Military dismisses HRW’s claims of sexual violence on Tamil detainees

Sri Lanka military yesterday dismissed a report by New York-based Human Rights Watch that alleged security forces continued to use sexual violence on suspected Tamil Tiger terrorists in detention. Responding to report, the Military spokesman Brigadier Ruwan Wanigasooriya dismissed the allegations as fabricated lies.

He said the 75 cases of alleged rape victims who provided their harrowing experiences to the right group were those who have applied for the asylum in the West.

“These are fabrications to justify their claims for asylum,” Brigadier Wanigasooriya said adding that the Army is ready to investigate if there are proper complaints filed.

He said the Government has resettled about 300,000 displaced people in the conflict while another nearly 12,000 LTTE ex-cadres had been rehabilitated and reintegrated into society. “No one has made any complaint of rape,” he said.

The military spokesman said this is a well-established pattern of the LTTE rump to hoodwink the international community.



Every time Sri Lanka goes before an international forum such as UNHRC, the interested parties set out to publish photos and reports alleging the Sri Lankan security forces of war crimes. Citing an example, the spokesman said the alleged photos of the LTTE leader’s son were in public domain for a long time and were available for any interested party to view.

“If anyone really wanted to, the pictures could have been published then. The fact is they never wanted to publish them at the time, nor did they hand them to any authority with the relevant information (that they claim they know for certain beyond any reasonable doubt) for investigation. This indicates their objective is to keep the tempo going before each HRC session,” the military spokesman said.