The Punishment for Peacekeepers Raping Haitian Children Was Dismissal
Decades after soldiers in Sri Lanka’s military were accused of sexually abusing minors while some of the troops were serving as United Nations peacekeepers in Haiti, the Sri Lankan government recently acknowledged that they were tried internally by a Sri Lankan military court, convicted and punished by dismissal. This is not justice for the child victims; dismissal is not justice; it is impunity — a failure made newly urgent by Sri Lanka’s proposed return to Haiti as the largest contingent in the Gang Suppression Force (GSF).
The allegations against the Sri Lankan troops in Haiti occurred almost 20 years ago, and a confidential 2007 investigation by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) found that all six Sri Lankan battalions deployed between 2004 and 2007 to the UN peace operation, MINUSTAH, were implicated in systematic sexual exploitation and abuse of children.
The recent public admission by Sri Lanka about the dismissal raises immediate questions about Sri Lanka’s return to Haiti as part of the Gang Suppression Force, whose mandate renewal will soon be considered by the UN Security Council.
Sri Lanka says it has screened 1,132 of its personnel for the battalion intended to help control armed gangs in Port-au-Prince and beyond in the Caribbean nation. Younger soldiers may not have served during the Sri Lanka’s civil war that ended in 2009, but generational changes cannot cure a compromised vetting process. Sri Lanka’s deputy defense minister, Aruna Jayasekera, served as deputy commander of Sri Lanka’s third Haiti contingent between 2005 and 2006, when the abuse occurred.
A decade ago, we obtained the confidential OIOS investigation report, ID Case No. 0483/07. It found that the alleged abuses by Sri Lankan troops based at the peacekeeping mission in Haiti “were frequent, occurred usually at night, and at virtually every location where Sri Lankan military were deployed” — in UN military vehicles, at static points in Port-au-Prince and at Sri Lankan military bases across the country. Children received tiny sums of money or food in exchange for sex.
One girl was “about 12 years old when she first had sex with a Sri Lankan soldier”; at that time, she “did not even have breasts,” the investigation found. At the Jacmel base, she was forced to have sex with about 30 soldiers and then the “Commandant,” who “sent her on her own to another Sri Lankan military base at Petit Goave after some soldiers had asked for her.” She spent a month there, with about 15 more soldiers, including the commandant, before being sent on to Léogâne for 70 cents.
Every child interviewed for the UN investigation had been an orphan or abandoned. The children identified more than 100 soldiers. Photographing the perimeter wall at Jacmel, the investigators saw a girl sitting on top of it in the barbed wire. They asked what she was doing there. She answered in French: “J’ai faim.” I am hungry.
As members of the International Truth and Justice Project, a nongovernmental organization focusing on human rights in Sri Lanka, we submitted the OIOS report to the UN Committee Against Torture in 2016. The committee’s concluding observations recorded that “only 23 out of more than a hundred accused personnel had been convicted,” referring to the Sri Lankan troops, and called for criminal punishment proportionate to the gravity of their acts and compensation for victims. No adequate public account followed, and the issue slipped from international attention.
Just days after our op-ed about the Sri Lankan troops joining the Gang Suppression Force was published on PassBlue (Sept. 8, 2026), Brig. Waruna Gamage, director of the Directorate of Media and Psychological Operations in Sri Lanka, told the Sunday Times, a national paper, that “those who were accused of such crimes were tried in an internal military court” and later dismissed. He identified no proceedings, judgment, charge, sentence or number of personnel.
The 2007 OIOS probe also found serious command failures in the instances of alleged abuses. MINUSTAH, which has since disbanded, had required each contingent commander to submit signed monthly reports on sexual exploitation and abuse. The report by the Sri Lankan fifth battalion, for March 2007, covering five locations, Léogâne, Jacmel, Petit Goave, Killick and Brache, recorded the overall situation as “Nil” and certified that commanders constantly watched their men. Later reports were unsigned. OIOS concluded that commanders failed to act despite clear warning signs.
The OIOS did not name the 5th battalion commander or allege that he personally committed abuse. He was Ajith Kariyakarawana, who later became deputy chief of staff of the Sri Lankan Army. UN documents clearly stated it was his “personal duty” to report and enforce discipline, which makes the “Nil” certification a legitimate subject for investigation, though it does not establish criminal liability.
At the time, MINUSTAH praised Sri Lankan soldiers for regularly delivering water to an orphanage housing 160 children near Léogâne. It later emerged that the Léogâne base was one of the locations where children were being abused. OIOS concluded that “despite the clear warning signs, Sri Lankan Commanders failed to prevent sexual exploitation and abuse and enforce discipline.”
Sri Lanka’s latest account of how it held its peacekeepers in Haiti accountable for response to sexual exploitation and abuse raised further questions about accountability, underscoring the persistence of impunity from criminal prosecution and proportionate punishment. The account previously referred to an army Court of Inquiry, a Sri Lanka fact-finding body, rather than a court martial empowered to convict and sentence, regarding the allegations.
Indeed, official numbers have dwindled. OIOS had identified 134 alleged perpetrators. Sri Lanka told the UN Committee Against Torture that 23 were convicted. In 2018, the Defense Ministry reportedly said three were involved. This latest statement gives no number at all.
Dismissal and repatriation may be necessary disciplinary and protective measures, but they cannot extinguish criminal responsibility. Credible evidence of rape or sexual abuse of a child requires an independent criminal investigation and, where the evidential threshold is met, prosecution before a competent and impartial court. Any sentence must follow a fair trial and reflect the gravity of the offense, the child’s vulnerability, the abuse of entrusted power and any repeated or organized conduct.
Every contingent commander from the six Haiti deployments was later promoted, many of them to the top echelons of the force.
Yasmin Sooka is a South African transitional justice expert who investigated allegations that French peacekeepers sexually abused children in the Central African Republic. She currently heads the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan.
