Freedom in the World 1999 - Sri Lanka

1999 Scores

Status: Partly Free
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Civil Liberties: 4
Political Rights: 3

Overview

President Chandrika Kumaratunga won a second term in office in the December 1999 presidential elections amid a deadlock in political and military efforts to end Sri Lanka's 16-year-old civil war, and consensus estimates that economic growth for 1999 would be below the modest 4.7 percent rate achieved in 1998.

This island nation located in the Indian Ocean off southeastern India achieved independence from Great Britain in 1948. Political power has alternated between the conservative United National Party (UNP) and the leftist Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). Colonial-era language policies favoring Tamils and other minorities over the Sinhala-speaking majority contributed to communal tensions that continued after independence.

The 1978 constitution vested broad executive powers in a president who is directly elected for a six-year term and can dissolve parliament. The 225-member parliament is directly elected for a six-year term.

In 1983, an attack by Tamil guerrillas on an army patrol and subsequent anti-Tamil riots marked the beginning of an armed Tamil-based insurgency. The war came in the context of longstanding Tamil claims of discrimination in education and employment opportunities, the country's high unemployment rate, and a series of anti-Tamil riots pre-dating independence. By 1986, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which called for an independent Tamil homeland in the Northern and Eastern Provinces, controlled much of northern Jaffna Peninsula. The UNP government brought in an Indian peacekeeping force between 1987 and 1990 that largely failed to disarm Tamil militants. In 1987, the Marxist, Sinhalese-based People's Liberation Front (JVP) launched a separate insurgency in the south. The army and military-backed death squads crushed the JVP by 1990, with total deaths estimated at 60,000.

In 1993, a suspected LTTE suicide bomber assassinated President Ranasinghe Premadasa, of the UNP. In the August 1994 parliamentary elections, held with a 76 percent turnout, the People's Alliance (PA), an SLFP-dominated coalition led by Kumaratunga that promised to end the war, won 105 seats to oust the UNP (94 seats) after 17 years. In the November presidential elections Kumaratunga won 62 percent of the vote against the widow of the UNP's original candidate, whom the LTTE had assassinated in October.

Early in her term, Kumaratunga tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a peace agreement with the LTTE and subsequently turned to a military solution. In 1996, the army recaptured Jaffna Peninsula, sending the LTTE to the northern Vanni jungle. Between May 1997 and late 1998, the army lost thousands of soldiers trying to secure a land route to Jaffna through the rebel-held Vanni.

In 1998 and 1999, Kumaratunga failed to persuade the opposition to support proposed constitutional amendments aimed at ending the war by devolving power to new regional councils, including one in the contested north and east. The UNP and the influential Buddhist clergy rejected the plan, alleging it would lead to a Tamil state, and the PA itself was short of the two-thirds parliamentary majority required for constitutional amendments. In October 1999, Kumaratunga called early presidential elections, which the government subsequently scheduled for December 21. On November 2, the LTTE began a major offensive that recaptured large areas in the Vanni the rebels had lost in the preceding two years, while causing several thousand villagers to flee their homes.

Kumaratunga campaigned on a pledge to win approval of her proposed constitutional amendments. Her main opponent, Ranil Wickremasinghe of the UNP, promised to de-escalate the civil war fighting and called for unconditional peace negotiations with the LTTE. On December 18, a suspected LTTE suicide bomber killed at least 24 people and slightly wounded Kumaratunga at an election rally in Colombo, and another bomb at a UNP rally killed 12 people. At the December 21 elections, held under an estimated 73 percent turnout, Kumaratunga won 51.12 percent of the votes to defeat Wickremasinghe, who took 42.71 percent; 11 other candidates shared the remainder.

Political Rights and Civil Liberties

Sri Lankans can change their government democratically. The UNP and some independent poll monitors accused the governing People's Alliance of some electoral fraud and harassment of voters during the December 1999 presidential elections. The government denied nongovernmental monitoring groups access to polling booths. Independent monitors and the opposition also accused the PA of vote-rigging and instigating violence in the January 1999 polls for the North Western provincial council. Observers reported far fewer irregularities in five April provincial elections, although violence killed at least five people during the campaign. Parliamentary elections are due by August 2000.

The judiciary is independent. Conditions in prisons and remand homes are extremely poor. The Kumaratunga administration has frequently imposed islandwide or local states of emergency related to the civil war. The Emergency Regulations allow authorities to detain suspects for up to one year without charge and ban political meetings. The Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) permits authorities to detain suspects for 18 months without charge and provides broad immunity for security forces. These detention laws, and poor implementation of safeguards for detainees, are blamed in part for the continuing problems of torture and disappearances. In July 1999, Amnesty International reported that "torture continues to be reported almost (if not) daily" in the context of the civil war, while police officers "regularly torture" criminal suspects and people arrested over land disputes or other private matters.

