Thank you very much, indeed.
I should probably mention that I've written a book of survivor stories about the end of the civil war in 2009, so I'm quite happy to answer questions about that period as well.
At this point I'm going to tell you a bit about the research I did for a recent BBC documentary looking at ongoing rape and torture in Sri Lanka. This is based on the testimony of asylum seekers and refugees in the United Kingdom on the whole, though a few were in other countries in Europe. I can't be specific as to which countries, for the sake of their safety
Initially, I was actually looking for people who I'd heard had been sexually abused in detention at the end of the war, and I knew of a couple of cases. In fact, what I ended up finding was much more than I expected. I found a large number of cases from this year in the U.K. of men and women who alleged they had been repeatedly raped and tortured in detention by the Sri Lankan military and the CID.
I found 12 cases, eight females and four males, who had already arrived in the U.K. after rape this year, so that's pretty quick. Some of them were people who had student visas, or who got them quite quickly and managed to get out to the U.K. and then claimed asylum. Others left by boat to India, then went on false passports through the Middle East to the U.K.
Of those 12 cases in which the rape occurred in detention this year, they say, nine already had medical/legal reports—so independent expert medical reports—that looked at the psychological and physical damage these people had sustained, and corroborated their story of torture. Almost all of them had scars that were consistent with torture, including.... I think everybody had cigarette burns. One woman had 30 cigarette burns on her body, to give you an example, including on her genitals. That was very common.
I also found quite a lot of cases from last year, although eventually I was overwhelmed with the number of cases. I didn't need them all for the documentary. But I knew about eight from last year, and there were a lot more out there, and those were different from the 12 from last year that Human Rights Watch had documented. Obviously, I'm concerned that these cases are the tip of the iceberg of what's going on, because those people have to have the money, the luck, and the way to get to the U.K. and so quickly.
The pattern of stories that I heard was quite chilling, because it was more or less the same thing again and again. These tended to be people who had some tenuous link with the LTTE. They were not, in my opinion—and I didn't say they were—hard-core LTTE fighters.
I used to live in Sri Lanka. I was there during the peace process period, so I spent quite a bit of time with the LTTE. I've interviewed a lot of Tigers, and I don't think these were hard-core fighters. These were people who had joined them in Jaffna or in Colombo, who had helped them pass messages, find safe houses, stitch uniforms, those sorts of things. They were not people who really fought with guns, most of them. If they had been in the war, then they said they had been forcibly recruited in the last few months.
The typical pattern was that they were stalked, often in the north of Sri Lanka, blindfolded and handcuffed, and thrown in the back of a white van. They were driven for some hours on a smooth road, then driven on a bumpy road into a more remote area, and taken inside a building. They never ever saw the outside of the building, either when going into it or coming out of it. They were kept in a solitary room. They were blindfolded when taken to the toilet or to the interrogation room, where there would be instruments for torture. The women all talked about hearing other Tamil female voices screaming, and they supposed they were being tortured or raped.
All of them were fingerprinted and photographed. All of them were forced to sign a confession in Sinhala, a language they couldn't understand. And the torture and rape would be before and after the confession. There was no sense of it being geared toward getting a confession alone. They were generally held for.... One woman I met was held for four months, but generally for 20 or 30 days. They were held until their family members could find someone, an intermediary, quite often from the Tamil pro-government militia party, EPDP, to negotiate a trade, basically a giant bribe to get the person out of detention. Everybody had paid that bribe to get released.
In one case, a girl said she was held naked actually in the cell for the last three days and raped just before she was released, and the women talked about being raped repeatedly throughout the time they were held there by men in military uniform and in plain clothes. These were quite young women, so they were deeply traumatized by that.
Their release tended to be the same story again and again. They would be blindfolded in the cell. They were not told that they were being released and they would be taken out in this van, driven on a bumpy road, and then a smooth road, and then a bumpy road again, and when they were kicked out of the van at the other end, they assumed that they were going for execution. So they were terrified. And then they would have the blindfold removed and see an uncle or a father or somebody standing there. Some of them saw money changing hands. Others didn't. The trade had been done before. In most of the cases they didn't go home. They didn't go and see their mothers, for example, and they've never told their mothers quite what had happened to them. They were put in hiding somewhere and smuggled out of the country as quickly as possible.
