Iran frees American sailors who strayed into its waters

WEDNESDAY 13 JANUARY 2016

The Iranian military releases US Navy personnel on Wednesday morning after detaining them when two American boats strayed into Iranian waters while patrolling in the Gulf.

A US official confirmed the crew members had been set free.

The incident has heightened tension between the US and the Shia Muslim regional power just as a deal over Iran's nuclear programme is due to be implemented.

The US and other global powers have agreed to drop economic sanctions against Tehran in return for measures designed to prevent Iran developing atomic weapons.

Iran's navy detained ten US sailors on Tuesday. The country's armed forces chief, Major General Hassan Firouzabadi, said the incident was a show of Iranian strength to "troublemakers" in the US Congress, which has sought to put pressure on Iran after the nuclear deal.

The Revolutionary Guards - a staunchly Islamic branch of the Iranian military with enormous power - said the boats were "snooping" in Iranian territory and said Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had demanded an apology from Washington.

A Guards spokesman, Ramazan Sharif, dismissed US statements by US officials that the Navy personnel would be released quickly, saying the sailors would be interrogated on nearby Farsi island and "if, during the interrogation, we find out that they were on an intelligence-gathering mission, we will treat them differently".

The rhetoric was toned down markedly later after senior Iranian officers appeared to accept that a technical fault had led the US vessels to stray into Iranian waters accidentally.

Our investigations show the two US Navy boats entered Iranian territorial waters due to a broken navigation system.Ali Fadavi

Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi was quoted as saying "Our investigations show the two US Navy boats entered Iranian territorial waters due to a broken navigation system.

"The final order will be issued soon and they will probably be released."

Conservatives in both the US and Iran are unhappy with the nuclear deal, which is bitterly opposed by America's ally Israel.

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, who frequently accuses the Obama administration of being weak on foreign policy, described the incident as "an indication of where the hell we're going".

The Revolutionary Guards are in charge of defending Iran's borders, and they are highly suspicious of US military activity near Iranian territory.

The organisation frequently stages wargames in the Gulf, which divides Iran from its rival Saudi Arabia and a US naval base in Bahrain.

In December last year, the US Navy said a Guards ship had fired rockets near an American aircraft carrier in the Straits of Hormuz, a key oil shipping route. Irand denied the accusation.

In April 2015, the Guards seized a container ship belonging to the shipping giant Maersk in the Gulf over a legal dispute with the company. The
ship and its 24 crew members were released after 10 days.

In 2004 Iran seized six Royal Marines and two sailors after accusing British boats of straying too close to the Iranian coast in bad weather.

The men appeared blindfolded on Iranian TV and said they were forced to undergo a mock execution before being released three days later.

In 2007 the Iranian military seized 15 Royal Navy personnel off the Iran/Iraq border and held them for 13 days.

Turkey says Istanbul suicide bomber entered country as refugee

Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu says four more people have been detained, bringing the number of suspects to five

 Turkish police seal off the area around Sultanahmet Square following the attack. Photograph: NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock

Kareem Shaheen in Beirut and agencies-Wednesday 13 January 2016

Turkey has said the suicide bomber who killed 10 German tourists in an explosion in Istanbul on Tuesday entered the country as a refugee and had not been monitored because he was not on any watch lists.

Speaking a day after the attack, which Ankara has blamed on Islamic State, the Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, said four more people had been detained, bringing the number of suspects to five.

The attack, which also left 15 people wounded, took place in the Sultanahmet district in the heart of city’s historic centre. It was the latest in a spate of violent incidents in a country struggling to contain the fallout from the Syrian war as well as a Kurdish separatist insurgency.

In comments published in the Turkish media on Wednesday, a tour guide who had been accompanying the group of German tourists said the bomber “was a young bearded man who looked like a Turk”.

“He had a innocent face and was wearing modern clothes,” Sibel Şatiroğlu was quoted as telling the daily Hürriyet newspaper.

