Sri Lanka: Protests erupt countrywide against fuel price hike

By Charles Haviland | BBC Sinhala
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Bus and lorry operators have gone on strike across Sri Lanka in response to sudden steep rises in the cost of fuel.

Roads have also been blockaded by fishermen who say the price hikes will ruin their livelihood.

There are fears that other basic goods will now get more expensive.

The dramatic rises in the cost of oil products came almost without notice late on Saturday.


Protestors in Negombo - 13 February 2012

In one fell swoop, the cost of diesel – used in buses and lorries – has increased by 36%, and that of kerosene, used by many poorer people, by a crippling 49%. Petrol has gone up by just nine percent.

Many people have responded angrily to the increases.


Protestors in Anuradhapura - 13 February 2012

In Chilaw on the west coast, fishermen burned tyres and blocked road traffic, chasing away the security forces and demanding a fuel subsidy. Private buses – which are more than half the total – have mostly been on strike, so people have had to use jam-packed public ones.

More than 40 people were arrested for attacking vehicles which ignored the stoppage.


Protestors in Anuradhapura - 13 February 2012

There are warnings of imminent rises in the prices of basic foods and of electricity, much of which is generated by fossil fuels in Sri Lanka.

The government says soaring world oil prices and a recent devaluation of the currency made the fuel price rises inevitable.

The opposition called the changes "anti-poor" and said they had been brought in to satisfy conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund, which is disbursing a large loan to the island.


Protestors in Chilaw - 13 February 2012

Many bus operators say they can no longer function unless the government gives them fuel subsidies or allows them to increase fares.

The authorities are nervous that US sanctions against Iran - being enforced in July - will worsen the fuel problem, as Sri Lanka gets 90% of its crude oil imports from Iran.

© BBC Sinhala

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Fuel Protests: Sri Lanka fuel users protest over steep increase

Lanka Business Online
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A steep fuel price increase in Sri Lanka to correct mounting economic imbalance and pressure on a currency peg has seen protests by bus operators and fishermen, reports said.

Fishermen blocked a road on the main road to the capital Colombo from Negambo, a fishery centre, a media report said.

Sri Lanka raised the price of kerosene by 35 rupees to 106 rupees a litre Saturday, and Diesel from by 31 rupees to 115 rupees, both fuels used by fishermen.

Sri Lanka does not have an automatic price formula to change prices based on cost, but sale prices arbitrarily changed by rulers based on political expediency.

When prices are held down for long periods, Sri Lanka's rupee peg comes under pressure, partly due to heavy borrowings from the banking system by energy utilities to buy dollars, putting pressure on both inflation and the rupee peg.

Sudden price corrections then lead to protests.

Commuters were stranded on roadsides Monday after a key bus operators' union kept buses at home

Sri Lanka's The Island newspaper quoted Lanka Private Bus Owners' Association President Gemunu Wijeratne as saying that they wanted a 17 percent fare hike of diesel at 76 rupees, lower than even the 84 rupee price before the hike

State-run buses, and operators of another union continued to run their vehicles.

The Federation of All Island Private Bus Associations a rival association had said they will continue to operator their busses.

"We have a total strength of 11,000 buses comprising 7500 for short distance travel and another 3,500 buses, on long distance running," the newspaper quoted the union chief Anjana Priyanjith as saying.

Media reports said the Treasury is expected to give a subsidy from tax payer's money to bus operators to prevent them from raising fares.

Tax payers are expected to subsidize diesel up to 80 kilometres a day per long distance bus and 60 kilometres for a short distance bus, The Sunday Times newspaper said.

The Island newspaper quoted minister for private transport C B Ratnayake as saying that Diesel would be issued at 84 rupees a litre for bus operators. Sri Lanka has a large number of ministers, including separate ministers for state and private transport.

© LBO

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Time for a reality check on the Sri Lankan civil war

By Emanuel Stoakes | The Independent
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The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) are expected to consider a motion tabled by the United States over Sri Lankan accountability for war crimes later this month, nearly three years after the end of the island nation’s bloody civil war between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a rebelsecessionist militia.

The government has been accused of multiple atrocities committed during its war effort in 2008 and 2009, including intentionally shelling thousands of civilians in a “no-fire zone” declared by the army, extra-judicial killings, torture, enforced disappearances and attacks on civilian infrastructure including hospitals.The estimates suggest that between thousands and tens and thousands were killed in the endgame of the fighting.

