“Over 30 activists, human rights campaigners, lawyers and academics from Europe, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa have signed onto a letter that brings her attention to the most immediate threats to peace and justice in Sri Lanka today. Tamil organizations, irrespective of their organizational differences, have signed under the broad banner of the Canadian Peace Alliance” says the Canadian Peace Alliance.

We publish below the letter in full;

Dear Dr. Pillay,

With your visit to Sri Lanka from August 25^th-31^st, we urge you, as global citizens concerned with the deteriorating situation in the island, to investigate militarization, settlements, and the systematic rape of Tamil prisoners of war. These three issues, the most immediate threats to peace and justice today, lay new seeds of dispossession, inequality and bitterness. Ultimately, an international investigation cannot delink the 2009 massacres from the ongoing suffering of the Tamil people in the here and now.

Navi Pillay

The Sri Lankan army is building military bases throughout the Tamil peoples’ lands. The Sri Lankan army presence of 85,000-86,000 in the North and East is contrary to peace building and amounts to a Tamil civil society under occupation. According to ground reports, armed soldiers control every area of civilian life from schooling to public meetings; soldiers even place restrictions on humanitarian, developmental and psychiatric work for the war ravaged Tamil people[i].

Through the occupation, the Sri Lankan Armed Forces seize land from Tamil civilians while settlers from the South are brought in to colonize the land. From the Jaffna Peninsula in the North to the Trincomalee harbor and beyond in the East, the traditional homeland of the Tamil Nation is subjected to occupation and settlements. This situation exacerbates socio-economic deprivation, for Tamil people are denied the ability to cultivate their appropriated lands and must compete for fishing with the superior technology of Sinhalese settlers.

With Tamil villages renamed in Sinhala and Buddhist Stupas emerging where none were before, Sri Lankan’s ‘reconciliation’ program is triumphalism over a people under siege. We deeply suspect that the Sri Lankan state’s land-grab scheme is part of a much more insidious agenda: a slow and relentless genocide that seeks to eradicate the Tamil Nation and render them without their traditional territory. In fact, land-grabs are simply a continuation of an age-old state policy that lies at the heart of Tamil grievances in their homeland[ii].

Finally, we call for an international mechanism to protect the rights of Tamil prisoners of war from persecution and rape, which the government hides with its rhetoric of reconciliation and rehabilitation. Sri Lanka has a long history of prison brutality. In June 2012, the Special Task Force attacked a group of Vavuiya prisoners, which left 15 people seriously injured, and one dead from critical injuries[iii], but even Tamil prisoners released from internment continue to endure persecution.  Doctors and social workers on the ground report that many of the released ex-LTTE cadres are subjected to a systematic program of harassment, sexual abuse and rape[iv]. If the International Community is serious about the rehabilitation of ex-LTTE cadres, then it must pressure the Sri Lankan government to immediately stop its brutal treatment of ex-LTTE cadres who are attempting to rebuild their lives.

We believe that these matters must be addressed to ensure peace and stability, and urge you to investigate them in Sri Lanka. We—the undersigned organizations and individuals—hope to hear about these urgent issues at your oral report to the UNHRC in September.

Sincerely,