Continuing Torture & Sexual Violence In Sri Lanka – Part IV
By 
Dr. Brian Senewiratne
Continued from last Thursday
Securing “confessions” through torture
“Every case results in a confession signed by the victim, which they are not able or allowed to read. The documents to be signed are either blank pages or are written in Sinhala, a language the victim does not know”.
Here is a victim: “I signed six or seven pages of the Sinhala written documents. I do not know what they said as they were not translated to me and I did not ask, as I thought if I asked questions they would beat me up again”
To say that the confessions are signed under duress is an understatement. Here is a victim: “If you don’t sign the sheet we will kill you”
Here is another victim and a rather unusual response from her.
“The questions were more like statements: they accused me of being a member of the LTTE and having contacts to LTTE members abroad ad told me to admit this. The next days, they did not ask many questions, they just started beating me with wooden sticks. I asked what they wanted with me. The interrogator repeated the main allegations, so I said “either I agree to your allegations or you can kill me”. He repeated that I was an LTTE member who had come to regroup the LTTE and I said “yes I am”. After some time he stopped the beating.
Verbal abuse
Interrogators use a great deal of degrading and abusive language during the torture.
Here is a victim: “The beating continued more than 10 minutes all over my body, he was shouting “why can’t you tell the truth” and he used bad words like ‘motherfucker’ and ‘son-of-a-bitch’.
So you need a separate country.”
Here is another victim: “They talked in a bad way about Tamils, telling us we came from somewhere else and that we didn’t belong in Sri Lanka. They said that Sri Lanka belonged to the Sinhalese and not the Tamils”.
I will leave the ITJP publication to put in a personal note. I have been subjected to this type of abuse on numerous occasions in Australia for the past four decades. Every time I address a meeting on the Tamil struggle, I can expect a series of telephone calls from about 9 pm till morning and even after that.
Here is an example. I was invited to address the congregation in a Church, an ‘Information evening’, to deal with the plight of the Tamil people. I returned home and went to sleep because I had a medical clinic the following morning. Not a hope. At 10 pm the telephone rang “You mother-fucking Tamil Tiger, how much did the LTTE pay you for that talk?” I have learnt never to lose my cool. In a quiet voice I said, “Actually I am a Sinhalese and not a Tamil Tiger. I might add that the Tamil Tigers have done many things but not that particular act which you describe. I am also not paid by the Tamil Tigers or anyone else since I get enough money seeing patients”. So saying, I went back to sleep. 15 minutes later, there is another call, “You fucking Tamil cunt ….”. I replied quietly saying that they really have to get their human anatomy sorted out because what they have told me in the past few minutes is not anatomically possible.
Why don’t I take the phone off the hook? I cannot because I am on-call to a few hospitals. What amazes me about my former countrymen is that they are obsessed with sex. Perhaps they are sexual perverts as a series of ITJP publications have demonstrated.
Lord Reith, the founder of the BBC famously said, “There are some whom it is our duty to offend”. If I offend the racist Sinhala chauvinists, I am only doing my duty.
Chapter 7 – Surveillance and Informants
“What emerges from witness testimony is the continued use of informants and plain clothes intelligence officers, often with cameras, to surveil the Tamil population in the north and east and around the globe at diaspora events.”
I can confirm this. At the Church service that I addressed in Brisbane, Australia (which I have referred to earlier) a string of Sinhalese walked into the Church. I saw them videotaping me – not that it bothered me. I have no doubt that this was sent to Sri Lanka.
Village informants
“The Sri Lankan security forces run a large network of informants in the Vanni in particular. This is a particularly pernicious practice as it heightens the suspicions and divisions within the Tamil community. A victim detained in 2015 described being asked to work for the intelligence services as a paid informer. He explained how he had been betrayed by another Tamil in his village”.
Here in Australia, two people from Sri Lanka had the audacity to come to see me trying to bribe me. It was a Sinhalese man (two of them) one of whom complained of chest pain. They carried a suitcase. Once they were in my consulting room, I asked them which one had the chest pain. I was taken aback when they said that neither of them had a problem. They gave me the suitcase and told me that it was for me. In it was a huge amount of Australian dollars. They said that if I agreed to work for the Sri Lankan government, that sum of money would be trebled. I told them to take their suitcase and its contents and get out of my surgery before I called the police.
Photographed abroad
“Families were shown photographs during 2016 of their children attending protest events abroad…..indicating that this kind of activity poses a significant risk for anyone likely to visit or be returned to Sri Lanka”.
Here is a victim: “My mother said that she has not seen me since I had been detained. They then showed her photographs of me participating in various TGTE (Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam) activities, including protests in the UK”.