In a harrowing account, Şatiroğlu said she saw the man preparing to launch the attack after blending into a group of 33 German citizens visiting the Theodosius obelisk.

“I heard a click sound while I was telling the group about the obelisk. I thought it was strange and looked around,” she said.

“I saw the young man pull the pin and I shouted ‘Run!’ in German. Then we started to run away, and the bomb instantly exploded.”

Eleven people were still being treated for injuries sustained in the blast, including nine Germans, a Norwegian and a Peruvian national, officials said.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Turkish interior minister, Efkan Ala, said at a press conference with his German counterpart that Turkey was “seriously investigating” the attack and its perpetrators, and that the first suspect had been detained after the blast on Tuesday. 

Three Russian citizens were also detained on suspicion of links to Isis, the foreign ministry in Moscow confirmed. Interfax news agency quoted Russian officials as saying they were trying to get access to the detainees, one of whom was on an international wanted list, but that they had no known connections to terrorism. The three were among dozens arrested across Turkey following the attack. 

Davutoğlu said on Wednesday that Russia’s entry into the Syrian civil war had become a barrier to Turkish air strikes against Isis, and that the Russian air force appeared to be protecting the radical Sunni militants.

Asked whether Turkey planned air strikes against Isis in response to the bombing in Istanbul, he said the country would act at a time and in a manner that it saw fit.

Swedish police investigating alleged officer-led coverup of sexual assaults by migrants

Swedish police say they are now investigating an alleged cover-up of a "large number" of sexual assaults from a music festival last August, after Swedish media published internal police reports. (Reuters)

By Niraj Chokshi-January 12

Authorities in Sweden are investigating claims that police there covered up sexual assaults committed mostly by immigrant youths at a music festival in Stockholm — attacks apparently similar in style to those carried out on New Year's Eve in the German city of Cologne.

Police documented 38 claims of sexual assault — including two alleged rapes — in connection with the "We Are Sthlm" festival in 2014 and 2015, according to Reuters. They believe the attacks were carried out by about 50 people, most of them young Afghans, Reuters reported, citing Dagens Nyheter, the Swedish paper that broke the news.

[The big thing missing from Europe’s solution to the refugee crisis? Refugees.]

The alleged cover-up prompted a strong statement from Prime Minister Stefan Lofven.

"It's a double betrayal of these young women," Lofven told the Expressen newspaper. "It has not been prosecuted and handled in the way we would wish. The second is that police did not inform or tell about these problems."

The style of the attacks seemed to mirror a raft of assaults carried out on New Year's Eve in Cologne. There, groups of men repeatedly broke out from a 1,000-man crowd gathered near the main train station in town to surround, harass and steal from women, according to Germany's Spiegel Online.

Women throughout Europe reported similar assaults that night.

[German police report describes ‘chaotic and shameful’ night of attacks on women]

Police mount a temporary border-control fence at Hyllie train station in southern Malmo, Sweden, on Jan. 3. (Johan Nilsson/EPA)

Of the more than 600 criminal complaints filed in connection with the Cologne attacks, about 40 percent involved sexual assault claims. At least two rapes were reported, according to Reuters. Police are focusing their investigation largely on asylum seekers or illegal immigrants from North Africa, and the wave of attacks has inflamed the refugee debate in Germany.

The attacks in Sweden in 2014 played out in a similar way, according to Britain's Guardian newspaper.

During the 2014 festival, organisers picked up on rumours of a new phenomenon, said Roger Ticoalu, head of events at the Stockholm city administration.

“It was a modus operandi that we had never seen before: large groups of young men who surround girls and molest them,” Ticoalu said. “In the cases where we were able to apprehend suspects, they were with a foreign background, newly arrived refugees aged 17-20, who had come to Sweden without their families.”

He said festival organisers did not have enough facts at the time to say anything definitive, and it would have been “totally irresponsible on our side to make anything public”. After the festival the organisers launched a programme with police and NGOs to encourage girls and young women to report harassment and to identify culprits, he said.

