International action slow to stem Sri Lanka bloodshed: HRW

NEW YORK (AFP) - Global concern is mounting over Sri Lanka's worsening human rights record, but action by key international players has been "slow and lacked cohesion," Human Rights Watch said in its annual report.

The group said Sri Lanka managed to head off censure in the UN Human Rights Council by agreeing to host UN officials, though Colombo later rejected UN demands for the global body to monitor human rights in the country.

"Expressions of concern about the situation in Sri Lanka grew in 2007, but international action on human rights was slow and lacked cohesion," the New York-based group said.

The US government's Millennium Challenge Corporation suspended more than 110 million dollars in aid to Sri Lanka due to concerns about the island's human rights situation, HRW said.

It said Britain had also suspended three million dollars in debt relief citing concerns over human rights and high defence spending to battle separatist Tamil Tiger guerrillas.

More than 1,100 new "disappearances" or abductions were reported in Sri Lanka between January 2006 and June 2007, with the vast majority of victims being Tamils, the watchdog said.

The group has been lobbying Japan, Sri Lanka's largest single aid donor, to use financial assistance to the Colombo government as leverage to force the government of President Mahinda Rajapakse to clean up its rights record.

In the continuing conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), both sides show little regard for the safety and well-being of civilians, the report said.

Since a resumption of major military operations in mid-2006, which led to a collapse of a Norwegian-arranged ceasefire earlier this month, hundreds of civilians have been killed and more than 208,000 displaced, the group said.

Government security forces were implicated in extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, forcibly returning internally displaced persons to unsafe areas and restricting media freedoms.

Hundreds of people have also been detained under newly strengthened emergency regulations that gave the government broad powers of arrest and detention without charge, the group said.

"The regulations have been used to conduct mass arbitrary arrests of ethnic Tamils in the capital Colombo, as well as to detain political opponents, journalists, and civil society activists."

In areas under its control, the LTTE continues to forcibly conscript children and adults, control the media, and suppress freedoms of expression, association and assembly, the group said.

Tens of thousands of people have died and many more have been displaced since the LTTE launched a separatist campaign in 1972 for an independent homeland for minority Tamils in the majority Sinhalese nation.