Tigers Conduct Seven Suicide Missions in 24 Hours

The United Nations has asked Sri Lanka to prosecute ‘to the fullest extent of the law’ 108 Sri Lankan soldiers with the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti for sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of minors, including prostitution, the Sunday Times reported. The number is one of the biggest single withdrawal of soldiers from a UN peacekeeping mission. During the conflict numerous local and international NGOs protested both frequent rapes by security forces and the climate of impunity in which they occur.

The charges against the Sri Lankan soldiers may include rape (which is constituted a "war crime" in the context of military conflicts) involving children under 18 years of age, the paper said.

The ejection of 108 out of Sri Lanka’s contingent of 950 for sex crimes highlights the frequency of rape during Sri Lankan operation in the Northeast during the decades long conflict.

Tamil IDPs inside the barbed-wire internment camps in Sri Lanka Army (SLA) controlled Vavuniyaa are not only medically underserved, but are subjected to degrading interrogations and there are reports of regular rapes and killings, reveals a well known German writer and Human Rights activist, Thomas Seibert, who recently returned from Sri Lanka after a humanitarian trip, conducting personal interviews that described the plight of civilians kept as near-prisoners under the SLA occupation.

Tens of thousands of people who flee from the battle field have been identified and housed by the Sri Lanka Army and its paramilitaries in several camps located around Vavuniyaa.

`Many are tortured or simply shot. There are also reports of regular rapes,` Medico International quoted Thomas Seibert in a press statement.

In Sri Lanka, like in many other countries, incidents of rape in the context of armed conflict such as the above examples are reported on a regular basis.(2) During 2001, Amnesty International has noted a marked rise in allegations of rape by police, army and navy personnel. (See Appendix for details of some cases reported recently.)

Among the victims of rape by the security forces are many internally displaced women, women who admit being or having been members of the LTTE and female relatives of members or suspected male members of the LTTE. Some reports of rape in custody concern children as young as 14 (See Case No. 5, Thangiah Vijayalalitha, Appendix 1).

Complaints of rape, like other complaints of torture, are often not effectively dealt with by police, magistrates or doctors. Deficiencies in the early stages of the criminal investigation process have repeatedly contributed to the ultimate collapse of the investigation of the alleged rape and the prosecution of the alleged perpetrators.

Alarmed at the apparent rise in reports of rape, Amnesty International on 4 April 2001 wrote to the President of Sri Lanka urging her to take action to stop rape by security forces and bring perpetrators to justice. The appeal followed reports of rape by security forces in Mannar, Batticaloa, Negombo and Jaffna, including the rape of Sinnathamby Sivamany and Ehamparam Wijikala described above. To date, no response has been received to the appeal.

Torture has been widespread in Sri Lanka for many years. Amnesty International has obtained many testimonies of torture, corroborated by medical certificates.

Many of the recent reports of torture are linked to the conflict between the security forces and the LTTE. The fighting in the northern Jaffna peninsula increased sharply in April this year, and since then there has been an increase in reports of torture, including reports from elsewhere in the country.

After this increase in violence, the government issued new Emergency Regulations on 3 May, under which the security forces have wider powers to arrest and detain suspects. A suspect may now be held in preventive detention for up to a year, without being produced before a court, on the orders of the Defence Secretary. Anyone arrested in connection with a possible offence against these regulations can be held for up to 90 days if arrested in the north or east of the country, or 30 days elsewhere, before being produced before a magistrate. Under the previous Emergency Regulations such suspects could be held for 60 and 21 days respectively. Suspects can also be held for up to 18 months under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The increase in the maximum period of detention has put prisoners at greater risk of abuse in custody.

In the conflict between the Sri Lankan security forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (known as the “Tamil Tigers”), women in custody have been blindfolded, beaten, and raped by army, police and navy officials. For example, in March 2001, Sinnathamby Sivamany and Ehamparam Wijikala, two young Tamil women, were arrested by members of the navy in the coastal city of Mannar and taken to the office of a special police unit. Ehamparam Wijikala was brutally raped by two officers inside the police station. Sinnathamby Sivamany was blindfolded, undressed and raped in a van outside the station. Later, both women were forced to parade naked and then suspended for about 90 minutes by their hands and legs from a pole placed between two tables. They were also pinched and beaten with a thick wire.

MINUSTAH's Office of Internal Oversight Services investigated cases of alleged sexual exploitation and abuse of minors by MINUSTAH security forces during the year and submitted completed investigations to UN headquarters for final disposition. The government did not receive expected reports from UN headquarters or the government of Sri Lanka concerning the accusations against Sri Lankan peacekeepers of "transactional" sexual exploitation or sexual involvement with minors in 2007.