While one may expect that the word “sex” may emerge as a heavily searched word in Google, what is surprising is that Sri Lanka has created a world record for topping the list of the countries with the most number of searches for this “word” viewed by philosopher Freud as the most important in the dynamics of the psyche of humankind. Sri Lanka has excelled in demonstrating this Freudian motive even while the Rajapakse family had over two years ago banned most such web sites about sex, preventing Sri Lankans in logging into those sites.
This singular achievement may also point to the inner workings of the perverted cultural mind of the Sri Lanka military which has been blamed, and enjoys immunity from criminality, for several gang rapes with bestial brutality on Tamil fighting women during the war, and Tamil civilians after the end of the war in Sri Lanka.
India had taken the second place closely behind Sri Lanka in seeking the meaning of the word sex.
A spokesperson for Tamils Against Genocide (TAG-US) commenting on Sri Lanka’s position on this list, said: “It is ironic that while in Buddhist philosophy and in the Buddhism-centric vision of Sinhala Sri Lanka, sexual promiscuity is not tolerated and sex is a taboo topic in public discussions, we see that rape by Sinhala soldiers have become routine, and are protected by the ruling governments. And with the Google list we see what’s foremost in the minds of Sri Lankans, and we cannot deny that Sri Lanka’s top position is a likely pointer to the deterioration of traditionally valued cultural norms.”
Sri Lanka military has been accused of rapes during the course of the civil war, and during the nearly five years after the end of the war. Wikileaks exposed that even the U.S. government was aware that prostitution rings were set up by paramilitaries controlled by a sibling of Sri Lanka’s President Rajapakse.
US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, chairing the United Nations Security Council meeting in October 2009, on the last day of US’s turn of the rotating presidency of the 15-member body in September, on violence against women in warfare, dropped a bombshell on Sri Lanka by including Sri Lanka in the company of Congo, Sudan, and Mayanmar, saying Sri Lanka has used rape as a weapon of war [against Tamils].
Besides, extensive records maintained by TamilNet stories (see list below) indicate that the incidents of rape by Sri Lankan soldiers went unabated during the period of war.
Images of captured LTTE soldiers raped and killed, and bestial handling of dead bodies of Tamil women by Sinhala soldiers during war have deeply wounded the psyche of Tamils and this has become an insurmountable hurdle towards any approach to reconciliation, Tamil activists note.
Sigmund Freud argued that sexual oppression was one of the roots of many problems in Western and other societies. Freud believed that people’s naturally strong instincts toward sexuality were repressed by people in order to meet the constraints imposed on them by civilized life. Perhaps in the vigor to seek outlets Sri Lanka beat the others in similar predicament, Sri Lanka observers speculated.
Michel Foucault, in his The History of Sexuality, neither refutes nor confirms what he calls the “repressive hypothesis.” Instead, he says sexuality has become an important topic to understand and manipulate for the purpose of nation building. Through categorization of sexuality, the idea of repression was born. Are Sri Lankans, as a collective species, seeking to build a better nation in breaking the world record, if one thinks Foucault was serious with his words.
– Sri Lanka Gaurdian