AP News, June 9th, 2007
Nearly 200 ethnic Tamils expelled from Sri Lanka's capital amid the rising bloodshed in the country's 24-year war returned to their homes on government buses Saturday, police said.
Authorities provided transportation to Colombo for 186 of 376 Tamil people who were forcibly removed from the capital Thursday, said Rohan Abeywardana, a senior police official. The others decided to return to their hometowns, he said.
Authorities rounded up the 376 Tamils and bused them to the Tamil-dominated northeast, where tensions are flaring between government forces and Tamil Tiger rebels, who began fighting in 1983 for the creation of a separate homeland for the country's 3.1 million minority Tamils.
The expulsions were condemned by the U.S. government, human rights groups and opposition lawmakers. Peace broker Norway called them "blatantly discriminatory," and divisive. About a quarter of Colombo's 800,000 residents are Tamils, and about another 200,000 are temporary residents.
"We didn't do anything wrong," said Sanmugam Rasamma, one of the Tamils who returned on Saturday. "We were not told where we were being taken."
Rasamma came to Colombo five months ago, hoping she and her youngest son could obtain visas and join another son in Canada. She has been staying at a cheap hotel run by a Tamil family that caters to Tamils looking for work or those trying to land the paperwork to move abroad.
The group of roughly 30 Tamils were taken to a school yard, where they were given mats to sleep on, Rasamma said. Human rights workers came the next day to take down names, and that evening the Tamils boarded buses again to return to Colombo _ scared, tired, but safe.
On Friday, the Supreme Court ordered police to stop the expulsions. President Mahinda Rajapakse ordered an inquiry and told the police chief to explain the expulsion.
The Sri Lankan military said Saturday its troops captured four separatist Tamil rebel camps in the country's volatile east after two days of fierce fighting that left at least 30 insurgents dead, including three who committed suicide by taking cyanide.
One soldier also died in the clashes took place near a major rebel base in Thoppigala, one of the guerrillas' last redoubts in Batticaloa district, said military spokesman Brig. Prasad Samarasinghe.
"When we cleared the bunkers today we found that three Tigers had taken cyanide because they couldn't fight it out," Samarasinghe added.
The rebels always wear a string with cyanide around their necks to avoid being captured alive.
Violence has claimed more than 5,000 lives in the past 19 months, and about 70,000 people have been killed in the more than two decades of conflict.
On Saturday, Japan _ Sri Lanka's most generous donor _ vowed to continue sending financial aid to the island, even though Britain and the United States recently suspended millions of dollars in assistance because of the escalating violence.
"People should not be punished for (the) actions or policies of their leaders," Japanese peace envoy Yasushi Akashi told reporters in Colombo on Saturday, wrapping up five days of meetings with government leaders aimed at pushing the two sides toward talks.
