COLOMBO, 3 March 2007 — Sri Lanka’s Air Force bombed a rebel position in the east yesterday, wounding at least 31 combatants, the military said. Fighter jets, backed by ground troops, targeted a rebel base in eastern Batticaloa district, military spokesman Brig. Prasad Samarasinghe said.
Rebel officials were unavailable for comment, and independent confirmation was not possible.
Also yesterday, an explosion near a school spread panic among students and teachers and injured two officers at a nearby security post, the military said.
The school in Vavuniya was evacuated and none of the 700 students was hurt, police officer C.I. Bandara said by telephone.
Samarasinghe blamed separatist Tamil Tiger rebels for planting a roadside bomb near the school. Earlier reports said the explosion was caused by a mortar.
The school — which has students from the country’s majority Sinhalese community — is in an area the government controls under a 2002 cease-fire agreement.
Vavuniya is the last major government-held town before territory controlled by the Tamil Tigers starts, and has been the scene of previous violence.
The Tigers began fighting in 1983 for a separate homeland for ethnic minority Tamils following decades of discrimination by the majority Sinhalese.
The cease-fire all but collapsed in 2006 as renewed fighting killed thousands of combatants and civilians, according to European cease-fire monitors.
Meanwhile, anti-terrorism laws in Sri Lanka have led to widespread and systematic rights abuses, a panel of global jurists said yesterday, charging government forces of extra-judicial killings and torture. The panel was appointed in 2005 by the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists to investigate the impact of “terrorism” and counterterrorism measures on the rule of law and human rights.
It concluded a visit to India yesterday where it met affected people, activists and government representatives from the region including Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and the Maldives. The experts are due to visit Pakistan separately.
“Sri Lanka is a country where there is, really, a full-scale armed confrontation, which has provoked very serious violations by the protagonists,” Arthur Chaskalson, the head of the team, said.
A two-decade-old ethnic conflict between Colombo and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels has escalated after the virtual collapse of a truce and about 4,000 people have been killed in the past 15 months alone.
Around 68,000 people have been killed over the past two decades.
The panel expressed concern over “extrajudicial killings, torture, enforced disappearances and arbitrary detentions” by troops in the Indian Ocean island nation.
It said the reintroduction of counterterrorism measures and emergency laws, including a “wide arsenal of terrorism-related offenses that can be used to criminalize anybody connected to any broadly defined terror suspect” had led to widespread and systematic rights abuses.
Chaskalson said the panel did not get an opportunity to meet Sri Lankan government officials.
