Rape Of Tamil Women, Men And Children By Sri Lankan Armed Forces And Their Collaborators
Dr. Brian Senewiratne
Executive summary
The rape of Tamil civilians (women, girls and even men) in the Sri Lankan North and East by the Sri Lankan (Sinhalese) Armed Forces (at all levels), Police, specialised Police units such as the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), the Terrorism Investigation Department (TID), the Colombo Crime Division (CCD), National Intelligence Bureau (NIB), and the Sri Lankan Intelligence Service (SIS), pro-government Tamil paramilitary groups, and even Sinhalese workers relocated or sent to the Tamil areas to work on several projects, has now become a major problem.
With the brutal (Sinhalese) military and police running the North and East, treating the Tamil civilians as the ‘spoils of war’, and the area as ‘conquered territory’, backed by the Government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa that does what it likes to whoever it likes with no accountability, international intervention is mandatory and urgent.
A leading organisation for women in Sri Lanka said, on 14 July 2013, that in Sri Lanka a woman is raped every 90 minutes. With well-documented under-reporting because of shame or fear, the actual number of people subjected to rape and sexual violence in the Tamil areas, is much higher.
Rape is defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Rape is a war crime when inflicted with impunity by victorious armies. Broader than rape, any form of sexual violence is prohibited under both customary International Humanitarian Law and Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. International human rights law prohibits sexual violence.
Sexual violence consists of actions of a sexual nature committed with a person without their consent, which besides including the physical invasion of the human body, may include acts that do not imply penetration or even any physical contact whatsoever. Examples include forced nudity or virginity tests. Covering a broad range of gender-based offences such as rape, sexual slavery, molestation, sexual mutilation, forced marriage, forced abortion, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy and enforced sterilisation, sexual violence is defined as any act of a sexual nature that is committed on a person under circumstances that are coercive.
