights after the horrors of the Second World War.”

Developments are not all negative. The number of people killed has not increased over earlier eras. And several states undergoing change have improved their human rights records.

In response to international pressure, Morocco released more than 300 people who had been abducted up to 18 years earlier--although many of its “disappeared” are still missing, the report said.