A spokesman for Stockholm police expressed regret over not sharing details of the attacks before they were published by Dagens Nyheter.

Swedish National Police Commissioner Dan Eliasson at a news conference on Monday. (Henrik Montgomery/EPA)

"I actually do not know why it did not happen," Varg Gyllander, head of communications for Stockholm police, told Radio Sweden, according to the BBC.

Gyllander and other police officials also admitted that the controversy over welcoming refugees and immigrants may have played a role in the reluctance to publicize the attacks.

[German sexual assaults lead to ‘I told you so’ claims on Muslim immigrants in U.S.]

"These days, the level of discussion is very harsh, and it's very aggressive when it comes to discussing the matter of refugees and foreigners," he said. "I think that all of us are very careful how we express ourselves."

In the fall, arsonists attacked more than a dozen Swedish refugee centers, including a home for unaccompanied refugee children, according to Britain's Telegraph. Police in Cologne reported at least four apparent reprisal attacks on foreigners on Sunday.

Read more:
This refugee was stuck in legal limbo for 25 years. Then he died.
Syrian asylum seekers are ‘well educated,’ Austrian survey finds
White House invites Syrian refugee to Obama’s State of the Union address
Germany springs to action over hate speech against migrants

Niraj Chokshi is a general assignment reporter for The Washington Post.

Venezuela’s Supreme Court Suspends the Opposition-Dominated Parliament

BY DANIEL LANSBERG-RODRÍGUEZ-JANUARY 13, 2016

Roughly a quarter of the way into a multi-hour speech last week, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro recalled a conversation he claimed to have had nine years ago with Hugo Chávez, his deceased predecessor. In Maduro’s telling, despite his electoral success, el Comandatehad long harbored a secret desire to “break definitively” with the “old bourgeoisie structures of representation” that he felt distanced the government from the people. “This is a task we have still to carry out,” Maduro announced. Five days later, his government made good on that promise.

Over the past few days, tensions between the chavista government and the new opposition-dominated National Assembly, which was inaugurated last week after December’s landslide election, reached a fever pitch. On Monday, the constitutional chamber of Venezuela’s supreme court — which in over 45,000 decisions over the last dozen years has never ruled against the presidency — suspended the assembly and declared its leadership to be “in contempt” of the court’s authority.

It’s unclear what this determination means, since there is no constitutional basis for any of this. The supreme court claims that its ruling nullifies in advance any legislation the assembly might try to pass — unless the opposition acquiesces to the suspension of three of its legislators, whom the government accuses of buying votes in the remote state of Amazonas. The stakes are high, since the loss of even a single legislator could neutralize the opposition’s two-thirds supermajority, threatening its ability to reform the constitution or initiate a recall referendum against Maduro.

The road to Venezuela’s constitutional quagmire has been paved with brinksmanship from both sides of the country’s widening political chasm. Soon after the opposition’s electoral landslide, Maduro stripped the unicameral legislature of its oversight over the Central Bank and the national finances, while the outgoing assembly rushed to pack the supreme court with loyalists through an expedited, ad hoc process that had no constitutional grounding. Concurrently, Maduro called for the creation of a novel “communal parliament,” to be set up in parallel to the one he had lost. Meanwhile, the court dutifully pushed forth the suspension of the Amazonas delegates: three from the opposition and one from the ruling socialists for good measure.
The opposition, too, has upped the ante. In electing the assembly’s leadership, the smaller parties within the opposition coalition joined forces to sideline its largest member, the moderate Primero Justicia party, denying them its highest offices. The assembly’s new president, Henry Ramos Allup, is a wily and colorful holdover from the pre-Chávez era. With his trademark folksy bombast, Ramos Allup soon announced that Maduro would step down within six months, while quickly and unceremoniously disposing of the Chávez portraits and other chavista symbols that had become ubiquitous in the assembly building. Ignoring the supreme court, he swore in the suspended Amazonas delegates anyway. Such aggressive measures, while providing much-needed catharsis to many within the long-suffering opposition, risk alienating Venezuelans who dislike Maduro but haven’t quite given up on Chávez, while enraging the government and its more strident supporters.

