One more report nails Sri Lanka’s lies; time for action is now!

There is something terribly wrong here: the whole world says with evidence that Sri Lanka has killed thousands of innocent Tamil civilians and committed war crimes; but the island nation laughs them off saying it is a concerted effort to discredit the country.

Forget America, the UK and the rest of Europe, it was the most neutral interlocutor that one can imagine, the UN, which said first that about 40,000 innocent Tamils had been killed in 2009 – mostly by shelling to no-fire zones created by the Sri Lankan military itself – as the country pushed for its victory against the LTTE.

Rights groups all over the world recorded testimonies and case studies corroborating what the UN has said. Then came two documentaries by UK’s Channel-4 which showed chilling evidence of shelling on civilians, executions, evidence of sexual abuse and everything that can be counted as war crimes.

But Sri Lanka still maintained that there were no civilian deaths. Initially the triumphalist Rajapakse gave some silly figures of unavoidable civilian casualties, but when the evidence was mounting, he marginally revised them. Still, they refuted everything the UN and the rest of the world have said.

A Sri Lankan factory worker interviewed by the HRW. Screen-grab from YouTube video.

In Sri Lanka’s eyes, the entire world was lying and whatever it said alone was absolute truth.

Now, there is more damning evidence against Sri Lanka.

International watchdog, Human Rights Watch (HRW), on Tuesday released a 140-page report which establishes that scores of women and men were sexually abused by the security forces of the Sri Lankan regime – the military, police, intelligence and others – during 2006-2012 and it is still continuing.

The report, aptly titled “We Will Teach You a Lesson”, talks about a vengeful and ultranationalist government taking on its own citizens purely based on racial prejudice and hatred. It corroborates the recent assessment of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees that “ sexual violence, including but not limited to rape, against Tamil men in detention has also been reported recently, including reports of cases perpetrated in the post-conflict period.”

The report is a compilation of 75 case studies of alleged rape, both men and women, based on in-depth interviews with victims conducted in several countries. HRW has said that it was able to interview this many people in such a limited number of former detainees strongly indicates the possibility of widespread sexual abuse. Thousands of people had been detained during and after the war in Sri Lanka.

The report said eight cases that it documented occurred in 2012, indicating the impunity with which the Sri Lank is still thumbing is nose at the international community.

“In all of the cases documented in this report, the acts of rape and sexual violence were accompanied by other forms of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment by state security forces. The conditions in which the individuals were held—without access to judges, defense lawyers, relatives, or doctors—violated fundamental due process rights. Often the perpetrators came from more than one branch of the security forces, and included members of the Sri Lankan army, police, and pro-government Tamil paramilitary groups,” the report said.

“In the cases we investigated, most of the detainees were interrogated by Sinhala- speaking security officials with Tamil interpreters. Most were forced to sign a confession in Sinhala following their abuse, though the torture often continued after they signed confessions. Detainees were normally not released but rather allowed to “escape” after a relative paid a bribe. Human Rights Watch of necessity was only able to interview those no longer in custody—the fate of detainees who remain in custody, while unknown to us, is of urgent concern.”

Here is one of the accounts in the report – the sexual abuse of a 31 year old man, identified as KP, who was abducted by a “white van” (one of the state symbols of terror in Sri Lanka). It’s pure horror.

“During the first interrogation, the official in military fatigues forced me to undress. He tried to have oral sex with me. He forced himself on me and raped me. During questioning, the officials would squeeze my penis. They would force me to masturbate them. One of them masturbated me. I was severely tortured when I resisted. The officials would furiously say some words in Sinhala when they sexually abused me. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. They abused me in Tamil and used slang words. I was sexually abused many times during my detention. On some days, the army official who had arrested me sexually abused me during interrogation. On two nights, I was raped by prison guards. The sexual abuse by the officials stopped after I signed the confession.”

The report also quoted detainees who said prior to their rapes, they were forced to strip, their genitals or breasts groped, and they were verbally abused and mocked. HRW said it found evidence of such violation on many of their medical reports.

A number cases involved people who had returned to Sri Lanka, either as deportees with failed attempts at overseas asylum or voluntarily, indicating that for Tamils, it is a dangerous place to return to even as the government claims peace and equality for all its citizens. They get picked up at the airport itself for detention and torture. Recently, an Australian citizen (male) also had disclosed after getting back to his country that he was detained and raped in Sri Lanka.

The HRW report is one more addition to the mountain of evidence on alleged war crimes and other excesses against humanity that the Sri Lankan government and its various agencies have committed. The world will repeat what it has scientifically documented and Sri Lanka will continue to pooh pooh them with impunity.

The timing of the HRW report, as well as the upcoming Channel 4 documentary (the third in a row) that will show the alleged execution of LTTE chief Prabhakaran’s son by security forces, is no secret. It’s to build pressure on the rest of the world, particularly on fences-sitters such as India, to press for action against island nation at the UN Human Right Council.

Even under optimum circumstances, the UNHRC’s options are limited. It will at best ask for the implementations of LLRC (The Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission) that the country had established to investigate the allegations of war crime. Sri Lanka has successfully procrastinated any possible action of the LLRC by telling the world the bureaucratic steps it has taken to implement the recommendations.

What is required now is way beyond LLRC. The LLRC was a ruse of Sri Lanka to hoodwink the rest of the world – show something symbolic and continue with its excesses. And even under best circumstances, a country-led process such as LLRC will be a complete sham because the country is plainly lying.
The action should be plain and simple as Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa has demanded – economic sanctions and action at the International Court of Criminal Justice.

Taking Rajapakse to the ICC is not easy because Sri Lanka is not a signatory. It requires a UN Security Council resolution to refer the case to the ICC. With China and Russia on its side, the alleged war criminals in Sri Lanka are perhaps confident that such a resolution at the SC will never get through and they don’t go behind bars.

However, what can still work is economic sanctions. It’s high time that the world has moved towards such an affirmative action. It is the minimum that the world, particularly India, should do to instill confidence in the rest of the world’s humanity. A rogue-nation such as Sri Lanka is as dangerous as a Talibanised Pakistan.

http://www.firstpost.com/world/one-more-report-nails-sri-lankas-lies-time-for-action-is-now-641643.html