So that was one category that I looked at, that was ongoing rape this year.
I also looked at the issue of torture and sexual abuse in the government rehabilitation program for former combatants. I don't know how much you know about this. We think approximately 12,000 former fighters or suspected fighters were detained or surrendered at the end of the war and put in any one of up to 22 camps at that point, and now there are only four of them left.
I got the case documents of seven men and I met some of them. Four had medical reports establishing torture, and government documentation proving that they had been in this rehabilitation program. Just to give you an idea, one of the men I met was very young. He had been forcibly recruited by the Tigers at the age of 17 and he fought for six months, well, not even fought, he helped them move ammunition and dead bodies, and then was so scared at the end of the war that he surrendered to the army, thinking he'd be better off to own up to what his role had been. He was actually kept for four years in rehabilitation. Considering he had only been with the Tigers for six months against his will, four years of re-education was quite a lot. He said he had been kept in four places, and in all of the four places...there is some lack of clarity about which are detention centres and when they become rehabilitation centres because it's...the whole program, but certainly some of the places he was kept in, Welikanda, for example, in the east, is definitely a rehabilitation centre. He says in all of those he was tortured, including sexually abused. He was really quite graphic about some unpleasant things that happened to him but I won't trouble you with them at this point. He was very young and basically after he was released, he was continually harassed and forced to inform on others to the police, the local police and army camp, and basically his life was made a misery. His family finally said he should leave Sri Lanka. It was a very similar pattern to the other men I met who had been in that rehabilitation program and who had been in that camp at similar sorts of times.
Interestingly, they also talked about being forced to smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol because that broke the LTTE prohibition on smoking and alcohol and they found that quite distressing.
Seven cases in the bigger picture of 12,000 is obviously a drop in the ocean, but I am aware that there are many more cases that I haven't documented in the U.K. Also, I recently went to Paris and I was told about more cases there.
The other thing that I looked at was a particularly nasty form of torture branding which you might be aware of: a hot metal rod is used to brand diagonally somebody's back. You will see in the U.K. now men, and some women too, who've got anywhere between two and 15 of these branding marks on their backs. It can be anything up to literally 50% of the skin surface of the back. I know, just from two doctors who work on this, who specialize in torture and the charity Freedom from Torture that helps survivors, they together have a hundred cases now from Sri Lanka of Tamil men and women who've been branded like that after the war, and that's in the last two or three years. There are probably lots more cases out there in the U.K. alone that we just haven't counted. Certainly some of the people I met had not gone to lawyers or doctors and so haven't been picked up and haven't gone to charities.
To give you another sense of the scope of this... and also Freedom from Torture have been doing a forensic study looking at the branding to ascertain if there was any way this could be self-inflicted. I think that's going to be published soon in a forensic journal. It will say it's not possible. To sustain that kind of torture you'd have to be anesthetized or tied down to be able to cope. Many of the people discussed passing out because of the pain. That's the branding.
In other cases, the charity I mentioned in the U.K., Freedom from Torture, has documented 120 cases of torture overall since the end of the war. As you are probably aware, Human Rights Watch has documented 62 cases of sexual abuse postwar.
To give you a sense, one of the independent expert medical witnesses, who testifies to the Home Office in the U.K. for asylum cases and who's very well respected, told me she had documented and done these medical reports for 200 Tamils in the last five years and established torture in those cases. The scale of it was quite shocking.
I should also point out briefly that everybody I met talked about continuing harassment of their families after they left Sri Lanka. Their family's been visited and questioned by the security officials. Certainly I'm aware that there has been a crackdown post CHOGM, the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, of those people who helped the media, particularly people connected to the program that I made that was broadcast worldwide and also some of the other British TV programs. I can't go into too much detail because it would obviously identify those people who faced harassment, but I know of five cases where people's families or the interviewers themselves have been questioned or threatened in the last week.
BBC put the evidence that I gathered for this documentary to a senior human rights lawyer in the U.K. She looked at the case studies and the background information and said that in her opinion it appeared to be systematic and widespread, and that it could constitute a crime against humanity. In my opinion, looking at it politically, we're seeing an ongoing mopping-up operation of anyone with even the most tenuous links to the LTTE. That's being enabled by the climate of impunity and the lack of accountability for what happened in 2009.
That's probably enough at the moment. I'll take some questions, if that's okay.