President MahindaRajapaksa’s administration had responded toa body of evidence that indicates the army of Sri Lanka, following orders from its civilian leadership, committed atrocities in this period by denying all, but of late has peregrinated toward greater openness. It hasmoved on from echoing the president’s claim that “not one civilian was shot dead” toward acceptance of the government-appointed “Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission” (LLRC)panel’s findings that large numbers were killed.

This may be a sign of some progress, but the conclusions of theinternal investigation- which unsurprisingly exonerates the government of responsibility for suchalleged abuses, citing “crossfire” and other factors- contraststarkly with the views of authoritative external assessments. The report of a United Nations panel last yearfound“credible allegations of serious violations committed by the Government, including killing of civilians through widespread shelling”, and by other means of violence.

The UN high commissioner for human rights, NaviPillay, stated after the report’s release that “addressing violations of international humanitarian or human rights law is not a matter of choice or policy; it is a duty under domestic and international law”-duty or not, Sri Lanka have blocked any international inquiries to date and will try to do so again later this month.

The UN’s findings, reinforced by reports from human rights groups such as Amnesty International and international media which have included video footage of executions are all of a piece, according to apologists. They posit a malicious anti-Sri Lankan campaignby LTTE sympathisers who have duped / bought off the western media (apparently I’m in on it too, according to my trolls) in order to damage the country and intimidate itsleadership.

Unfortunately, some of the rebuttals provided by officials to disputethe more compelling evidence have onlyfurther damaged the credibility ofthe government’s stance. After Channel Four broadcast an alleged “trophy video” of Sri Lankan forces executing unarmed men in 2009, a panel of domestic experts investigated the footage and declared that they had “scientifically” proven that it was a fake assembled most likely by pro-LTTE conspirators, and listed their objections.

In response, Philip Alston, Special Rappourteur for Summary, Arbitrary or Extra-judicial killings at the UNissued a point-by-point refutation of the Sri Lankan panel’s findings, drawn from the conclusion of world-leading experts in forensic pathology, forensic video analysis, and firearm evidence. Receiving the backing ofChristofHeyns, -Alston’s successor- also, the case for the authenticity of the video is now very compelling indeed.

On another occasion, PalithaKohona, a government representative, was caught out live on Al Jazeera, responding to satellite imagery of a civilian “safe zone”that depicted shell craters. He admitted that the government had fired on the area, but denied there were civilians targets. Al Jazeera broadcast footage from earlier that year of himself denying that there was any shelling in the area, because civilians were present, a claim augmented by a number of military officials who backed up Kohona.

It has been around a thousand days since the conclusion of the war. In that time the response of the government to allegations of abuses, up to and including the LLRC report has been unconvincing,redolent of political self-servicerather than an authentic attempt at truth andreconciliation. Even some of the most ardent patriots who instinctively rally toRajapaksamust be growing weary of reflexive cries of “lies and propaganda!”every time new allegations surface.Any panacea’s placebo comforts dim with overuse.

For this reason, among many others, Sri Lanka should allow for an independent inquiry into crimes that are alleged to have occurred during the endgame of the war- to decisively prove the inference of its representatives that there is nothing to hide.

Having said that, here’s a thought: if America can table such a motion and expect a response, why shouldn’t the armed forces of Tommy “we don’t do body counts” Franks, and all Bush’s men not expect the same over, say, certain events in Fallujah, Haditha and Abottabad?And doesn’t Sri Lanka’sfailure to self-examine convincinglyalso apply to Britain’s patheticHutton report on Iraq?

Sri Lanka must be held open to international scrutiny for its alleged war crimes- Britain and America too.

But don’t hold your breath.

© The Independent

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My brothers’ keepers: In Sri Lanka the grip of the Rajapaksas only tightens

By Banyan | The Economist
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The president of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, may well feel pleased with himself. On the face of it, more than six years after his first election, his prospects are still remarkably rosy. The economy clips along at about 7% a year. Mr Rajapaksa’s coalition controls over two-thirds of parliament, and opposition parties are so weak that a senior minister chuckles about not being held to account. The chief political threat, Sarath Fonseka, a former general turned popular presidential candidate, is in a Colombo jail. There, says an MP who has visited him, he wears short trousers and passes his days in a cell known as the “Scouting Room”, complete with a portrait of Baden-Powell.

Confidence lay behind the heavy hint dropped on February 8th by Basil Rajapaksa, the economy minister, that Mr Fonseka, a classmate chum, might soon leave prison and even return to politics. Basil is one of several Rajapaksa brothers, the one reckoned to be the brains of the ruling family. Possibly he thinks that Mr Fonseka may make a fool of himself at large, while enjoying martyr status behind bars.

