Defense Minister and brother of the President Mahinda Rajapakshe, Sri Lanka declared ,
“”I will be surprised if my military did not rape Tamil women.”
This he said in his statement in an interview.
“Sri Lanka’s Defence Secretary, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, accused the British Tamil aid worker, Damilvany Kumar of fabricating the story in an interview with Headlines Today:
“Now, she [Damilvany Kumar] says that there had been all these alleged rape and murder and all these things. Now she is one person who will get attracted by soldiers, because she is so different from others.
I want to know whether she was raped. She was there for one year. She came with the IDPs, and she was in the IDP camps.”
The permanent secretary to the Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights,Rajiva Wijesinha, stating that allegations of rape by the military lacked sufficient details to be substantiated, told The Observer:
“We received a report that a soldier went into a tent at 11pm and came out at 3am. It could have been sex for pleasure, it could have been sex for favours, or it could have been a discussion on Ancient Greek philosophy, we don’t know.”
On another occasion when asked by a Sky News reporter about the allegations of sexual violence within the camps, Mr Wijesinha replied:
“There are a few blue eyed children in that camp, so you know that some of the NGOs have had a jolly good time when they were up in Vavuniya, so when you go up just have a look and try and identify them.“
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The Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict begins in London tomorrow, co-hosted by the UK’s Foreign Secretary, William Hague and the Special Envoy for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Angelina Jolie.
In the run up to the ESVC summit, we have been revisiting the mounting evidence which documents the widespread, systematic and on-going use of sexual violence by Sri Lanka’s military against Tamils, that occurs with absolute impunity.
The summit follows the Declaration of Commitment to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, tabled by the Mr Hague and endorsed by two-thirds of UN member states, which condemns the on-going use of sexual violence in conflicts and pledged to ensure justice for victims.Sri Lanka was highlighted by the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as a key country where rape was used as a tactic of war, in October 2009, only a few months after the armed conflict ended.
Addressing an UN Security Council focused on rape in war, she said:
“Now, reading the headlines, one might think that the use of rape as a tactic of war only happens occasionally, or in a few places, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Sudan.
That would be bad enough, but the reality is much worse. We’ve seen rape used as a tactic of war before in Bosnia, Burma, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere.
In too many countries and in too many cases, the perpetrators of this violence are not punished, and so this impunity encourages further attacks.
…
Much of the photographic and video evidence of sexual violence in the final stages of the armed conflict emerged in the form of ‘trophy videos’, filmed by Sri Lankan soldiers themselves whilst committing the crimes.
One of the latest videos to emerge depicts soldiers performing acts of sexual violence on the stripped, dead bodies of Tamil LTTE fighters.
Citations. and for more check the following Links.
http://www.itamil.org/UN/Reference/An%20Officially%20rapist%20government%20of%20Sri%20lanka.html
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