A Tamil Named “Kumar” living in Australia has detailed shocking claims of rape and torture at the hands of Sri Lankan army intelligence to Australia Broadcasting Corporation.
Transcript of Telecast is as Follows:
Transcript
LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: In recent years Australia has grappled with an influx of refugees from war zones and trouble spots around the world, including Sri Lanka.
It recently emerged from 30 years of a brutal civil war in which mass killings and disappearances were commonplace.
Last year almost half of the asylum seekers who arrived here were Sri Lankans, many with tales of gross abuses of human rights.
But the Government has been sending Sri Lankans home, more than 900 in fact since the start of last year, claiming, as the Sri Lankan Government does, that the war and the threat of persecution are over.
But tonight, one Sri Lankan Tamil living in Australia tells a very different and disturbing story, a story of torture at the hands of the Sri Lankan Army intelligence just last month.
Heather Ewart has this exclusive report.
HEATHER EWART, REPORTER: This Sri Lankan Tamil family in Melbourne is living with a terrible secret. The parents, who are afraid to be identified, have told their three young daughters their father was injured in a motorbike accident during a recent visit to his homeland. The real story is a very different and shocking one. ‘Kumar’, as we’re calling him, says that just three weeks ago he was abducted, raped and tortured by Sri Lankan army intelligence officers.
‘KUMAR’: I was bleeding and I was naked and I no place to sleep. I slept on the floor like a dog. I thought like dying, but I’m thinking of my kids and family back here.
HEATHER EWART: ‘Kumar’ arrived in Australia in 2008. He fled here from Sri Lanka after being interrogated and accused of links to the Tamil Tigers. He says he’d been a school bus driver when he was coerced by the Tigers to deliver parcels for them. Soon after, Army intelligence took him in for questioning and he says he was threatened.
‘KUMAR’: And I got afraid and I thought it’s not safe to in Sri Lanka anymore.
HEATHER EWART: After arriving in Melbourne, Kumar studied to become a chef. His family joined him last year when he was employed by a local restaurant on a work visa. But in late March, he needed to fly home.
‘KUMAR’: This the time when I arrived to Sri Lanka on 30th March, 2013.
HEATHER EWART: So that was before anything had happened to you.
‘KUMAR’: Yeah, the first the first day.
SAMJEE, MALAYSIAN TAMIL FRIEND: ‘Kumar’ actually went to look after his uncle because his uncle wasn’t feeling very well.
HEATHER EWART: ‘Kumar’s friend Samjee, a Malaysian Tamil, this week learned ‘Kumar’s full story for the first time.
SAMJEE: And then he got picked up in a white van. These guys just took him at gunpoint and then, without giving any reason, abused him.
HEATHER EWART: Less than a week after he’d arrived in Sri Lanka’s Gambar Province to manage his uncle’s restaurant, ‘Kumar’ says he and his brothers were stopped by two men in a white van.
‘KUMAR’: They just kept – they p**s on my head and they told my brother that we are from Army intelligence. And they took me into the van and they just (inaudible) my eyes with a black cloth.
HEATHER EWART: When the van finally stopped and the blindfold was removed, ‘Kumar’ could see where he was.
‘KUMAR’: It’s a dark room with dim light and also the walls are with blood, dried blood.
HEATHER EWART: It was a sign of what was to come, as the men claiming to be Army intelligence grilled ‘Kumar’, he says, about links to the Tamil Tigers, which he repeatedly denied.
‘KUMAR’: They came back and they just started again hitting me with a log at my back and now I got a spine problem as well.
HEATHER EWART: Tell me what happened then? What else did they do to you?
‘KUMAR’: The two guys were drunk and they came to me and they just – they just put their hand on my body and they just rubbed me and they – like, I had some sexual torture as well.
HEATHER EWART: They raped you?
‘KUMAR’: Yeah, like, squeezed my balls and they just inserted the ice at the back of my anus and they did it, like, three times and when they did the third time, I fainted.