On independence day, February 4th, the president chided his countrymen, urging them to be more grateful. It is true that since a bitter end in 2009 to a long, wretched ethnic civil war, the lot of many Sri Lankans has steadily improved. The state of emergency is gone, even if other draconian laws remain. Many of the tens of thousands of Tamils detained in the north at the war’s end have been released. New roads, ports, railways and power stations are spreading. In Colombo, the capital, various swanky structures are rising and the ground has been cleared for a lotus-shaped tower intended to be South Asia’s tallest.

How, then, to explain a persistent grouchiness among Sri Lankans? The past months have brought strikes, riots and protests by students, railwaymen, prisoners and public workers. The opposition Tamil National Alliance swept local elections in the north, leaving the president’s party in the dust. Ranil Wickremasinghe, the main Sinhalese opposition leader, no ball of energy himself, claims to see wide “protests and agitation against unfulfilled promises”.

Hushed café talk about a “Colombo spring” overstates things, but Mr Rajapaksa may remember how such grumbles and protests helped his own rise to power. Most outsiders focus on his headaches abroad. In March the United Nations will consider a resolution on Sri Lanka over suspected killings of thousands of Tamil civilians and rebel prisoners in the last days of the war. Last month Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, said America would vote against Sri Lanka. A retired senior official frets about an “adversarial lock” closing on his country.

Yet matters at home may be more troubling. Furious recriminations followed the murder in October of a senior politician, an old friend of the president, in a shoot-out with a fellow MP. Rumours of graft in infrastructure deals persist. A big investor calls the government “extremely corrupt and arrogant”. In the past this businessman went along with kickbacks of a “few million dollars: this is a developing country, after all”; but he balked once demands rose to tens of millions of dollars to win tenders for projects funded with Chinese loans. The bribes, he suggests, are split between Chinese state-owned partners and members of the ruling clique. Morals aside, he says this makes it impossible to turn a profit. He has been threatened, including with violence, for speaking out.

In the capital, commentators, activists and business types—who all demand anonymity on the topic of the Rajapaksas—warn of a family rule that has become more centralised, heavy-handed and authoritarian. Here, the defence secretary, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, is most often mentioned. Whereas the president has an earthy charm that appeals to rural Sinhalese, Gotabaya Rajapaksa wields power more bluntly. He presides over both army and police, 300,000 armed men in all—just what a good democracy needs, he says. This year the defence budget will top $2 billion, a fifth of all public spending—an alarming share for a country now at peace. The army’s role in business is also growing. An economist and opposition figure, Harsha de Silva, says the army is getting into hotels, farming, construction, golf courses, sports stadiums and even running roadside tea stalls.

The vegetarian strongman

The defence secretary, curiously, also oversees urban development, giving Gotabaya wide powers of patronage. His brother, Basil, calls him “fully vegetarian…the nicest, kindest person in the family”, yet he is widely feared. A Tamil leader says the army oversees “oppressive, insulting, humiliating” rule in the north, with tales of land grabs, murders and rape. In Colombo political observers worry about the militarisation of politics. And though Gotabaya rejects the natural comparison with Pakistan, he enthuses about his recent expansion of what he calls his “huge” intelligence agencies. A suggestion that spooks can undermine democracy is dismissed as merely “hypothetical”. Yet some local journalists are warned by editors never to write about him. Asked if he frightens people, he says: “If they don’t criticise me, it is because there is nothing to criticise.”

Some think that growing army clout could be the defence secretary’s personal route to power. It presumes potential discord among the brothers, of which there is no sign yet. Gotabaya disavows any interest in politics: he is an army man, he says. A human-rights lawyer, whose home was once attacked by assailants with grenades, raises a greater fear. If the ruling family feels it can rely on the army, it may worry less about appealing to voters; one day, it may even refuse to “go home”. Unsurprisingly, the Rajapaksas see it otherwise. “We brothers are a very successful family, maybe because we grew up close,” says Gotabaya. The brothers’ rule looks assured for a while yet.

© The Economist

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Sri Lanka: Tamil businessman abducted ahead of FR case

The Sunday Times
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An armed group grabbed a businessman from outside his residence at Wellawatte around 3.30 p.m. yesterday, two days before a fundamental rights case filed by him was to be taken up. Police said Ramasamay Prabhakaran, 42, was bundled into a white van by seven men armed with assault rifles and hand guns before it sped towards Dehiwala.

