Amidst reports of widespread sexual violence by the Sri Lankan army on suspected LTTE rebels, the Human Right Watch (HRW) has sought an international investigation.
The investigation demands came after a report, ” ‘We will teach you a lesson’: Sexual violence against Tamils by Sri Lankan Security Forces“.
The report is said to have contained a list of 75 cases of rape and sexual assault. These incidents happened all across Sri Lanka, from 2006 to 2012.
The majority of the cases are said to have happened during the armed conflict (with LTTE) that ended in may 2009.
The conflict ended almost three years ago, but the incidents of sexual violence continues till this day, the report quoted.
The revelations were confirmed by HRW Asia Director Brad Adams.
“The Sri Lankan security forces have committed untold numbers of rapes of Tamil men and women in custody. These are not just wartime atrocities but continue to the present, putting every Tamil man/woman arrested for suspected LTTE involvement at serious risk”, he was quoted in a news report published in national daily the Hindu.
The pictures fill in chilling details on the circumstances of his murder — and leave the Sri Lankan government with yet more questions to answer about just how systematic the executions at the end of the war appear to have been. Last year, we first revealed video footage and stills which showed Balachandran’s body shortly after his execution. These were analysed for us by a respected forensic pathologist, Professor Derrick Pounder, to assess the cause of death.
Murder of Tamils, Sri Lanka
The professor identified what he thinks is the first of the shots to be fired at the boy: “There is a speckling (on the skin) from propellant tattooing, indicating that the distance of the muzzle of the weapon to this boy’s chest was two to three feet or less. He could have reached out with his hand and touched the gun that killed him.”
The professor said the angle of the shots suggested that after that bullet was fired, the boy fell backwards and was then shot four more times. Unlike the men around him, there was no indication that the boy had been blindfolded or bound, so it was possible that the boy may have been made to watch the execution of his guards before the gun was turned on him.
The new photographs released today give us a chilling insight into what happened before that. They appear to demonstrate that the situation was calm and orderly. Balachandran was given a snack and some water. There was time to take photographs while he was held in the bunker and again afterwards. The forensic analysis report on the photographs concludes that there is “no evidence to indicate fabrication, manipulation or the use of effects to create the images” and concludes that the photographs “appear to be an accurate representation of the events depicted.”
From the separate video sequence recorded later (which has also been authenticated by both digital video analysis), it is clear that there were several military personnel in the area.
Investigation on war crimes and crimes against humanity,” said director Callum Macrae in a recorded message from London, adding that he hoped the film would lead to informed debate about the issue in the United Nations.
The so called allegations in their footage of the entire Channel Four episode on the last stages of war in Sri Lanka, is fabricated and the government completely denies and rejects the, Mass Media and Information Minister Keheliya Rambukwella said.
The ‘Daily News’ reported that the minister was addressing the Cabinet press briefing yesterday at the Ministry Auditorium.
This is an organised agenda of pro-LTTE diaspora to tarnish the image of the country by releasing of this kind of sensational footages on the verge of the UNHRC sessions in Geneva, the minister said.
He questioned that without releasing it soon after the war, why the Channel Four to 3 to 4 years to come up with this documentary.
The minister said, observing the pattern, that the next doctored documentary of the Channel Four on the war in Sri Lanka to be released just before the next UNHRC sessions next year could be easily predicted.
He requested that the content of the footage should be critically analyzed as the government on earlier occasions had challenged them.
He stressed that the former army commander and security forces had plainly rejected these claims which had been directed at the entire security establishments, adding that, a technical analysis on Channel Four’s latest documentary on Sri Lanka is now in progress.
In a technical analysis of the mobile phone footage on behalf of Sri Lanka’s Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission, E. A. Yfantis, a professor of computer science at University of Nevada-Las Vegas specialising in computer graphics and image processing, stated that “based on mathematical analysis, blood in the 3GP videos is not real blood. It is not clear if the blood in the 3GP scenes is water with red dye or digitally constructed or edited video blood” and that “videographic and mathematical analysis of the two 3GP videos show that the videos either were edited, or staged, or both”. He concluded that “Careful analysis of the two 3GP videos which included both frame by frame visual inspection as well as the robust mathematical attributes of the video frames, has led us to the conclusion that this is a very deliberate and orchestrated video”.(Wiki)
Earlier Channel 4 telecast last Year the Genocide of the Tamils in Sri Lanka.
Now a New Documentary is being released and it will be shown to UNHR.
The bodies of Tamil women civilians lay smouldering on the floor in northern Sri Lanka after being deliberately targeted by Sri Lanka nationalist forces of Mahinda Rajapaksa. These bodies are not only the result of strident uncontrolled nationalism, but the direct effects of Globalisation between the world’s largest powers, the United States, China and India in the first initial pre-amble to multi-polarity developing throughout the world.
Would they take action against Rajapakshe and his band of Thugs at least now?
n one of the most repugnant images yet seen during the so-called War on Terror, A Tamil woman between 20 and 30 years of age lies dead in the mud after being raped and shot to death by nationalist Rajapaksa military forces during the ethnic cleansing of 2009. As an increasing body of evidence now illustrates, scenes like this were common throughout the north of Sri Lanka despite initial claims by government sources that incidents of this type were exceptional. In an attempt to explain this behaviour, the Sri Lankan military have claimed that disrobing and open handed detailing of bodies is required to search for weapons, explosives or documents as standard operating procedure. In many of these incidents, females have been found naked, blindfolded with clothing removed just enough to expose sexual organs with hands tied behind the back and gunshot wounds to the head. In almost all cases, females are found in face up positions with their legs splayed. It should be noted that the operation conducted by nationalist forces in Sri Lanka has not been made possible by competent anti-terrorist training for the role, or a degree of professionalism, but by a sudden influx of finance and military weapons and ordnance from the United States and China. This influx simply brought the Sri Lankan military into a position in which it had the military capability to overshoot its natural lack of competence.
