The Overlooked Human Rights Problem: Sri Lankan Tamils

In every region with a history of European colonization, instability remains a permeating effect. This lasting impact of the colonial era in Sri Lanka, a former British colony, is most dangerously evident in the social stratification and ethnic tension that exists between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamil communities that exists to this day. Great Britain had colonized India and Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon, in the early 19th-century. Even then, a small community of Tamils had existed in Sri Lanka for centuries. As a result of the British occupation, tensions that had not existed for so many years arose between the two ethnic groups. Because the Tamil ethnicity was one the British controlled through an array of colonies (e.g. Sri Lanka, India, South Africa) whereas the Sinhalese ethnic group were exclusive to only one, relatively small British colony, the British saw greater reason to advantage the Tamil population of Sri Lanka as a part of their regional objective. As part of the colonialist intent to institute western culture and the English language as a replacement for local traditions, they established English schools but primarily situated them in Tamil-dominated communities, alienating the Sinhalese. They gave administrative posts to Tamils imported from mainland India as opposed to the Sinhalese as part of the colonial commitment to a hierarchical political stratification resembling the western concept of a governmental social contract. Once the country gained independence in 1948, the Sinhalese majority immediately began enacting policies and laws discriminatory towards Tamils, including the Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948, which barred Indian Tamils from holding Sri Lankan citizenship. Eventually, as a result of the discrimination and systemic inequalities, the Tamils organized themselves into a coalition of separatists seeking independence from Sri Lanka in the northern region, which would become famously known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE. After a brief intervention by India which ended in politics preventing an actual resolution to the issue, several armed confrontations between the LTTE and Sri Lankan forces, and multiple failed attempts at ceasefires, the Sri Lankan government finally prevailed over the Tamil resistance group in 2009, ending a 26-year conflict by executing all the last Tamil soldiers who surrendered.

Fast forward to today and one can still clearly see remnants of the conflict that ended over a decade ago but not in the shape of outright war. Witness W344: a male who’s suffered from torture and imprisonment ever since his teenage years. He anonymously joined 14 other Tamils who had suffered the Sri Lankan government’s inhumane treatment of previous political dissidents to share his story to the International Truth and Justice Project, the ITJP. Their experiences were so horrifying and despicable that soon after, the ITJP filed a case in the United Nations legal system alleging that Sri Lankan Prime Minister Gotabaya Rajapaksa had played a role of tacit compliance to the nation’s security forces’ project of detaining and interrogating members of the minority Tamil community in Sri Lanka with little concern for human rights. In the report filed and published by the ITJP, witnesses narrated a collective experience of being held hostage in bloodstained rooms where they were “tortured, photographed, fingerprinted (with an inkpad), and forced to sign a confession in Sinhala.” For nearly a decade now, there have been numerous accounts and controversies surrounding the supposed torture of Sri Lankan national security forces on Tamils, who are an ethnic minority in Sri Lanka with origins in the southern parts of India, where they occupy their own state known as Tamil Nadu.

Since the civil war, the Sri Lankan government has sustained a commitment to rooting out fabricated treasonous behavior that hasn’t substantively existed since the end of the civil war. Only 3 of the 15 whistleblowers were even once members of the LTTE, whereas the other 12 had been detained and tortured for no other reason than the fact that they shared the same language, culture, and community as an ethnicity that the Sri Lankan government saw as a threat. Many of the witnesses with the ITJP recounted being sexually assaulted and raped by police officers, some remembering the trauma in vivid detail while others were in such shock, they couldn’t gather much of what had happened to them. The report also details the common practice of using white vans with no number plates on behalf of the state to kidnap Tamils to interrogate them for supposed intent of insurrection, which the report supplements with numerous first-hand accounts by Sri Lankan residents and statements by international institutions such as Amnesty International and the Asian Human Rights Commission. This disregard to due process of law and equal protection of the laws, which are constitutionalized in Sri Lanka, and human rights has escalated in recent years, leading to the ongoing legal initiative at the United Nations to hold the Rajapaksa-led Sri Lankan government accountable, which to this day vehemently denies all accusations of misconduct or unfair treatment of Tamils post-civil war.