Since the civil war began, government security forces, state-backed Sinhalese and Muslim civilian militias, and armed Tamil groups, particularly the LTTE, have committed massacres, disappearances, extrajudicial executions, rape, and torture against civilians, mainly Tamils. Press accounts indicate the war has killed 50,000 to 60,000 people, including many civilians. Civilians are occasionally killed during government bombing raids or by artillery fire from both sides. In September, authorities blamed the LTTE for the massacre of 56 Sinhalese civilians in eastern Ampara district, in apparent revenge for the accidental death of 22 Tamil refugees by government jet bombings in northeastern Mullaitivu district. Similar tit-for-tat killings of civilians occurred relatively frequently earlier in the war. In November, the military and the LTTE blamed each other for an attack on a Roman Catholic shrine at northwestern Madhu town that killed some 42 civilian refugees.

In the mid-1980s and again in the early 1990s, the army was implicated in thousands of disappearances in the northern Jaffna Peninsula and the Eastern Province. In 1997, the government announced that three presidential commissions established in 1994 had found evidence of 16,742 disappearances in the early 1990s. In 1996, security forces allegedly committed more than 600 disappearances of Tamil civilians in the Jaffna Peninsula, generally in reprisal for LTTE attacks on soldiers, although the number of disappearances has since dropped considerably.

In a landmark 1998 judgment, a court sentenced to death five soldiers in the 1996 murders of a schoolgirl, Krishanthy Kumarasamy, and three others in Jaffna, the first strict sentences handed down to security forces for severe abuses. In February 1999, a court sentenced six soldiers and a school principal to ten years' imprisonment for the disappearances of 25 people between late 1989 and early 1990, in the first judgment relating to the more than 12,000 disappearances in the late 1980s in the context of the JVP insurgency. Nevertheless, few security personnel have been convicted of rights abuses. An official Human Rights Commission has yet to substantially investigate abuses.

The LTTE and, to a lesser extent, other militant Tamil groups have killed large numbers of Tamil civilians during the civil war. The LTTE directly controls some territory in the Vanni, and maintains de facto control over many areas in the eastern province. The LTTE continued to be responsible for summary executions of civilians who allegedly served as informers or otherwise cooperated with the army; arbitrary abductions and detentions; denial of basic rights; and forcible conscription of children. The group raises money through extortion, kidnapping, and theft, and it has used threats and attacks to close schools, courts, and government agencies in nominally government-held areas in its self-styled Tamil homeland. In recent years, the LTTE has killed several Tamil politicians who participated in the political process and held moderate views, including the prominent constitutional lawyer and member of parliament, Neelan Thiruchelvam, in July 1999. The LTTE has also carried out major urban terrorism attacks in Sinhalese-majority areas in recent years that have killed hundreds of people. In response, authorities arbitrarily detained and sometimes tortured thousands of young Tamils in security sweeps.

The civil war has at various times internally displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians in the northern Vanni region. In 1999, the government continued to run several refugee camps and welfare centers in the Vanni. In June, Reuters reported that authorities had forced some 10,000 Tamil refugees living in Madhu back to their homes or welfare centers in advance of annual pilgrimages to the town's Catholic shrine.

Kumaratunga campaigned on promises to respect press freedom, but her government has filed criminal defamation charges against several editors and authorities have occasionally harassed, threatened, and assaulted journalists, particularly Tamils. The government continued to limit journalists' access to war zones, and in November 1999 reimposed censorship on local media reporting on the civil war. Restrictive legislation further chills press freedom. Print media are both public and private. The government controls Lake House Group, the largest newspaper chain. Radio and television are predominantly state-owned, and political coverage favors the ruling party. Unknown gunmen murdered an editor of an outspoken newspaper in September.

Women hold only 4.8 percent of parliamentary seats and face unofficial discrimination in education and employment opportunities. Rape and other violence against women remain serious problems, and authorities weakly enforce existing laws. Many of the thousands of child domestic servants are physically abused. Child prostitution is fairly widespread. Conditions in asylums are often inhumane.

Human rights and social welfare nongovernmental organizations are active. Partisan violence on campuses periodically leads to university closings. Religious freedom is respected. However, private disputes occasionally turn into confrontations along religious and ethnic lines, with attacks against Tamils, Muslims, and Christians.

Trade unions are independent, and collective bargaining is practiced. State workers cannot strike. Kumaratunga has used the 1989 Essential Services Act, which allows the president to declare a strike in any industry illegal, to end several strikes. Employers on tea plantations routinely violate the rights of workers, most of whom are Tamil descendants of colonial-era migrant workers who have difficulty obtaining citizenship and identity documentation.