Sri Lanka's president Anura Kumara Dissanayake has appointed retired general Aruna Jayasekara as deputy defence minister - a man who oversaw Sri Lankan troops as they raped minors in Haiti and was a platoon commander as the state crushed an insurgency led by Dissanayake’s party, the JVP.
Jayasekara was second in command of the 3rd contingent to Haiti during a Sri Lankan peacekeeping operation that faced allegations of running a child sex trafficking ring during a UN peacekeeping operation from 2004 to 2007. An investigation by the Associated Press in 2017 found that 134 Sri Lankan peackeepers were sexually exploiting children as young as nine years old in Haiti.
A confidential inquiry by the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Service said that “the acts of sexual exploitation and abuse were frequent, occurred usually at night, and at virtually every location where Sri Lankan military were deployed”.
The UN continues to deploy Sri Lankan peacekeepers despite the Sri Lankan military's record of human rights abuses.
According to his profile by the Sri Lankan army, Jayasekera was “commissioned in the rank of Second Lieutenant on 4th Oct 1985 and posted to prestigious 1st Battalion the Gemunu Watch”.
“Since the day this Battalion was raised it has been deployed on combat operational tasks to eradicate JVP Insurgency and Tamil Militancy,” the army added.
The JVP insurgency of 1987, led by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, saw tens of thousands killed. Dissanayake currently heads the JVP, which came to power for the first time in Sri Lanka’s history this year.
The Sri Lankan military also killed countless Tamil civilians in the years that followed.
To date, no one has been held accountable for the sexual exploitation of minors in Haiti or for the war crimes committed by the Sri Lankan military.