Sri Lankan authorities have been accused of allowing continuing human rights abuses, including torture and illegal detention, exactly one year after Maithripala Sirisena took power on a reforming ticket in a surprise election win.
International campaigners say they have documented 27 individual cases of serious human rights abuses occurring in the last 12 months.
Freedom from Torture, a UK-based organisation offering medical aid to survivors of torture, said it had been involved with eight cases. The victim in each was from Sri Lanka’s largely Hindu Tamil minority and the alleged perpetrators were members of the country’s intelligence services or military, which are dominated by the island nation’s largely Buddhist Sinhala majority.
Sri Lanka suffered a crippling 26-year civil war pitting government forces against violent Tamil separatists of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) which ended in a series of bloody battles in 2009. Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was president during the final years of the war, was defeated after calling a snap poll.
On his election, Sirisena pledged widespread reform and reconciliation between Sri Lankan communities. The veteran politician specifically promised an end to abductions in his maiden speech.
Sonya Sceats, director of policy and advocacy for Freedom from Torture, said Sirisena’s repeated recognition that reconciliation in his nation required accountability for serious human rights abuses was a welcome change. “But having set a new tone, the president must match his rhetoric with a clear blueprint for rooting out torture from Sri Lanka’s security sector and putting perpetrators on trial, no matter how powerful they may be,” she said.
The NGO says it has medical evidence of torture by the Sri Lankan military and intelligence services since Sirisena came to power which, it said, suggested that “an abusive ‘deep state’ is still terrorising communities and impeding Sri Lanka’s post-war revival”. Military authorities and the police have always denied any wrongdoings and human rights abuses.
Two of the survivors referred to by Freedom from Torture identified a well-known military camp in the northern town of Vavuniya as the site of their detention and torture. Others reported abuse at a makeshift jungle camp. Many have scars of branding with heated metal rods and have reported…
Keep reading: Click here