The men abducted the businessman in front of his wife and daughter shortly after the family had returned from Athurugiriya, police said adding that an islandwide alert had been sent out about the vehicle.

The Sunday Times learns that the businessman, had earlier been detained for about two years, on allegations that he had links with the LTTE but was released on September 16 last year due to lack of evidence and all charges were dropped.

Subsequently, the businessman had filed a Fundamental Rights case in the Supreme Court where senior police officers attached to the Colombo Crime Division (CCD) were cited as respondents.

The FR case was to be taken up for hearing tomorrow. Leave to proceed was granted earlier.

“The armed men were hiding in our compound, surrounded by a brick wall. They grabbed my husband by the neck and dragged him towards the vehicle. He was screaming for help as they sped away,” his wife Shiromi told the Sunday Times.

She later made a complaint to the Wellawatte police. “The police told me that the registration number of the white van was a fake,” she said.

© The Sunday Times

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The fog of an uncivil war in Sri Lanka

By Mark McDonald | IHT Rendezvous
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It has been nearly three years since Sri Lankan government troops crushed the separatist Tamil Tigers in a gory, scorched-earth campaign that brought an end to three decades of civil war. The final battles — with some 300,000 civilians caught in the crossfire — were fought on the northern beaches and in the impoverished hamlets of the island nation.

But the fog of war still has not lifted in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka said Tuesday that it would not be sending a review of alleged war crimes to the United Nations for discussion. There’s no need, a senior government official said, because its international critics in New York won’t be persuaded anyway.

A United Nations report has already called for an international inquiry into likely atrocities. Investigators found credible claims that a lot of hands had a lot of blood on them. The Tigers, after all, pretty much invented suicide bombing and the use of female suicide bombers. And Sri Lankan artillery batteries unleashed hell, even if civilians were in the way.

Here’s one representative sentence from the U.N. findings: “The Government systematically shelled hospitals on the frontlines.’’ And this sentence, which found that the Tigers “started point-blank shooting of civilians who attempted to escape the conflict zone.’’

It was that kind of war. More like murder.

In December, after the Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission had taken testimonies from hundreds of battlefield witnesses, the government completed its review of the war.

Suresh Premachandran of the Tamil National Alliance, the leading political party of the minority Tamils, told The Associated Press that the government’s submersion of the report was meant to deflect a likely storm of criticism over its end-game prosecution of the war.

Sri Lanka’s Foreign Ministry secretary told the Daily News in Colombo that government critics could not be persuaded by any explanation or defense. “We know that we can’t make them happy no matter what we do,’’ said Karunatilaka Amunugama.

In a recent commentary in The New York Times, the journalist Namini Wijedasa said the government report was “a valuable document, but regarding the war’s final weeks, it is largely an apologia for the army.’’

Sri Lanka’s Independence Day falls on Saturday, marking the former colony’s break from Britain in 1948. The timing would seem propitious for a reversal of the government’s stance on its refusal to make a break with its more recent past.

Forwarding its report to the U.N. might also elicit some assistance from Washington if the United States and the European Union place further sanctions on Iran. Sri Lanka gets 93 percent of its oil from Iran.

A senior U.S. Treasury official, Luke Bronin, is scheduled to have talks in Sri Lanka on Thursday. Iranian sanctions will certainly be on the agenda.

“We need an alternative. We’ll tell them to give us an alternative,” President Mahinda Rajapaksa told reporters on Tuesday, noting that in the end, U.S. and E.U. sanctions “are not punishing Iran — they are punishing us, small countries.’’

He was asked if he would ask for a waiver of the sanctions, for a way to escape the Washington-Tehran crossfire.

“We might,’’ the president said. “Otherwise, how do we survive?’’

© IHT Rendezvous

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'Black January' marked amidst rival protests

Photo courtesy: vikalpa.org

BBC Sinhala
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Media organisations in Sri Lanka have been marking 'Black January' while an international watchdog has downgraded the country's rank in Press Freedom Index (PFI).

The annual Press Freedom Index issued by Paris based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has ranked Sri Lanka 163 out of 178 countries ranked. Sri Lanka was ranked 158 in 2010.

The campaign in Colombo, organised by Sri Lanka's Alliance of Media Organizations, to mark killings of journalists and threats and intimidation against media personnel in January, is also supported by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).