In the immediate aftermath to Monday’s ruling the opposition waxed defiant, its leaders disputing both the court’s legitimacy and its jurisdiction over the National Assembly. But with every other branch and institution of government arrayed squarely against it, the embattled legislature stands alone, save for its overwhelming popular mandate. Behind closed doors, the standoff has exacerbated pre-existing divisions within the opposition, putting those who would force a crisis, even at the risk of being permanently sidelined should the government fail to blink, against others more disposed towards tactical retreat.

On Tuesday morning, the assembly’s scheduled session failed to take place, ostensibly due to the lack of a quorum. Later that evening, following much internal debate and backchannel communications with the executive branch, Ramos Allup announced that — by their own request — the Amazonas Three would resign from the legislature in the coming days. In backing down, the opposition has diffused a crisis that might have escalated into civil strife. But it has also set a dangerous precedent: that it’s open to being bullied. Time will tell if caution was indeed the better part of valor. (According to an opposition source who declined to be identified, the government has agreed to hold new elections to replace the three Amazonas delegates. The timing of the elections is unknown.)

Constitutional order, like oxygen, is often taken for granted until it is in short supply. Now that Venezuela’s supreme court and its legislature publicly deny each other’s legitimacy while the president touts an unelected parliament he likes better, everyone in the country seems to have become a constitutional analyst. In conversations around Caracas last week, I heard taxi drivers, retirees, and legislators alike intricately parsing the finer points of Venezuela’s constitution, one of the longest and most complicated in the world. The result is yet another layer of uncertainty to a people already burdened by soaring homicide rates, shortages of basic goods, unbridled inflation, and other revolutionary delights.

A few months ago, when an opposition victory in the December elections seemed imminent, I sat down for a chat with Luis Miquilena — the ancient Marxist who personally presided over the creation of the constitution in 1999 — to try to understand what might happen. Having long since broken with the revolution, Miquilena was downplaying the role the constitution’s design might play in what was to come. He seemed surprised I had bothered to ask.

“It doesn’t really matter what the constitution says, they’ll do whatever they want,” he told me. “My constitution has already been the most violated in Venezuela’s history. There’s no salvaging it.” In the end, he assured me, it will come down to the people rising, at which point Venezuela’s famously opaque armed forces would be forced to pick a side. “Sooner or later,” as Miquilena put it, “that’s what always happens.”

In the photo, the president of the National Assembly, Henry Ramos Allup, attends a session in Caracas on January 12, 2016.

Photo credit: FEDERICO PARRA/AFP/Getty Images

The vaquita: Chinese medicine is driving world’s smallest porpoise to extinction

In this undated photo released by Proyecto Vaquita, a porpoise is seen trapped in a fishing net at the Gulf of California. Pic: AP.

by Graham Land-13th January 2016

THE critically endangered vaquita, literally “small cow” in Spanish, is a species of porpoise native to the northernmost portion of the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez. It is both the physically smallest — fully grown females measure 140 cm and males only 135cm — and most endangered species of cetacean in the world.

Since the vaquita has no close relatives on the evolutionary tree, it is considered a crucial species in terms of conservation. Once it dies out, the vaquita’s evolutionary branch dies with it.

Gillnet fishing for TCM cures is wiping out the vaquita

As of now, it is believed that less than 100 individual examples of the species remain and that the overall vaquita population is declining at a rate of 18.5 percent each year. With such small numbers, inbreeding is probably now affecting the genetic health of the population.

