US Reports HR Violations
By Cassandra Mascarenhas
The President’s family dominates the government; two of his brothers hold key executive branch posts as defence secretary and senior advisor to the President – this is the statement made in the opening paragraph of the US State Department’s 2009 report on Human Rights in Sri Lanka. The report takes issue with a range of human rights violations said to have taken place within the country. And places particular emphasis on violations that took place during the last phase of the civil war in 2009.
The report states that towards the end of the three decade long ethnic conflict, the government’s respect for human rights declined rapidly with a large number of violations occurring outside the conflict zones as well as within them such as the killings and disappearances of mainly young male Tamils. It was reported by several NGOs and international sources that paramilitaries abducted civilians from IDP camps. The exact number of abductions was hard to confirm as many persons escaped the camps by bribing officials but observers have suggested it amounts to as many as 10,000 people.
Reports on the government, its paramilitary allies and the LTTE committing unlawful killings have proven difficult to confirm because past complainants were killed and the victims families’ feared reprisals if they filed complaints.
Such cases include the killing of The Sunday Leader Founding Editor Lasantha Wickrematunge by four assailants and the killing of a young man during an altercation at a polling site in Mount Lavinia allegedly by UPFA candidate Duminda Silva. The case was dropped shortly afterwards.
Statistics show that there have been approximately 300 to 400 disappearances over the last few years. Former detainees of the Terrorist Investigation Division at Boosa Prison (TID) have reported many incidents of torture, including beatings with iron bars, electric shocks, and burning with metal objects resulting in severe injuries. There have also been reports of secret government facilities where suspected LTTE sympathizers were taken, tortured, and often killed.
Human rights groups have estimated that the government held 11,700 combatants since the end of the conflict in detention centres near Vavuniya. Approximately 2,400 LTTE suspects were held in regular detention camps with an unknown number of detainees held in police stations, the CID, the TID, at army or paramilitary camps, and at other informal detention facilities.
Prison conditions have been reported as appalling with prisons designed for approximately 10,000 holding an estimated 26,000 prisoners of which 1,400 were women. Some 12,000 of these prisoners were convicted, while the remaining 14,000 were in detention, either awaiting or undergoing trial.
The law also prohibits arbitrary arrest and detention, which of course does not stop it from being practised, for example the case where astrologer Chandrasiri Bandara was detained for a week without charge for making negative forecasts concerning the President.
During the year there was no indication or public report that civilian or military courts convicted any military, police, or paramilitary members for human rights abuses. In some cases the military turned over members to the civilian judicial system for processing. The report also stresses that the Executive President failed to appoint the Constitutional Council, which is required under the constitution, thus obstructing the appointment of independent representatives to institutions such as the Human Rights Commission, Bribery Commission, Police Commission, and Judicial Service Commission.
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The response to this report by the government and its sympathisers including some journalists and columnists in the media, is that that USA which “is committing human rights violations in ‘many countries’ has ‘no right’ to comment on what has been going on/goes on in sri lanka”.
They ignore the fact that USA promptly prosecutes those suspected of HR violations, including members of its own armed forces and ‘army contracters’ fighting the Al quida in Iraq and the Taliban in afghanistan and civilians who do so in its own homeland.Britain does likewise.
Al quida has attacked mainland USA and embassies abroad.
So far, no indictments have been reported against ‘more than 500 members of the armed forces and police who committed human rights violations’ as reported by the lankan delegation at the annual sessions of the UN Human Rights Council in 2008 when sri lanka was voted out of the Council.
No indictments have been reported against the 108 lankan peacekeepers who were expelled by the UN from Haiti, for human rights violations of haitian females, most of them children.
No government can bang or collide with USA, they may be right or wrong,
one thing we can do collaborate with Al Queaida.
The Sri Lankan government should prove that the American were wrong. Do they have the gutts to do that?? When you are wrong you are wrong there is no way you could prove your innocents.