A story of mass sex abuse

Published 10:25 am Friday, May 26, 2017

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — The general sat on a plastic lawn chair in the garden of his mother’s home, the scent of tropical blooms filling the air as he talked about the alleged rape and sodomy of a Haitian teenager by a Sri Lankan peacekeeper.

There was no rape, insisted Maj. Gen. Jagath Dias, who was dispatched to Haiti to investigate the 2013 case. He may not have been the best choice for that job – Dias had been accused of atrocities in his own country’s vicious civil war.

Dias didn’t talk to the accuser, he told The Associated Press, nor did he interview medical staff who examined her. But he did clear his soldier, who remained in the Sri Lankan military.

It wasn’t the first time that Sri Lankan soldiers were accused of sexual abuse: In 2007, a group of Haitian children identified 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers in a child sex ring that went on for three years, the AP reported in April.

In that case, the Sri Lankan military repatriated 114 of the peacekeepers, but none was ever jailed.

In fact, Sri Lanka has never prosecuted a single soldier for sexual assault or sexual misconduct while serving in a peacekeeping mission abroad, the AP found.

The alleged abuses committed by its troops abroad stem from a culture of impunity that arose during Sri Lanka’s civil war and has seeped into its peacekeeping missions. The government has consistently refused calls for independent investigations into its generation-long civil war, marked by widespread reports of rape camps, torture, mass killings and other alleged war crimes by its troops.

The U.N. has deployed thousands of peacekeepers from Sri Lanka despite these unresolved allegations of war crimes at home. This is a pattern repeated around the world: Strapped for troops, the U.N. draws recruits from many countries with poor human rights records for its peacekeeping program, budgeted at nearly $8 billion this year.

An AP investigation last month found that in the last 12 years up to March, an estimated 2,000 allegations of sexual abuse or exploitation have been leveled at U.N. peacekeepers and personnel. That tally could change as U.N. officials update their records and reconcile data from old files.

Congolese troops also have been accused of war crimes during their own longstanding war. As peacekeepers in Central African Republic, at least 17 have been accused of sexual abuse and exploitation. The situation in Congo, meanwhile, is so complex the country is hosting a U.N. peacekeeping mission to manage its own violent conflict while also sending personnel on peacekeeping missions to other countries.

Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan understands the predicament. When fighting gripped Rwanda, he struggled to find peacekeepers to help stem what would later become a mass slaughter that killed an estimated 800,000 people.

“Sometimes the U.N. needs troops,” Annan told the AP earlier this month. “And they are so desperate that they accept troops that they will normally not accept if they had the choice.”

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RAPE CAMPS

In the case of the Haiti sex ring, nine children told U.N. investigators of being lured into having sex in exchange for food and then being passed from soldier to soldier. One girl said she didn’t even have breasts when she first had sex with a peacekeeper at age 12. Over the course of three years, another child said he had sex with more than 100 Sri Lankan peacekeepers, averaging about four a day.

The allegations of sexual abuse by Sri Lankan peacekeepers echo those of the country’s generation-long civil war against the ethnic Tamil rebel group, known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which was fighting for an independent homeland in the island nation’s north and east. Eight years after the war ended, people are increasingly coming forward to give horrific accounts of camps where they say they were tortured and gang-raped.

One Tamil woman said in testimony shared with the AP that she was kidnapped by masked men in plain clothes and taken blindfolded and gagged to what she thought was an army camp.

“He removed all my clothes and forced me down on a mattress on the floor and tied both of my hands and legs apart with a nylon rope to iron bars on both sides of the mattress,” she said. She was held for about two months, and repeatedly raped.

She described another of her tormentors, who was brought into the room she shared with four other girls. “He was asked to take his pick,” she told the International Truth and Justice Project, which issued a 57-page report in March documenting the alleged torture or rape of 43 people, some as recently as December. “He looked around and chose me. And took me to another room and raped me.”

She identified him from a series of photographs of soldiers. The AP found that the man, an officer, went on to become a U.N. peacekeeper.

The woman asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. The Sri Lankan army and the government declined to comment on the report.

Sri Lanka has routinely denied that its forces have been involved in widespread torture or abuse. In interviews with the AP, Sri Lankan officials pointed to their new peacekeeping role in Mali as evidence that their military is beyond reproach.

“If Sri Lanka is being invited to do this job, then that means all those issues have been dealt with in a way that everybody’s comfortable with,” Deputy Foreign Minister Harsha de Silva said.

That’s not exactly how the U.N. sees it.

Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, said the U.N. had few offers when it went looking for peacekeepers to protect convoys in Mali, one of the most dangerous U.N. missions in the world.

“The only ones who offered soldiers were the Sri Lankans,” he said.

Countries with better trained troops and human rights records have been reluctant to offer personnel for peacekeeping since 1993, when 18 American troops were killed in Somalia. The deaths were considered to be a key reason why the U.N. struggled to find help ahead of the Rwanda genocide in 1994.

Robert O. Blake, who was the U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka from 2006 to 2009, was one of many officials who pressed the Sri Lankan government for more transparency about the war crimes allegations.