The practice of gillnet fishing, used to illegally catch another endangered aquatic species within the shared habitat, is the major cause of the vaquita’s demise, resulting in an estimated 39 deaths per year. Vaquitas are unintentionally caught and killed by the practice. Though gillnet fishing is banned within half of the cetacean’s environment, their numbers are still declining at a rapid rat

Demand for Fish Bladder May Wipe Out World's Rarest Ocean Mammal

By National Geographic @NatGeo

The swim bladder of a fish called the totoaba is prized in China, but the way the fish is caught ends up drowning nearly extinct porpoises.

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Gillnet fishing is used to catch totoaba, an officially threatened species that, like the vaquita, is endemic to the Gulf of Mexico and the only member of its genus. It also just happens to be roughly the same size as the vaquita. Though not a popular product by any means, in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the totoaba’s swim bladder — sometimes called its “maw” — is valued as a treatment for health ailments such as skin and circulatory problems, as well as a means of boosting fertility. The bladder is also a prized ingredient in soups.

Clare Perry, team leader, Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) oceans campaign, is quoted in the Guardian:

The vaquita’s extinction clock stands at one minute to midnight and the species is being pushed into oblivion by the demand of a relatively small number of Chinese consumers of totoaba maw.

As is the case with shark fins, sea horses, sun bear gall bladders and tiger penises, there is absolutely no scientific evidence of any medicinal value inherent in totoaba bladder. Sadly, the vaquita and totoaba are victims of myth and the latter’s status symbol as an ingredient. Their eventual extinctions are being facilitated by a massive increase of wealth in China and other parts of Asia, coupled with lingering superstitions regarding the supposed curative properties of their body parts.

The only solution is enforcing a total ban on gillnet fishing

Totoaba fishing has been illegal since 1975 and under the authority of the Mexican government, gillnet fishing in general is under a two-year ban within the vaquita’s habitat. While fishermen use gillnets to catch shark, shrimp and fish in the Gulf of Mexico, the skyrocketing price of totoaba bladders has resulted in a spate of poaching.

According to experts, only an enforced, complete and total removal of gillnets from the entire range of the vaquita’s habitat can save this little porpoise from extinction.

In this instance, activist groups like Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd are on the side of the Mexican government and are assisting its efforts to protect the vaquita.

We hope that our collaboration with the Mexican government will set an example for other governments. The vaquita needs our vigilant efforts to survive. Sea Shepherd will not be deterred in protecting marine wildlife.

—Captain Oona Layolle, Sea Shepherd

Kathy Niakan: Scientist makes case to edit embryos

By James Gallagher-13 January 2016

A scientist has been making her case to be the first in the UK to be allowed to genetically modify human embryos.

Dr Kathy Niakan said the experiments would provide a deeper understanding of the earliest moments of human life and could reduce miscarriages.

The regulator, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), will consider her application on Thursday.

If Dr Niakan is given approval then the first such embryos could be created by the summer.

Every person has gone through a remarkable transformation from a single fertilised egg into a fully fledged human being made of trillions of precisely organised cells.

Exactly how this takes place is a mystery.

Dr Niakan, who has spent a decade researching human development, is trying to understand the first seven days.

During this time we go from a fertilised egg to a structure called a blastocyst, containing 200-300 cells.

The embryo divides and develops from a single fertilised egg (top left) to a blastocyst (bottom right)

But even at this early blastocyst stage, some cells have been organised to perform specific roles - some go on to form the placenta, others the yolk sac and others ultimately us.

During this period, parts of our DNA are highly active.

It is likely these genes are guiding our early development but it is unclear exactly what they are doing or what goes wrong in miscarriage.

Dr Niakan, from the Francis Crick Institute, said: "We would really like to understand the genes needed for a human embryo to develop successfully into a healthy baby.

"The reason why it is so important is because miscarriages and infertility are extremely common, but they're not very well understood."

Of 100 fertilised eggs, fewer than 50 reach the blastocyst stage, 25 implant into the womb and only 13 develop beyond three months.

She says that understanding what is supposed to happen and what can go wrong could improve IVF.

