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Message: <blockquote data-quote="akeel1" data-source="post: 574980" data-attributes="member: 34522">Sri Lanka police evict ethnic Tamils from capital (AFP News)Sri Lankan police forced hundreds of ethnic minority Tamils out of the capital Colombo Thursday as part of an effort to clear the city of feared Tiger terror cells, officials and witnesses said. Armed police stormed Tamil-majority areas of the capital under cover of darkness and frogmarched guests at low-budget hostels into buses at gunpoint, residents said.One man who was forcibly removed told a local radio station by mobile phone that they were woken at 3.45am and moved while still wearing their night clothes.They were not even allowed to use the toilet, the man said while his bus was being escorted by police and speeding out of Colombo.The forced eviction came even as Japanese peace envoy, Yasushi Akashi, was visiting the island in a bid to try and revive the island's tattered peace process.The local media rights group, the Free Media Movement (FMM) slammed the government action and said the eviction was "tantamount to ethnic cleansing.""This reminds us of what Hitler did to the Jews," said FMM spokesman Sunanda Deshapriya.The defence ministry confirmed the eviction, but said the move was necessary to prevent Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) bomb attacks. Nine people were killed in and around Colombo, a city of 600,000 people, in two blasts last month."Investigations have also confirmed that those responsible for these brutal killings have hatched their brutal plans and executed them from these 'lodgings'," the ministry said in a statement.It said 376 people, including 85 women, were sent in seven buses to their homes in Vavuniya and Jaffna in the north and Batticaloa and Trincomalee in the east. Police sources, however, said nearly 50 buses were used.It was not clear how the civilians would be taken to the Jaffna peninsula. There is no land access to Jaffna which has been cut off since August last year.Police had last week announced they would provide transport for Tamils to return to their homes in the embattled northern and eastern regions unless they could prove they were employed in Colombo."This operation is a very bad example," Tamil political leader Dharmalingam Sithadthan said."It is OK for the LTTE to indulge in this sort of ethnic cleaning because they have no moral responsibility, but a government can't behave like this," he said.He said the police move reminded him of how the Tamil Tigers had evicted thousands of minority Muslims from the northern peninsula of Jaffna in 1990.Thousands of Tamils from revolt-hit areas arrive in the capital monthly in the hope of obtaining passports to travel abroad for employment or to secure political asylum overseas.But Tamils are required to obtain permits from the police to travel to the rest of the country under a de facto visa system put in place to prevent Tiger rebels infiltrating the capital.Official sources said restrictions were set to tighten, with the deployment of cameras to photograph anyone leaving the embattled north and east and travelling to the rest of the country. The evictions reverberated in the national parliament, where ethnic Tamil lawmakers briefly held up proceedings to protest, officials said.-AFP-</blockquote>

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