We Will Teach You A Lesson: Sexual Violence Against Tamils By Sri Lankan Security Forces
We Will Teach You a Lesson: Sexual Violence against Tamils by Sri Lankan Security Forces’, Human Rights Watch publication, 2013. Approximately 130 pages. ISBN: 1-56432-993-3. This is a difficult document to read. Shakespeare’s Macbeth speaking figuratively said that he had eaten too much of horrors. So it is with reading one testimony, “eating” one horror, after another. An emotional revulsion sets in; a wish to set a mental distance, if not escape. What the ‘Report’ records is morally sick, and the sickening is to be avoided with repugnance, if not with aesthetic distaste. For example, when one reads that a sharp needle was inserted in the penis of men. “In one case, this was used to insert small metal balls into their urethra […] the metal balls were later surgically removed by doctors abroad” (page 4). Yogalingam Vijitha, a 27-year-old Tamil woman from Jaffna was tortured and raped with a plantain-tree flower. These “flowers are hard and cone-shaped” (page 19). On the 17th of May 1997, police officers raped Murugesupillai Koneswany of Batticoloa in her home and then detonated a grenade in her genitals, both to kill her and to hide evidence of gang-rape (ibid). “Subramaniam Kannan, a man from Vavuniya […] had barbed wire inserted into his rectum” (p. 21).
I apologise for the crude and extremely distressing detail but their inclusion is essential to the case that Human Rights Watch seeks to present to the world’s awareness and conscience, concern and action. An understandable impulse is to stop reading, close the ‘Report’ and put it both out of sight – and mind. But what then of the victims, the human beings who experienced and must for ever live with this trauma? They can never put the experience aside, as we can lay aside the ‘report’. Those who have been tortured, or have undergone a similar extreme experience, never recover. They never regain their former self; they remain for ever tortured or raped. What was a single happening is, in fact, life-long damage.
more and source:
http://ift.tt/1IaRbLf
We Will Teach You a Lesson: Sexual Violence against Tamils by Sri Lankan Security Forces’, Human Rights Watch publication, 2013. Approximately 130 pages. ISBN: 1-56432-993-3. This is a difficult document to read. Shakespeare’s Macbeth speaking figuratively said that he had eaten too much of horrors. So it is with reading one testimony, “eating” one horror, after another. An emotional revulsion sets in; a wish to set a mental distance, if not escape. What the ‘Report’ records is morally sick, and the sickening is to be avoided with repugnance, if not with aesthetic distaste. For example, when one reads that a sharp needle was inserted in the penis of men. “In one case, this was used to insert small metal balls into their urethra […] the metal balls were later surgically removed by doctors abroad” (page 4). Yogalingam Vijitha, a 27-year-old Tamil woman from Jaffna was tortured and raped with a plantain-tree flower. These “flowers are hard and cone-shaped” (page 19). On the 17th of May 1997, police officers raped Murugesupillai Koneswany of Batticoloa in her home and then detonated a grenade in her genitals, both to kill her and to hide evidence of gang-rape (ibid). “Subramaniam Kannan, a man from Vavuniya […] had barbed wire inserted into his rectum” (p. 21).
I apologise for the crude and extremely distressing detail but their inclusion is essential to the case that Human Rights Watch seeks to present to the world’s awareness and conscience, concern and action. An understandable impulse is to stop reading, close the ‘Report’ and put it both out of sight – and mind. But what then of the victims, the human beings who experienced and must for ever live with this trauma? They can never put the experience aside, as we can lay aside the ‘report’. Those who have been tortured, or have undergone a similar extreme experience, never recover. They never regain their former self; they remain for ever tortured or raped. What was a single happening is, in fact, life-long damage.
more and source:
http://ift.tt/1IaRbLf
Sexual Violence Against Tamils By Sri Lankan Security Forces
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