Sri Lanka’s Survivors Of Torture & Sexual Violence
By Charles Sarvan –August 11, 2015
Prof. Charles Sarvan
A Still Unfinished War: Sri Lanka’s Survivors of Torture and Sexual Violence, 2009 – 2015. International Truth & Justice Project, London, July 2015.
The above (hereafter, Report) is “dedicated to the survivors who trusted us enough to tell us about their darkest days in the hope of saving others from the same fate”. It also recognises the many strangers in foreign lands “who have helped individual witnesses in different ways – fed them, looked after their children, interpreted for them, visited them in detention, offered help finding doctors or lawyers, supplied warm clothes, or who have just been a voice at the end of the phone to calm them when they panic” (p. 8). The ‘Report’ is similar to We Will Teach You a Lesson: Sexual Violence against Tamils by Sri Lankan Security Forces’, Human Rights Watch publication, 2013. ISBN: 1-56432-993-3. (See Sarvan Colombo Telegraph: 3 April 2015.) I thank Mr. Chinnathamby Nadarajah Suseenthiran for giving me a copy of the Report.
A problem in reading case after case is what can be described as a morphological similarity: arrest, torture, horrible sexual abuse, ransom. However, the Report argues the similarity indicates that the practises of the security forces were systematic and institutionalised, the intention being to sow terror among those Tamils “remaining behind” (p. 16). A further problem is that distaste and disgust set in; an emotional fatigue. I must confess that, perhaps exacerbated by my near-octogenarian age, I found it very difficult to read, and so to encounter, these cases. But then I asked myself: If I find it difficult and distressing merely to read, how must it be for those who go through the ordeal, who live the experience? They are forced to endure the unendurable. To protect witnesses and their relations back in “the Paradise Isle”, identifying detail is omitted (often, witnesses, having been blindfolded, do not know where they were taken) with the result that the Report is both specific and necessarily vague.Read More