UPDATE

Carnage in eastern Sri Lanka

AS September 18 dawned in eastern Sri Lanka, a total of 50 Sinhalese villagers, men, women and children, lay dead. The innocent villagers, residing in a nebulous zone in a linguistically polarised island-nation, were hacked to death in their sleep, repor tedly by members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). An otherwise silent night was shattered by the killing-spree.

Gonagala division of Ampara district, bordering Batticaloa district, bore the brunt of the attack by the LTTE. The hacked remains of 14 persons in Chilaw Bund village were a sad sight. Butchered and chopped, the remains spoke of the intensity of the atta ck by the cadres of the LTTE.

GEMUNU AMARASINGHE/AP
A Sinhalese woman grieves the death of her family members on September 18.

A dissected palm in front of a pulverised skull was the final act of protection a middle-aged man had desperately sought before he was butchered. In the same room, barely a few feet away lay an overturned cot, under which one could see the body of a boy, perhaps not yet into his teens, 'sleeping' in a pool of blood. Next to him was a severely hacked body of a teenager. Both appeared to have been sleeping on the cot when they were butchered.

Herath Premasiri was the lone survivor of his family. The living room of his house was a veritable morgue. Walking across the blood-splattered floor one came across mutilated and hacked bodies. Twelve hours after the cold-blooded murders the remains awai ted the arrival of judicial authorities with body-tags written out in paper and strapped around their wrists.

Of the 50 villagers hacked to death, 46 hailed from Gonagala. Of these, 14 were children. A total of 31 men and 15 women were done to death. No firearms were reportedly used by the killers as they "preferred the silence of the night" to operate. Two vill agers each were killed from two other hamlets.

While no information is available on the number of attackers, details provided by some of the villagers indicated the presence of women cadres as well. Defence authorities estimate that the number of attackers could have been about 10, going by the magni tude of the deaths. The attackers had apparently arrived from nearby Batticaloa district, parts of which were under LTTE control. Going by previous incidents and the cold-blooded trail left behind, the hand of the Tigers in the killing does not appear to be in doubt.

The immediate provocation for this attack appeared to be an aerial bombing on September 15 by the Sri Lanka Air Force of Puthukudiyiruppu, a Tamil village, killing 22 Tamil people. While the incident was reported by the LTTE and confirmed by the Internat ional Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Sri Lankan defence authorities had denied it. They continue to maintain that the Puthukudiyiruppu bombings were "on selected and positively identified LTTE targets" and say that the ICRC was known to have made mistakes in the past.

President Chandrika Kumaratunga, expressing "shock at the massacre", said that the act, committed at a time when the "Government is doing all possible efforts to solve the two-decade-long ethnic crisis in the island, was not acceptable to any civilised s ociety." Assuring the Government's "assistance to the families of the victims," she "called upon political and civil authorities to take all measures to restore normalcy and provide protection for the affected areas."

Deputy Defence Minister Gen. Anuruddha Ratwatte, who visited the affected areas along with the Army Commander and the Chief of the Air Force, condemned the act as "dastardly" and "carried out by a set of cowards." He said the LTTE was "acting in despera tion" and was "taking revenge" for military setbacks in the Vanni area.

Reacting to the massacre, the Parliamentary leader of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), Joseph Pararajasingham, did not fail to mention the bombing of Puthukudiyiruppu. While "condemning the murder of innocent civilians" in Ampara, Pararajasingha m in a letter to the President said, "When your Excellency's air force bombed the Puthukudiyiruppu village in Mullaitivu last Wednesday, killing 22 innocent Tamils, your Excellency neither expressed grief nor conveyed your sorrow." This "contrasting beha viour" he said "has gone to reinforce in the minds of the Tamil people that your Excellency too have decided to follow the same communal path of your predecessors."

While much blood has been shed in the decades-long separatist strife, this month's killings were the extreme manifestations of deeper maladies which come in the way of well-intentioned peace-makers and liberal political leaders.

V.S. Sambandan