Before the weekend was over, three more men would be pulled from their car and killed by death squads that have turned the lonely roads and forests around this frontline town in northern Sri Lanka into no-go zones.
“It might be two or three getting killed each day and it’s unclear who’s carrying out these crimes,” explains Thorfinnur Omarsson, spokesman for the Sri Lankan Monitoring Mission — the Nordic peace observers who are called out every time another body turns up in the weeds.
Both the government in Colombo and rebel Tamil Tigers have accused the other side of murdering civilians.
But Omarsson, expressing the frustration felt by many of those trying to keep the island nation from sliding back into all-out war, says “the killing goes both ways … and there are also paramilitaries”.
“It’s always quite unpredictable and tense … it’s happening all of the time,” he adds.
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As the government and LTTE negotiators prepare to meet in Geneva to try to salvage Sri Lanka’s peace process, a special United Nations envoy has condemned both Colombo and the Tigers for what he says are “killings being allowed to run unchecked”.
Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, wrote in a recent report: “Every such killing represents a major setback … and every retaliatory death plays into the hands of those whose interests do not lie in the restoration of peace.”
He labelled the LTTE’s denials for many of the attacks ”unconvincing”, but also said the government had failed to investigate the killings, calling for the full-time presence of international rights monitors.