Carefully evidenced and powerfully measured, ‘No Fire Zone’ is a feature length film about the final awful months of the 26 year long Sri Lankan civil war told by the people who lived through it. It is a meticulous and chilling expose of some of the worst war crimes and crimes against humanity of recent times – told through the extraordinary personal stories of a small group of characters and also through some of the most dramatic and disturbing video evidence ever recorded.
This footage allows us to document the day to day horror of this war in a way almost never done before: Footage recorded by both the victims and perpetrators on mobile phones and small cameras – viscerally powerful actuality from the battlefield, from inside the crudely dug civilian bunkers and over-crowded makeshift hospitals.
Footage which is nothing less than direct evidence of war crimes, summary execution, torture and sexual violence.
This was supposed to be a war conducted in secret. The Government excluded the international press, forced the UN to leave the war zone and ruthlessly silenced the Sri Lankan media – literally dozens of media workers were killed, exiled or disappeared. While the world looked away in the first few months of 2009 around 40,000 to 70,000 civilians were massacred – mostly by Sri Lankan government shelling, though the Tamil Tigers also stand accused of war crimes.
The film starts in September 2008. An air of deep foreboding hung over Kilinochchi– the de facto capital of the Tamil homelands of Northern Sri Lanka. The armed forces of the ultra-nationalist Sinhalese government of Sri Lanka were on the move, and the brutal secessionist army of the Tamil Tigers was on the retreat. After a twenty-six year revolt – the scene was set for the final awful endgame.
We have looked at and translated hours of raw footage which captures the day-to-day life of the people who lived and in many cases died – during the 138 days of hell which form the central narrative of our film. This footage is an incredibly intimate account of human suffering.
But the film is also built around compelling personal stories. There is Vany – a young British Tamil who was visiting relatives in Sri Lanka who became trapped along with hundreds of thousands of other men, women and children, desperately fleeing the government onslaught. She had trained as a medical technician in the UK, now she found herself helping in a makeshift hospital while doctors tried to treat hundreds of desperately injured people, in some cases performing major surgery without general anaesthetic.
Other people who tell their stories include two of the last UN workers – Peter Mackay and Benjamin Dix – forced to leave on the orders of the UN which, they feel, was betraying its fundamental duty to protect.
Inevitably too, this film is the personal story of some who didn’t make it.
‘No Fire Zone’ also brings the story up to date. The Sri Lankan government still denies this all happened in what thy describe as an “humanitarian rescue”. The repression and ethnic restructuring of the Tamil homelands in the north of Sri Lanka continues – journalists and government critics are still disappearing. The government will tolerate no opposition and have even turned on their own judiciary, impeaching the Chief Justice of the country when she found they had acted unconstitutionally.
Without truth there can be no justice in Sri Lanka. And without justice there can be no peace. We hope our film can be part of that truth-telling.
We offer this film, not just as the definitive film of record, but also in the hope it will jolt the international community and audience to call for action.
Like all crimes, it was all supposed to be conducted in secret.
In September 2008, as Sri Lankan government forces pushed the fighters of the Tamil Tigers further and further back into the Tamil homelands of the north, the government ordered the UN to evacuate their last few international workers from Kilinochchi, the Tigers’ de facto capital.
The reason, they said, was they could no longer guarantee their safety.
The real reason was far less honorable: They did not want any witnesses to what was coming.
One of the UN staff, communications Officer Benjamin Dix, recalls how distressed and angry they felt. A mood which was not improved by the celebratory party the UN threw for them when they escaped the war zone.
“I remember feeling pretty disgusted by that party. I didn’t see that there was anything there to celebrate. What we had actually done was complete abandonment of our duty of protection of civilians in a conflict situation,” he said.
The next day Dix resigned from his post. But even he had no idea just how catastrophic that abandonment was, how awful was the disaster that was about to befall the people left behind.
With the UN out of the region, with international media excluded and local journalists and critics silenced, exiled, disappeared or in fear of their life, the government felt ready to launch the final offensive.
On January 2, 2009, Kilinochchi fell. Between 300,000 and 400,000 civilians were on the run, fleeing further into the Tiger-held territory. But they were fleeing into a terrible trap – a trap which would see tens of thousands of them die, mostly (as a UN panel of experts later concluded) as a result of targeted government shelling.
Back in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo, the increasingly autocratic regime of President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother, the Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, was determined to finish the Tigers off. As the then UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, Sir John Homes told me: “They were not going to let anybody stop them do that. Either the international community, the media or the fear of humanitarian issues of civilian casualties. And that’s the way it worked out.”
And if any local journalists were thinking of challenging that plan, they were about to receive a painful reminder of what the consequences might be.
Soon after the fall of Kilinochchi, the founding editor of the Colombo Sunday Leader, the Sinhalese writer, Lasantha Wickrementunge, wrote an article attacking the government’s military triumphalism and commitment to a military solution to the Tigers 26-year insurgency. It was not an easy article to write; he had once been a personal friend and admirer of the president.
A few days later, as Wickrementunge was driving to work, he was ambushed and executed by four unknown assailants on motorbikes.
After his death his newspaper published a front page editorial he had written in anticipation of his own murder. It was addressed to his former friend, the president. “For all the dreams you had for our country in your younger days . . . you have trampled on human rights, nurtured unbridled corruption and squandered public money like no other president before you.”
And he concluded:
“When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me.”
But pleas concerning this dead journalist had no effect.
To the regime in Colombo, it must have seemed like all the elements were in place: There was no one left to witness what was about to happen.
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