Though the anecdotal evidence from the witnesses whose accounts were gathered by the ITJP speaks for itself, a closer look at the empirical evidence paints an even bloodier picture. Take, for instance, the 2012 Report of the Secretary-General's Internal Review Panel on United Nations Action in Sri Lanka, which details the obstructions of UN-led initiatives that the Sri Lankan government engaged in at the height of the civil war. According to the 128-page report, the Sri Lankan government willfully depicted the number of Tamil civilians in need of aid during the war in Wanni, located in the northern Tamil-dominated region of Sri Lanka, in a manner far from the truth. Wanni local government officials testified to the UN that their calculations had 360,000 Tamil individuals in need of aid, whereas the UN estimated approximately 350,000 individuals; but Colombo officials insisted that there were for certain no more than 70,000 civilians in need of aid in the entire region despite earlier commissions made by the same Colombo government in 2008 counting 429,000 residents in the region. As a result, the government denied any meaningful aid or food assistance from entering the country and would later issue restrictions on UN attempts to deliver aid by sea. Moreover, the government refused to let UN officials monitor the distribution of what little aid did happen to make it into the country, instead claiming their right to sovereignty from the UN.
 There exists also conclusive evidence supportive of the narrative given by the 15 witnesses who told their stories. Medical reports written by idependent experts confirmed the torture recounted by the 9 witness, and the ITJP photographed several scars on the bodies of the witnesses. Michelle Bachelet, the former Chilean President and the current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights since 2018, spoke recently with regards to the ITJP report to be considered by the current UN convention and said that Rajapaksa had promoted at least 28 former military and intelligence officials who had been specifically outlined by UN reports as guilty of committing human rights abuses and war crimes against humanity during the civil war to positions of high power, including crucial administrative posts. The organization Tamils for Biden on September 18th of this year sent a letter to the attorney-general urging the United States to take a firm stance against Rajapaksa’s actions, citing several pieces of evidence as to the inhumanity committed by the Sri Lankan state; this includes a UN panel report that had concluded that at least 80,000 Tamil civilians had been massacred by Sri Lankan bombs in official “no-fire zones.” In 2017, the ITJP handed over a report to the UN that described Sri Lankan military-run sexcamps where Tamil wives, mothers, and sisters were being held as sex slaves for soldiers. The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office on Human Rights and Democracy published a report in 2012 concluding that there were at least 90,000 Tamil widowers in just the northern region of Sri Lanka who had lost their husbands during the war and had no financial or social security. The UN Working Group on Enforced Disappearances stated in 2020 that Sri Lanka was the 2nd highest nation with enforced disappearances, the significant majority of which are attributed to the systematic usage of white vans by the Sri Lankan government to detain and torture and rape Tamil people.

The disheartening stories and empirical evidence suggest foul-play on the behalf of the Sri Lankan government and Prime Minister Rajapaksa. Perhaps what is even more concerning than the injustices taking place in Sri Lanka is the fact that most of this story has never been delivered to the public by the media in any meaningful way. Instead, Addison Rae’s new movie, President Biden’s singular stutter in a 15-minute-long speech, the Easter eggs in the trailer for the upcoming Marvel film, and the ridiculous tweets by former President Donald Trump are at the forefront of what we consider the media of a modern world led by globalization and international cooperation. Many stories like those of the 15 witnesses currently testifying are upsettingly also experienced by Rohingya Muslims, Hong Kong protestors, African Americans, and women seeking equality in certain Middle Eastern countries among other marginalized or persecuted communities. For in a growing world of consumerism led by an obsession with hedonic ambitions, it’s simply easier to laugh at cat videos than to act against war crimes and crimes against humanity. In fact, it’s unlikely that even half of Americans could point to where Sri Lanka is on the map, much less be aware of the genocide taking place there; yet awareness is a critical component of being a global citizen, for without it, we all risk leaving our own countries in obscurity where an authoritative state willing to commit crimes similar to the stature of the crimes committed by the Sri Lankan government are able to emerge to power and make us the next Witness W344.

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