HEATHER EWART: There was still worse to come. On the fourth and final day, ‘Kumar’s captors branded his back with hot irons.
‘KUMAR’: I thought my life is – that’s the end of my life and I just fainted. Again, I fainted.
HEATHER EWART: ‘Kumar’, do you mind showing me what the scars are on your back?
‘KUMAR’: Yeah, sure.
HEATHER EWART: Are you OK? (Lifts shirt to show scars on back) Oh, that’s terrible.
‘Kumar’ says he only managed to make it home because his uncle paid a $20,000 bribe to his captors. He landed in Melbourne two weeks ago.
It must still be very painful, is it?
‘KUMAR’: Yes.
TREVOR GRANT, TAMIL REFUGEE COUNCIL: I learnt of this through a phone call last Wednesday evening that came to the Tamil Refugee Council. The doctor who had seen this man two days earlier was quite shocked by what she’d seen and she contacted the Tamil Refugee Council and we came into it from there.
HEATHER EWART: The doctor had already issued a referral for ‘Kumar’ to get urgent psychiatric treatment, saying he was deeply traumatised, he’d been tortured by Sri Lankan Army intelligence and burnt with heated rods. Professor Louise Newman, an expert advisor on asylum seekers mental health, was also consulted by the Tamil Refugee Council.
LOUISE NEWMAN, REFUGEE MENTAL HEALTH EXPERT: In my view it is a credible story. He provides detail and is very preoccupied with some of the minute details of the atrocities that were actually performed on him, which is very typical of the accounts that we get of people who’ve been through these sorts of experiences.
GORDON WEISS, FORMER UN SPOKESMAN, SRI LANKA: It’s certainly believable. There have been a series of reports in just the last few months from the US State Department, from Human Rights Watch, from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights detailing this kind of treatment.
HEATHER EWART: Gordon Weiss was the United Nations spokesman in Sri Lanka during the civil war.
GORDON WEISS: One has to remember that the people in charge of Sri Lanka at the moment have got long histories stretching back to the 1980s of using torture and abduction in order to suppress segments of the population.
‘KUMAR’: I know, if I go back, surely I’ll be killed.
THISARA SAMARASINGHE, SRI LANKAN HIGH COMMISSIONER: There is no such truth in such false allegations. If he has been treated in the manner that he has just explained by you, he’s welcome to come and present it to even to me or present it to any government authority with his name and identity.
HEATHER EWART: ‘Kumar’ and his supporters say he’s not about to take that risk or his family in Sri Lanka might be penalised. But the High Commissioner is questioning his credibility.
THISARA SAMARASINGHE: If they are doing it to bring discredit to Sri Lanka, they are making a serious mistake. Sri Lanka is transparent.
GORDON WEISS: The High Commissioner, in keeping with other proxy agents for the Government of Sri Lanka, represents a government which is accused of mass atrocity crimes. So it’s no surprise that there will be blanket denial. Recall the very same government was denying that they were using heavy weapons during the war, that they were bombing schools and hospitals.
HEATHER EWART: Yet the Australian Government doesn’t believe there’s still a problem. It’s just returned 38 of the Sri Lankan asylum seekers who arrived by boat at Geraldton earlier this month.
BOB CARR, FOREIGN MINISTER (Feb. 14): Since 2010, there has been no evidence of returnees being discriminated against or arrested, let alone tortured. … And I think it’s wrong to say that Tamils live in fear and are fleeing their country.
‘KUMAR’: When they see my back, they will know what has happened to me. Because a lot of stories doesn’t come out from Sri Lanka.
HEATHER EWART: ‘Kumar’s injuries mean he can’t work and he’s now in danger of losing his visa. If that happens, he faces deportation within a month, so his next step would be to apply for asylum.
‘KUMAR’: That I can’t forget. No-one wants to get these kind of things in their life, pray to God. No-one must get this kind of punishment.
LEIGH SALES: Heather Ewart reporting.