Survivors Tell How Rebels Killed 100 Sri Lanka Police

AMPARAI, Sri Lanka —  He was blindfolded, his arms were tied and he was forced face down in the dirt with more than 100 other police officers, but Alm Tahir says he was most frightened by the mocking laughter of his would-be executioners.

“The women and girls were laughing and clapping,” Tahir, 21, recalled Monday from his hospital bed here. “Then they shot us.”

Police Sub-Inspector Piyeratna Ranaweera remembers another sound when the shooting began.

“Everyone was shouting for their loved ones,” he said at another hospital. “Then there was silence.”

The two men are the only known survivors of an apparent massacre of Kalmunai police a week ago by Tamil separatist guerrillas. Though wounded, both escaped into the jungle before the guerrillas burned their colleagues’ bodies, they said in separate interviews.

Kalmunai, on Sri Lanka’s east coast, was the opening shot in what threatens to be a brutal new phase of the civil war in this lush Indian Ocean nation. Citing more than 600 dead and two collapsed cease-fires in the last week, the government Monday declared total war on the Tamil guerrillas.

“From now on, it is all-out war,” Defense Minister Ranjan Wijeratne told Parliament in Colombo, the capital. “We will annihilate the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, take over the east and then go for the north.”

The Tigers, as they are called, are demanding a separate Tamil state in the north and east. They claim that the nation’s Tamils, who are mostly Hindu and make up about 18% of Sri Lanka’s population of 15 million, are discriminated against by the majority, mostly Buddhist Sinhalese.

More than 10,000 soldiers, rebels and civilians have died since the Tigers launched their first attacks in 1983. The beleaguered government turned to New Delhi for help in 1987, but the 50,000 Indian peacekeeping troops withdrew last March after failing to defeat the insurgent ethnic army.

Instead, President Ranasinge Premadasa’s government began negotiating a power-sharing arrangement and let the Tigers assume many military and civilian functions, with the hope they would put down their guns and campaign for elections. That fragile peace held until the Tigers’ surprise offensive last week.

Wijeratne still held out the possibility of peace Monday.

“I advise the (Tigers) to stop the fighting and come to the negotiating table before it is too late,” he said.

But peace was hard to find near Kalmunai, about 200 miles east of Colombo, on Monday. The seaside town remained under the control of the Tigers, and the steady crump of mortar shells and the chatter of small arms fire filled the air at Malwate Junction, five miles away.

Nearby villages were deserted. Thousands of refugees were reported in makeshift shelters at schools, Buddhist temples and government facilities.

At dusk, a light tank and four armored personnel carriers rushed fresh troops to the embattled area, past a tropical tableau of green rice paddies, dense jungle and waving coconut palms.

Soldiers and police at sandbagged checkpoints said they fear that as many as 750 other police officers also were killed when the Tigers broke the 13-month-old truce last week and captured 17 police stations, including Kalmunai, in the north and east.

“Not a single policeman from the stations has come out,” said police officer Yumyu Mustaba, who was guarding the main road outside Amparai, the district seat. “All were rounded up. All are gone.”

“The police are all finished,” said an army officer, who asked not to be identified. “They are dead.”

Fighting was also reported Monday at four army camps in the eastern Batticaloa district, and at Trincomalee, in the northeast, which suffered severe damage in fighting last week.

Fierce fighting also reportedly raged at the Kiran military camp, further north, where the military used helicopter gunships to repulse a dawn attack, according to the Defense Ministry. A ministry communique Monday said the Tigers had lobbed “chemical bombs . . . causing severe physical irritation” into the camp. No further details were available.

The week of fighting dashed the tenuous peace that had reigned in Sri Lanka since last year, when a government-linked purge crippled a leftist insurgency among the majority Sinhalese. More than 30,000 people were reported killed in the two-front war last year alone.

Diplomats in Colombo said they see little hope of an early end to the bloodshed, now that the Tigers have gone back to war.

“The whole phony peace of the last few months was based on the assumption that the Tigers would put down their arms,” one diplomat said. “Instead, it’s clear they simply used the last few months to build up their strength.”

Certainly, there are few illusions about the Tigers’ intentions in Kalmunai.

Police Sub-Inspector Ranaweera, interviewed in the Kandy General Hospital, about 50 miles west of Kalmunai, said several dozen heavily armed Tigers arrived at his police post a week ago and demanded that the officers turn over their weapons.

“They asked us to surrender,’ said the 23-year-old officer. “They said if we do nothing, they won’t hurt us. And that once the government agrees to their demands, we will be released. So, we surrendered.”

Ranaweera, who was wounded in an arm and ear, said the Tigers loaded the police on three buses.

“They didn’t say anything. They just counted us one by one,” he said. “All 115 were taken away.”

The buses were driven to a Tigers camp deep in the jungle.

“When they got us to the camp, they took everyone’s name and blindfolded us,” said Tahir, who was hospitalized in Amparai. “Then they tied our hands behind our back and dragged us by the ankles on the ground. Then they shot us.”

Tahir, who was wounded in the hip and buttocks, pulled back his tattered shirt to show skin rubbed raw by the ground. Deep marks on his wrists indicated that he had been tied.

Both men said they passed out and woke up in the bloody heap of bodies. Tahir said he hid all night in the jungle before making his way to government lines. As he left, he said, the Tigers returned with tires and fuel to burn the bodies and the buses.

Tahir, still shuddering, said he only had one thought throughout the ordeal.

“I thought I was going to die,” he said softly.