Though there have been numerous reports indicating that the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) has been systematically raping Tamil women fleeing the country’s war zone for the past four months, the Sri Lankan government’s brutal methods of media censorship have almost entirely prevented these stories from being publicized. The most notable exceptions are two articles in the Tamil media, one that reported “130 women were taken for sexual abuse” after fleeing the war zone by SLA soldiers, and one that described “shocking stories of sexual violence meted out" to Tamil women civilian detainees in military-run detention camps. However, the untold personal accounts from witnesses and victims of these crimes are countless.
In February, a doctor in the Vavuniya hospital, speaking on the condition of anonymity, reported that he had an entire ward full of women who had been raped by soldiers, many of whom had bite marks “all over their bodies.” In March, a woman who is being forcibly held in a female-only “transit camp” reported the soldiers had raped virtually every detainee in the camp while taking them outside individually to “interview” them about possible connections to the rebel Tamil Tigers (LTTE). Another anonymous source, who is involved in disposing dead bodies from the conflict zone, said that the majority of bodies of women who the army claims were LTTE members had been raped.
The Sri Lankan military has a long history of raping Tamil women with complete impunity. A 2002 Amnesty International report said there had been “a marked rise in allegations of rape by police, army and navy personnel” and that “not a single member of the security forces has been brought to trial in connection to incidents of rape in custody.” In 2000, the Asian Human Rights Commission issued a statement that “impunity continues to reign as rape is used as a weapon of war in Sri Lanka”.
However, the current level and pattern of rapes is likely unprecedented, suggesting that they may be acts of genocide. Rape has historically been a trademark of genocide, with Rwanda, Darfur and Bosnia being prime examples. According to Former US Ambassador for War Crimes David Scheffer, “rape can be so well planned and done on such a mass scale as to wipe out much of an ethnic group just as thoroughly, if more slowly, than large-scale murder”. He explains that for
women who had been raped during the atrocities in the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Uganda and the eastern Congo…the experience was devastating to their character, their ethnic bonds and often to their physical health. Even if they were still physically able to bear children, these women typically were ostracized from their communities and could not marry their ethnic men…. mass rape can destroy a substantial part of a group and thus constitute genocide.[1]
The UN Genocide Convention requires its parties – which include Canada, Australia, the USA, the UK and 136 other countries – to "prevent and punish" genocide, “whether committed in time of peace or in time of war”. Classifying the rapes and other atrocities currently being committed in Sri Lanka as genocide is therefore crucial to stopping them.
[1] According to international law, acts that cause “serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group or deliberately inflict on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” constitute genocide.