Sri Lanka is preparing to send 185 police officers to Haiti for United Nations duties, most of them drawn from the Special Task Force, the paramilitary police commando unit.
The contingent is made up of 174 Special Task Force personnel and 11 other police officers, among them two doctors from the Police Medical Division, Tamil Guardian reported, citing the Police Media Division. The officers will travel in three groups — the first two leaving this month and the last in November.
Inspector General of Police Priyantha Weerasooriya met the officers at the Special Task Force Training School in Katukurunda on Tuesday.
A police deployment, following the army’s
This is a distinct stage from the army movement this desk has reported previously. In April, the Sri Lanka Army completed pre-deployment training at IPSOTSL for troops joining the UN-authorised mission, after Defence Secretary Sampath Thuyacontha held talks at UN Headquarters in New York on the proposed Gang Suppression Force deployment. The 185 officers now being readied are police, not soldiers, and form a separate contingent.
The history the deployment returns to
Sri Lankan personnel have served in Haiti before, and that record is the reason the new deployment is contested.
In 2007 the United Nations said it had received allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse by members of the Sri Lankan battalion serving with the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), and that 108 Sri Lankan soldiers were being repatriated on disciplinary grounds, with senior officers also sent home over failures of command. The allegations involved Haitian children said to have been exploited in exchange for small amounts of money or food. A later UN investigation identified allegations involving more than 100 members of successive Sri Lankan contingents between 2004 and 2007.
Tamil Guardian reported that the UN Committee Against Torture noted in 2016 that only 23 of the more than 100 accused had been convicted, and raised concern about the lack of clarity over the punishments imposed. In September, the Sri Lankan army acknowledged that soldiers had committed crimes against Haitian children, saying those responsible had been tried in internal military proceedings and dismissed.
Amnesty International has said publicly available information does not show that any Sri Lankan peacekeeper was criminally prosecuted and convicted over the allegations, and has called for answers on the vetting of personnel sent to Haiti.
The Special Task Force itself has been accused of grave abuses against Tamils, including the 1987 Kokkadichcholai massacre in Batticaloa.
Not reported
The filing does not say what vetting, if any, the 185 officers underwent, nor which UN mission or command structure they will serve under. It does not give the length of the deployment, the ranks or gender composition of the contingent beyond the two medical officers, or whether the Sri Lanka Police has adopted a screening procedure of its own.
No response from the Police Media Division, the Ministry of Defence or the United Nations to the vetting question is reported. At the time of writing this desk could not find a filing on this specific police deployment from any other verified newsroom — the story was carried elsewhere only by aggregator sites, which do not count as independent corroboration.