The protest marks recent attacks in January including the murder of Sunday Leader editor, Lasantha wickrematunga in 2009, the disappearance of political columnist Prageeth Ekneligoda in 2010, the attack on Sirasa media network in 2009 and the brutal attack on television producer Lal Hemantha Mawalage in 2008.

Press Freedom Index

The protest that was to be held in front of Colombo fort railway station was forced to shift to Lipton Roundabout as pro-government groups staged a protest at the railway station hours before 'Black January' protest.

Sarath Kumara Perera, the convener of Free Media Association (FMA) which staged the pro-government protest accused the 'Black January' protesters of being "traitors" and "trying to create unrest in the country" using foreign funding.

Traffic in front of the railway station was disrupted by the protest, co-organised by the FMA and Organisation of Self-Employed.

Chandana Sirimalwatta of Journalists Against Oppression, categorically rejected FMA views.

Media in Sri Lanka has a right to reveal what is actually happening in the country, he said, and accused the pro-government protesters of being involved in media oppression.

Releasing the PFI, the RSF said: "The stranglehold of the Rajapakse clan forced the last few opposition journalists to flee the country. Any that stayed behind were regularly subjected to harassment and threats."

It added though attacks were less common, impunity contributed to self-censorship “by almost all media outlets”.

© BBC Sinhala

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Families and activists demand information on Sri Lanka's disappeared journalist, civilians

Photo courtesy: vikalpa.org

By Krishan Francis | Winnipeg Free Press
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Families, activists and opposition politicians marched in the capital Tuesday demanding information about the disappearances of a journalist and abducted civilians.

The civilians disappeared after they allegedly were abducted by a pro-government militia, and columnist and cartoonist Prageeth Ekneligoda had criticized the government before he went missing two years ago Tuesday.

The protesters carrying candles and photographs of the missing marched to a church where they prayed for freedom for the victims.

"I have gone everywhere possible over the past two years to know the whereabouts of Prageeth," said Sandhya Ekneligoda, the journalist's wife. "We must join hands and take this struggle together," she told other women who participated in the campaign.

Last year Sandhya sought the help of the United Nations to help trace the journalist, and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon announced that the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and UNESCO the world's body's educational organization are looking into the case.

However, there has been no information on Prageeth.

Sandhya chanted prayers at the church calling for "strength and freedom" for her children and husband.

"Give me a family, find my husband and children," read banners carried by the protesters.

Opposition politician and activist Mano Ganeshan accused the government of abductions.

"There is no one else to do it but the government," he said. "We tell the government to explain what happened to these people before trying to defend yourselves internationally."

Foreign governments and human rights groups have heavily criticized Sri Lanka's human rights record, especially during the final stages of the civil war that ended with the defeat of the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels in 2009.

Scores of ethnic Tamils suspected of having links with the rebels disappeared after being abducted. Journalists were killed, some imprisoned and others were taken away and severely beaten.

© AP

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‘In ravaged times, poets become the voice of the voiceless’ - Tamil Poet Cheran

By Bhamati Sivapalan | Tehelka
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R.Cheran is a Sri Lankan Tamil poet and academician, born in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. He published his first collection of poems Irandaavathu Suriya Uthayam (The Second Sunrise) in 1982. His other titles include Yaman (God of Death) (1984), together with an anthology of Tamil resistance poems, Maranatthul Vaalvom (Amidst Death, We Live), which he edited in 1985, and Miindum Kadalukku (Once More, The Sea), published in 2004. He is currently a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Windsor, Canada.

A lot of your literature deals with the Sri Lankan Tamil experience. In places caught in ethnic conflicts, we witnesses destruction of cultural identity. In this context, how do you position your work?

My first collection of poetry was titled The Second Sunrise in English. It was written in 1981 after the burning of the Jaffna public library. When I look back, I am reminded of a saying by a German writer and intellectual: “First you burn books, then you end up burning human beings.”

That's very pertinent to what you're asking. I was very close to that library. Every Saturday my father would take us to the library. I would spend 4-5 hours there. I was a young university student in Jaffna at the time of the burning. We couldn't go to the library when it was being burnt but we went the next day. We saw a large number of Sri Lankan soldiers and other agents of the state stationed next to it in a huge stadium. They were laughing and mocking us. That is my very first memory of the library being burnt.

My poem was symbolic. It simply depicts the burning of the library as the second rise, which is unimaginably ironic, right? It’s a second sunrise in the sense that the Tamils were about to resist the cultural genocide. And this was the time when various Tamil militant movements emerged.

