Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said on Wednesday that failed asylum seekers held in Australian-run detention centers in the South Pacific will not face prosecution or harm if they return home.
Wickremesinghe’s comment comes as Australia increases pressure on failed asylum seekers on Papua New Guinea’s Manus island and the tiny island nation of Nauru to return home voluntarily, including offering large sums of money, amid fears a deal for the US to take refugees has collapsed.
Only five men from Nepal on Manus have so far opted to leave despite the threat of deportations.
Australia does not publish details on the nationalities of the 1,152 people held on Manus and Nauru though refugee advocates said there are approximately 150 Sri Lankans detained.
Many of these would have received their refugee status, advocates said, but for those who have been rejected, they face the choice of accepting the offer of cash from Australia or the threat of deportation.
“They are welcome to return to Sri Lanka and we will not prosecute them,” Wickremesinghe told reporters in Australia’s capital Canberra.
Despite the assurances from Wickremesinghe, refugee advocates said many Sri Lankans would be reluctant to return home amid reports of mistreatment of members of the ethnic Tamil minority, a claim Wickremesinghe rejected.
“It is quite safe for them to come back... we want all the Tamils to come back,” said Wickremesinghe.
The UN has urged Sri Lanka to better protect minorities like Tamils and redress the wrongs committed during a 26-year conflict with Tamil rebels which ended in 2009.
However, Tamil women who survived Sri Lanka’s civil war now face widespread exploitation by officials in their own community as well as from the army, the head of an ethnic reconciliation body said.
Former president Chandrika Kumaratunga, the chairwoman of the Office for National Unity and Reconciliation, said women who were widowed during the 37-year conflict were among the victims of abuse by officials who frequently demand favors just to carry out routine paperwork.
“There is a lot of abuse still going on by officials, even Tamil officials and even at lower levels,” she told Sri Lanka’s Foreign Correspondents’ Association.
“Even to sign a document, they abuse the women and of course some people in the (armed) forces,” she said.
Kumaratunga, who lost an eye in a Tamil Tiger suicide bombing when she was president at the height of the conflict, said the best way to make women less vulnerable was to improve their livelihoods.
“We feel that when women have livelihoods, they will be empowered... they feel safer and they do not have to be exploited,” she said.
Kumaratunga said many women had been traumatized as a result of the abuse and needed psychological support but the authorities lacked qualified experts to treat them.
Prosecutions of military personnel or officials for crimes are rare in Sri Lanka, although four soldiers were jailed for 25 years for the gang-rape of a young Tamil mother in 2010, a year after the war ended.
At least 100,000 Sri Lankans lost their lives during the conflict that saw horrific abuses by both sides.

Source: Arab News