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Groton Daily Independent
Saturday, Nov. 114, 2017 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 125 ~ 47 of 66
aid, said the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee has made aid to the government conditional on its compliance with international standards for arrest and detention, as well as accountability for war crimes.
Sri Lanka has received $76 million in U.S. foreign assistance since 2015.
“These accounts of torture are horri c and contradict the Sri Lankan government’s professed commitment to reconciliation and justice,” Leahy said, adding, “I will be looking for convincing evidence that torture has ended and those responsible are being punished.”
Several doctors wrote to U.N. Human Rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein and called for an independent investigation.
“As forensic experts, we have collectively seen many hundreds of Sri Lankans who have ed their country following torture over the years,” the physicians’ letter said. “We continue to receive a worrying number of cases from Sri Lanka despite the change of government.”
One of the men in the AP investigation said he was held for 21 days in a small room where he was raped 12 times, burned with cigarettes, beaten with iron rods and hung upside-down. Another man described being abducted from home by ve men, driven to a prison, and taken to a “torture room” pocked with blood splatters on the wall.
Most of the men say they their captors identi ed themselves as members of the Criminal Investigations Department, a police unit that investigates serious crimes. Some, however, said it appeared their inter- rogators were soldiers.
Rep. Eliot Engel, top-ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said policymakers in Washington cannot ignore the torture reports.
“The seriousness of these reports should also make the United States wary of advancing our military relationship with Sri Lanka until a full accounting has occurred,” he said Friday.
Sri Lanka’s diplomatic mission in Geneva did not respond to repeated calls or an email Friday seeking comment.
U.N. human rights of ce spokesman Rupert Colville said, “We are currently looking into these alarming allegations to work out the best way for them to be further investigated.”
The AP’s investigation into the recent Sri Lankan torture allegations came months after another inves- tigation in which the AP found that 134 U.N. peacekeepers from Sri Lanka were implicated in a child sex ring in Haiti between 2004 and 2007. Despite evidence of child rape, no Sri Lankan peacekeeper was ever prosecuted.
In August, rights groups in South America led lawsuits against Gen. Jagath Jayasuriya, a Sri Lankan ambassador in the region. He is accused of overseeing military units that attacked hospitals and killed, disappeared and tortured thousands of people at the end of the country’s civil war.
Upon the ambassador’s return to Sri Lanka, President Maithripala Sirisena vowed that neither Jayasuriya nor any other “war hero” would face prosecution — a pledge that rights groups said illustrates continued impunity in Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka, which has denied the allegations of torture and war crimes, goes before the U.N.’s Human Rights Council in Geneva next week as part of a regular examination known as the Universal Periodic Re- view. All 193 U.N. member states usually undergo such reviews about every 4-1/2 years, but Wednesday’s review may hold added signi cance.
The new allegations suggest that Sri Lanka still has not stopped using torture — a practice it was highly criticized for during and after the war against the Tamil Tigers rebel group.
Yasmin Sooka, director of the South Africa-based Foundation for Human Rights, said she hopes the review will spur member states to ask Sri Lanka tough questions. She also urged the U.N. to establish an independent body to investigate the allegations — much like it did in Guatemala.
“There is no real framework for witness security in Sri Lanka,” said Sooka. “As it stands now, the very people who are accused of such violations would essentially be in charge of investigating themselves.”
Many ethnic minority Tamils contend the government continues to target them as part of a larger plan to destroy their culture. Tamils speak a different language and are largely Hindu, unlike the country’s largely