The JVP, a Marxist revolutionary group drawn largely from disaffected Sinhalese students and school pupils, launched its second insurrection in 1987, the year the Indian Peace Keeping Force took charge of security in the Tamil northeast. Amnesty International recorded that the JVP 'terrorized political opponents, killing several thousand people, and had murdered the families of members of the security forces'. From 1987 to 1990 the security forces, alongside plainclothes death squads linked to them, ran what Amnesty called an 'unprecedented campaign of counter-terror'. Amnesty documented thousands of extrajudicial executions, disappearances and killings in custody, and mutilated or burned bodies left in public places. JVP leader Rohana Wijeweera died in army custody in November 1989, along with most of the politburo, and the insurgency collapsed. Totals rest on estimates: Mick Moore judged about 40,000 dead a likely order of magnitude, Human Rights Watch reported estimates of 35,000 to at least 60,000 killed and disappeared, and Amnesty later wrote of an estimated 30,000 or more disappeared in 1989-90 alone. Presidential commissions appointed in 1994 examined 27,526 complaints of disappearances since January 1988 and established 16,800; Amnesty counted fewer than 30 convictions for abduction or wrongful confinement between 1987 and 2007. The concurrent war with the LTTE in the north and east is covered in the entry on the Sri Lankan civil war, whose death toll does not include this campaign.
The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) waged an insurrection of assassinations and intimidation in Sinhala-majority Sri Lanka; government security forces and allied death squads responded with mass extrajudicial executions, disappearances and detention of suspected supporters, mostly rural Sinhalese youth
Both ends are estimates; no count was ever made. The low end follows Amnesty International's 2015 statement that an estimated 30,000 or more people were forcibly disappeared in 1989-90 alone, Mick Moore's 1993 judgment that 40,000 was a 'likely order of magnitude', and the 'more conservative' figure of around 35,000 reported by Human Rights Watch in 1990. The high end is the estimate of at least 60,000 killed and disappeared on all sides in south and central Sri Lanka by a European parliamentary delegation, cited by Human Rights Watch and repeated in a 1998 US immigration service country report. The figures include the several thousand people Amnesty says the JVP killed; Human Rights Watch reported that government-backed death squads were believed to have killed tens of thousands, and Moore that the vast majority of the dead were actual or suspected JVP members. The 16,800 disappearances established by the 1994 presidential commissions are a documented subset, not a total; their mandate covered the whole island from 1 January 1988.
Amnesty International (1990, 1991, 1995, 2015) documented extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture and killing in custody, and mass detention of JVP suspects; Human Rights Watch documented death-squad killings and prolonged incommunicado detention; and the 1994-97 presidential commissions established 16,800 enforced disappearances.
Sri Lanka