In the past 30 years, there has been a systematic attempt by the state of Sri Lanka to ethnically cleanse and culturally subjugate the entire Tamil population. And the culmination of that particular project, ethnic cleansing and pogrom, is the May 2009 genocide of Tamils.

How does your work counter this narrative of cultural genocide?

Well in one sense, in the past 30 years, my eight collections of poetry have been a witness to the ongoing resistance of the Tamils and the genocidal massacres of the Tamils by the Sri Lankan state. So in that sense I became a witness to that history. My witnessing is not just as a historian or an archaeologist or a social scientist. It’s the poet as the witness, which involves a different kind of sensibility. It’s a different kind of imagination that is involved in this particular kind of being a witness, which you can very clearly see in my work.

A lot of poetry that comes out of conflict spaces often tends to be primarily valued as a sociological document. Does its value then, as a craft for the literary devices, run the risk of going unnoticed?

That’s an interesting observation… I would like to mention that the cultural theorist Leo Lowenthal who said that historians, social scientists and sociologists should be prevented or banned from using poetry as raw material for their works. But on the other hand, when public intellectuals like journalists, politicians and academicians are silent to this kind of genocide or ethnic cleansing, the poets step in and articulate a particular kind of resistance. That shouldn't be the primary work of a poet. However, in the absence of all other voices of resistance, in the absence of counter narratives, sometimes it happens that the poets become the voice of the voiceless.

The second point is that, it is not that the poetry I wrote or the ones that my colleagues wrote were simply agitprop poetry. It’s not ‘kavitai koshum’ (sloganeering poetry) as we say in Tamil. But rather this is a different kind of poetry with a different sensibility and speaks to a particular kind of nuance at times of conflict, war, disappearances and genocide. The particular poetic movement that emerged in the north east of Sri Lanka in Tamil greatly impacted the Tamil poetry in Tamil Nadu and in various other parts of the world. When my poetry was translated to Kannada, some of the key Kannada literary critics and poets felt that the poetry from north eastern Sri Lanka had an organic combination of poetry, protest, resistance and aesthetics that was unique. So that is what I think differentiates the kind of poetry that I wrote and my colleagues wrote. That's a very important distinction. We can't simply say that this is a kind of poetry that witnesses an agony and resistance but there is more to it.

Bhamati Sivapalan is a Video Correspondent with Tehelka.com

© Tehelka

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Sri Lanka jail riot 'injures 31' in Colombo

BBC News
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At least 31 people have been injured in clashes between guards and rioting inmates at a prison in the Sri Lankan capital, hospital officials say.

Most of the injured are prisoners who were shot by guards. Police deny claims that three inmates were killed.

Several buildings were set alight in the remand wing of Colombo's main prison before order was restored.

Prisoners say they want better food and conditions. Police said inmates were angry at moves to curb drug smuggling.

The head of Sri Lanka's prisons department admitted that the treatment of prisoners in the jail fell short of acceptable standards.

A local resident told the Associated Press news agency that disturbances had been going on for several days.
Wounds 'not serious'

Throughout Tuesday smoke billowed from the Welikada (Magazine) prison as dozens of inmates demonstrated on the rooftops. Some held up a banner calling for the head of the prison to be removed.

The BBC's Charles Haviland says the air outside the jail was acrid with tear gas and smoke - inside the barrier gate the prison is teeming with police and armed military.

Ambulances have been taking the wounded to Colombo's National Hospital. A senior staff member there told the BBC that 26 inmates and five officers were being treated, although the injuries were not serious.

The prisoners had gunshot wounds, mostly below the knee. The officers had head or leg injuries after being assaulted.

Earlier, one of the inmates told the BBC Sinhala service that three prisoners had been killed when officers at the gates shot at a large group in the compound.

The deaths are unconfirmed and exactly what happened is unclear.

Police spokesman Ajith Rohana said gunfire and tear gas had been used after prisoners rioted over new regulations.

"The new prison administration have launched a massive programme in order to curtail the drugs inside the prison and apart from that to prevent drugs going inside the prison," he said.

"I think this is the reason for this protest."

But the prisoners said the new rules in fact banned food from outside.

Later the head of the prisons department told BBC Sinhala that the treatment of the prisoners was less than ideal and that this would be corrected.

Prisons Commissioner PW Kodippili said food had been sent in but there was no immediate confirmation of this from the prisoners.

He also said that 180 remand prisoners suspected of links with the Tamil Tigers had now been transferred to another jail.

© BBC News

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