"We believe that this research could really lead to improvements in infertility treatment and ultimately provide us with a deeper understanding of the earliest stages of human life."

Gene editing

However, she says the only way to do this is to edit human embryos.

Many of the genes which become active in the week after fertilisation are unique to humans, so they cannot be studied in animal experiments.

"The only way we can understand human biology at this early stage is by further studying human embryos directly," Dr Niakan said.

Her intention is to use one of the most exciting recent scientific breakthroughs - Crispr gene editing - to turn off genes at the single-cell stage and see what happens.

She said that if our DNA were an entire encyclopedia, then Crispr had the precision to alter a single letter on a single page.

She aims to start with the gene Oct4 which appears to have a crucial role.

It is expressed only in a handful of blastocyst cells (pictured above in green) which go on to form all the tissues of the human body.

She will stop it functioning in 20-30 donated embryos and if the experiments are successful her research group will move on to other genes.

The blue cells form the placenta

Image copyright

The knowledge gained from such studies could help pick which embryos had the best chance of resulting in a successful pregnancy in IVF.

Such experiments are legal in the UK as long as the modified embryos are not implanted into people.

But scientists need a licence from the HFEA before they can perform such studies.

The regulator will consider Dr Niakan's request on Thursday.

The field is attracting controversy with some saying that altering the DNA of an embryo is a step too far.

Dr David King, the director of the campaign group Human Genetics Alert, said: "This is the first step on a path that scientists have carefully mapped out towards the legalisation of GM babies."

Dr Niakan said this was not the aim of her research and that: "In the UK there are very appropriately tight regulations in this area that would make it completely illegal to move it in that direction [of genetically modified babies]."

Wolf Reik, a genetics professor at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, said such experiments needed to be carefully monitored and regulated to prevent misuse, but they were an "exciting prospect".

He added: "The long term impacts on understanding human development and hence on better regenerative medicine approaches will be considerable.

"Not everything about human development can be understood from studying model organisms such as mice or even non-human primates."

Follow James on Twitter.

Governments change, but the torturers stay the same - Frances Harrison

11 January 2016

While the world hails “the new Sri Lanka” for committing to deliver accountability for the past, the same torturers and rapists are in place doing what they’ve always done writes author of Still Counting the Dead and former BBC correspondent Frances Harrison. 

Full article reproduced below.

“These are not things you can tell your wife,” said the Tamil man from Sri Lanka, “you do not talk about these things in my culture”.

He’s so ashamed about what the soldiers did to him  - and there were many of them - that this is the first time he’s told anyone, even his immigration lawyer. Sinhalese soldiers in camouflage uniform forced him at gunpoint to undress and then one by one raped him. It happened again and again.

He knows which camp but he also knows it’s dangerous to say. He left his family behind in Sri Lanka and the security forces are watching them closely.  “This evil needs to be stopped,” he says.

Shadowy structures of repression

While the world hails “the new Sri Lanka” for committing to deliver accountability for the past, the same torturers and rapists are in place doing what they’ve always done. Politicians may come and go but the shadowy structures of repression remain in tact.  Experts discuss transitional justice and security sector reform for Sri Lanka but they use terms that don’t yet exist in the local languages. They don’t look the human beings in the eye who’ve been crushed and degraded again and again in ways that are often too unspeakable to articulate in words. They talk about mapping projects or jurisdictions but it’s the scar diagrams that doctors draw for torture survivors that really map what politics can do to human flesh .

For the new Sri Lankan government the victims of ongoing torture and sexual violence are an inconvenience; they disrupt the meta-narrative of hope and change. They shouldn’t worry too much: the recent victims exist clouded in shame and pain in foreign lands and it’s pretty easy to overlook them. They don’t hold noisy protests like the Families of the Disappeared. But without their testimony there will only be a partial truth at any future Truth Commission.

