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Thursday, April 25, 2013
Man claims rape and torture upon return to Sri Lanka
A
Tamil man living in Australia has detailed shocking claims of rape and torture
at the hands of Sri Lankan army intelligence.
Last
year almost half of the asylum seekers who arrived in Australia were from Sri
Lanka, which recently emerged from 30 years of brutal civil war.
The
Government has been sending Sri Lankans home, claiming the threat of war and
persecution is over.
But
one Sri Lankan Tamil living in Australia has told the ABC's 7.30 a very
different and disturbing story.
Kumar,
as 7.30 chose to call him, says just three weeks ago he was abducted, raped and
tortured by Sri Lankan army officers.
"I
was naked and no place to sleep, except the floor like a dog. I felt like dying
but I thought of my kids and family back here," he said.
Kumar
arrived in Australia in 2008. He fled Sri Lanka after being interrogated and
accused of links to the Tamil Tigers.
He
says he was working as a school bus driver when he was coerced by the Tigers to
deliver parcels for them.
"I
got afraid and I thought it's not safe to live in Sri Lanka any more," he
said.
Kumar's
family joined him in Australia last year. In March, he needed to return home as
his uncle fell ill.
Less
than a week after he arrived home to manage his uncle's restaurant, Kumar says
he and his brothers were abducted at gunpoint by two men in a white van.
He
was blindfolded and taken to a dark room with "dried blood" on the walls.
He
says the men claimed to be army intelligence officers and grilled him about
links to the Tamil Tigers, which he denied.
"They
came back and again started hitting me with a log at my back and now I've got a
spine problem as well," Kumar said.
"The
two guys were drunk and they came to me and they just put their hand on my body
and they just rubbed me and I had some sexual torture as well."
On
the fourth and final day of his ordeal, Kumar's captors branded his back with
hot irons.
"I
thought that's the end of my life and I just fainted," Kumar said.
"When
they see my back they will know what has happened to me recently, because a lot
of stories [do not] come out from Sri Lanka.
"I
can't forget. No-one wants to get these kinds of things in their life.
"I
pray to God. No-one must get this kind of punishment."
'Believable'
Kumar
says he only made it home because his uncle paid a $20,000 bribe to his
captors.
Soon
after he returned Kumar went to see his local doctor, a fellow Sri Lankan Tamil
who issued a referral for Kumar to get urgent psychiatric treatment for his
trauma.
The
doctor was so horrified by Kumar's injuries that he also sought help from the
Tamil Refugee Council.
The
council consulted Louise Newman, an expert adviser on the mental health of
asylum seekers.
Ms
Newman says Kumar's is a "credible story".
"He
provides detail and is very preoccupied with some of the minute details of the
actual atrocities that were performed on him which is very typical... of the
accounts we get from people who have been through these sorts of experiences,"
she said.
Gordon
Weiss, who was the United Nations spokesman in Sri Lanka during the civil war,
agrees Kumar's story is believable.
"There
have been a series of reports in just the last few months from the US state
department, from Human Rights Watch, from the UN high commissioner for human
rights, detailing this kind of treatment," he said.
"One
has to remember that the people in charge of Sri Lanka at the moment have got a
long history stretching back to the 1980s of using torture and abduction in
order to suppress segments of the population."
