A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
(Full Story)
Search This Blog
Back to 500BC.
==========================
Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Saturday, May 27, 2017
UN sex abuse: Sri Lankan peacekeepers accused of running child sex ring in Haiti
Sri
Lanka has never prosecuted a single soldier for sexual misconduct while
serving in a peacekeeping mission abroad, the AP found.
In
this Sept. 13, 2016 photo, a Sri Lanka Air Force airman carries the UN
flag during training for a road patrol at the Institute of Peace Support
Operations Training in Kukuleganga, Sri Lanka. (AP Photo)
May 26, 2017
When a Haitian teenager alleged that she had been raped and sodomized by
a Sri Lankan peacekeeper, the government here dispatched a high-ranking
general suspected of war crimes to lead the investigation.
He didn’t interview the accuser or medical staff who examined her, but
he cleared the peacekeeper — who remained in the Sri Lankan military.
“A suspected war criminal is the wrong person to conduct an
investigation into alleged crimes committed by a peacekeeper,” said
Andreas Schuller of the European Center for Constitutional and Human
Rights, a Berlin-based group that helped launch the complaint.
It wasn’t the first time that accusations against Sri Lankan
peacekeepers were swept aside. In 2007, a group of orphaned Haitian
children identified 134 Sri Lankans who gave them food for sex in a
child sex ring that went on for three years, an Associated Press
investigation found.
In that case, which was corroborated by UN investigators, the Sri Lankan
military repatriated 114 of the peacekeepers, but none was ever jailed.
In fact, Sri Lanka has never prosecuted a single soldier for sexual
misconduct while serving in a peacekeeping mission abroad, the AP found.
A culture of impunity that arose during Sri Lanka’s civil war has seeped
into its peacekeeping missions. The government has consistently refused
calls for independent investigations into its generation-long internal
conflict, marked by widespread reports of rape camps, torture, mass
killings and other alleged war crimes by its troops.
Despite those unresolved allegations, the UN has deployed thousands of
peacekeepers from Sri Lanka. This is a pattern repeated around the
world: Strapped for troops, the UN draws recruits from many countries
with poor human rights records for its peacekeeping program, budgeted at
nearly $8 billion this year.
An AP investigation last month found that, in the past 12 years, an
estimated 2,000 such allegations have been levelled at UN peacekeepers
and personnel.
Many of today’s 110,000 or so peacekeepers come from unstable and
violent countries. Congolese troops, for example, also have been accused
of rape, torture and killings during the longstanding war in their
country; as peacekeepers, they have faced allegations of sexual abuse
and exploitation.
Robert O. Blake, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka from
2006 to 2009, was one of many officials who pressed the Sri Lankan
government for more transparency into alleged wartime abuses. As for the
peacekeepers, he said, “You are there to keep the peace. If they
themselves are guilty of atrocities, clearly they are not suitable
candidates for peacekeeping operations.”
Eight years after Sri Lanka’s war ended in 2009, people who have fled
the country are increasingly coming forward to give horrific accounts of
camps where they say they were gang-raped.
One woman said in testimony shared with the AP that she was kidnapped by
masked men, taken to what she believes was an army camp, and repeatedly
raped.
One of her tormentors was brought to the room she shared with four other
women. “He was asked to take his pick,” she told the International
Truth and Justice Project. “He looked around and chose me. And took me
to another room and raped me.”
She identified him from a series of photographs. The AP found that the soldier, an officer, went on to become a UN peacekeeper.
During the last months of the civil war that ended eight years ago, Maj.
Gen. Jagath Dias led an army division whose troops were accused of
attacking civilians and bombing a church, a hospital and other
humanitarian outposts. Nevertheless, when a teenager said she was raped
by a peacekeeper in Haiti, Dias was dispatched to investigate the 2013
case.
In an interview in the garden of his mother’s home here, he explained
the charges were groundless, even though he never interviewed the woman.
He also flatly denied the allegations of war crimes at home, telling AP
that his 57th Division only targeted areas where rebels were firing on
troops.
Yet evidence presented against Dias by two human rights groups in Europe
led authorities to threaten a criminal investigation in 2011 while Dias
was serving as a deputy ambassador to Germany, Switzerland and the
Vatican. He was soon recalled to Sri Lanka, where he was later promoted
to army chief of staff — the country’s second-highest military post. He
retired a few months later and now runs a private security business.
Dias described the barrage of allegations against Sri Lanka’s soldiers as unfair.
“If a soldier has raped a woman, he should be court-martialed, no doubt
about it,” he said. “But where is the evidence? Allegations are just
allegations.”
Dias also said the sex ring charges in Haiti were likely invented to
damage Sri Lanka’s reputation abroad — even though the UN corroborated
the stories of the nine children, one of whom was 12 when peacekeepers
started giving her food for sex. Another victim, a teenager, said he had
sex with 100 peacekeepers.
“None of the cases was, to my knowledge, serious at all. And none of the
soldiers was ever prosecuted,” Dias said. “We didn’t find any person
guilty on those accusations, right?”
Why would the UN rely on a country with Sri Lanka’s history of abuse
allegations, both in its civil war and its peacekeeping missions?
“Sometimes,” former Secretary-General Kofi Annan told AP, “the UN needs
troops. And they are so desperate that they accept troops that they will
normally not accept if they had the choice.”