Sexually violating detainees

Then there’s the difficulty of talking about rape, especially male rape, in any society that’s squeamish about talking about sex. One young man described kneeling on the floor while a circle of soldiers took out their penises and forced him to perform fellatio on them one by one. Perpetrators acting in groups while sexually violating Tamil detainees is a common feature in the accounts of survivors.  There’s no sense of shame about raping men in front of each other even though homosexuality remains illegal in Sri Lanka. Not that this is about sexual gratification, rather about the systematic destruction of Tamils physically, psychologically, financially and culturally. Some of the recent victims look so young that I’ve often wondered if there’s also an element of paedophilia involved too.

Survivors of “white van” abductions and torture have arrived abroad in recent months with scars so fresh that they’re still bleeding. One Tamil woman still had the marks visible from the handcuffs on her wrists; another had the scratch marks from her rapists still visible. A young man had cigarette burns and branding marks on his body that were still pink . In many countries it’s considered unacceptable to brand livestock but Sri Lanka’s torturers seem to enjoy marking their victims, safe in the knowledge they will never get caught.

Violations tend to be recorded individually but when you start to look at each family, there is layer of pain piled upon layer of loss,repeated again and again, and finally topped with the loneliness of exile. These are mostly survivors of the death march of Mullivaikkal – the final village of Sri Lanka’s 2009 killing fields. Starvation was their constant companion, death whispering all the time in their ear. Some literally crawled on all fours on injured limbs to escape the war zone; others ran through puddles of human blood. Teenagers were forced to join the rebels at gunpoint; most who survived the trenches just waited for an opportunity to desert and join their parents. Terror came from every direction – the air, the sea, the lagoon and their own people who needed reinforcements. Many families lost a child in the war – if there was a corpse and they found it and had time to conduct a hasty burial in an unused trench they were considered lucky. Not knowing is even worse – a half-life of decaying hope.

Paying ransoms

Years later they’ve returned to their scorched villages, to homes with no roofs or doors, to a land littered with human bones. They’ve survived detention, either as internally displaced people or as rehabilitees. They farm or fish, and get on with life, working hardand keep their heads down. They silently mourn those who disappeared or perished in the war. Then a son or daughter disappears one day in one of the notorious “white vans”. There’s a frantic search and if they’re lucky they find a broker who locates the child before too long elapses. Huge sums of money are raised to pay the ransom but paying never prevents the torture and sexual abuse, it only secures release afterwards.

Several of those being tortured and raped in 2015 were victims of abduction by the LTTE while as young as 15 years old. You would think that would elicit some sympathy but on the contrary they are detained for not having declared themselves LTTE members, no matter that they never chose to join, remained in the movement a matter of weeks and often deserted. Their crime six years later is that they didn’t join the government’s rehabilitation programme, which was rife with torture too. One way or another they seem destined for torture; it’s just a matter of when.

Even in exile it’s not over. The family continues to be harassed by the security forces. Sometimes a father or mother or a sibling is detained or disappears. There are suicide attempts; self harming is common among survivors. They live in a state of mind always defined by the past:  flashbacks, nightmares, insomnia, sweating. The mere sight of a man in uniform or sound of a boot crunching on a hard floor can set them off.

No justice

It’s a very long journey back from the terror of the torture cell. A highly educated civil servant who was raped with a glass coca cola bottle in detention told me how he’d ended up sleeping rough on the streets of London because he was so traumatised by what had happened to him. No matter that he had a sibling in London to look after him. Sexual violence obliterates the individual’s sense of self every bit as much a shell blasts a body apart. It also erects frontiers and no-go zones within close-knit families. A woman who’d been repeatedly raped for years in detention still hasn’t told her brother for fear his wife will throw her out of the house if she knows. She hides the truth and it’s eating her from the inside.

Those who do manage to speak about what they’ve survived do so for one reason only: to stop it happening to anyone else. They know they will never get justice for themselves. That is a very bitter pill to swallow.

A year into the new government in Sri Lanka and the torturers are still racking up - at the very least - dozens of new victims. There is absolutely no sign of it stopping.