Sri Lankan media on Saturday condemned the government over the eviction of hundreds of minority Tamils from the capital at gunpoint, and praised the Supreme Court for halting the move.
COLOMBO: Sri Lankan media on Saturday condemned the government over the eviction of hundreds of minority Tamils from the capital at gunpoint, and praised the Supreme Court for halting the move.
"While extraordinary measures are certainly called for to meet the growing threat of terrorism, the eviction of Tamils from any part of the country on any ground cannot be countenanced," said The Island, a privately-run, English-language newspaper.
Earlier this week, heavily-armed police and troops forced hundreds of Tamil men, women and children on to buses which took them 256 kilometres (160 miles) to the northern town of Vavuniya, near the battle zone with Tamil Tiger rebels.
"Treating all Tamils as Tigers will only help to push the innocent Tamils to the lap of the Tigers," said the Lankadeepa newspaper, published in the majority Sinhalese-language.
The Daily Mirror, a Sinhalese-owned newspaper, said the police action was a "clear and serious violation" of human rights of the Tamil minority and contributed to ethnic divisions.
After the Supreme Court order President Mahinda Rajapakse invited evicted people back to Colombo and ordered a disciplinary probe against the police chief responsible for the mass arrest and eviction.
Police sources said they were trying to undo the damage by bussing the Tamils back to Colombo. "Out of 272 held at the Vavuniya centre, we brought back 186 early this morning," a police official in Vavuniya said by telephone.
Nine people were killed in and around Colombo, a city of 600,000, in two blasts last month by suspected Tamil rebels believed to have used cheap lodgings similar to those targeted in the raids.
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