SEPTEMBER 2 — From the pogroms of 1956 and Black July to Mullivaikkal and Chemmani, Sri Lanka’s history is not merely scarred by atrocities. It is defined by governments that promised investigations, protected institutions and waited for witnesses to die.

The earth at Chemmani is doing what the Sri Lankan state has refused to do: it is giving evidence.

By August 2026, more than 530 sets of human remains had been located at the site outside Jaffna. From the soil came children’s footwear, schoolbags, a doll, a baby’s milk bottle and coins. Yet according to Human Rights Watch, the authorities have made little effort to establish who these people were or how they died. Families who have searched for their disappeared relatives for decades are once again being asked to wait. Human Rights Watch’s 2026 investigation records one relative’s devastating conclusion: “Excavations alone will not provide justice.”

In a case of enforced disappearance, delay is not neutral. Delay assists the disappearance. Evidence degrades, witnesses die, records vanish, suspects are promoted and families are exhausted into silence.

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake promised a new political culture. His National People’s Power government possesses a two-thirds parliamentary majority and specifically pledged justice for killings and disappearances in the North and East. Some investigations have moved. But the architecture that defeated justice under previous governments remains standing.

The promised independent prosecutor’s office does not exist. The Prevention of Terrorism Act remains in use. Sri Lankan law still does not adequately provide for command responsibility or recognize enforced disappearance as a crime against humanity. No prosecution has yet been brought under the country’s 2018 enforced-disappearance law. The government continues to reject the UN’s Sri Lanka Accountability Project while insisting that domestic institutions can investigate institutions of the same state.

Tamil families have heard this before.

This history did not begin in 2009

The road to Mullivaikkal was constructed over generations.

The Citizenship Acts of 1948 and 1949 made vast numbers of Hill Country Tamils stateless and stripped them of political rights. The 1956 Sinhala Only Act made Sinhala the sole official language, marginalizing Tamil speakers in government employment, education and public administration.

Anti-Tamil violence followed in 1956 and 1958. More violence erupted in 1977. In 1981, a mob that included police and government-linked actors burned the Jaffna Public Library, destroying nearly 97,000 books and manuscripts, including irreplaceable records of Tamil history. It was not simply a building that burned. It was an assault on a people’s memory. Historical accounts document this progression, while the library’s destruction is recognized as an act of deliberate cultural devastation by the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies.

Then came Black July in 1983. Tamil homes and businesses were identified and attacked. People were beaten, burned and murdered. Security forces frequently stood aside, and in some places participated or encouraged the mobs. The pogrom displaced tens of thousands and helped drive the island into full-scale war.

The later conflict produced its own catalogue of unanswered crimes.

In September 1990, Tamil refugees were taken from the Eastern University refugee camp and disappeared—an atrocity documented contemporaneously by Amnesty International. Days later came the killings at Sathurukondan.

In July 1995, more than 100 civilians, including infants, died when St. Peter’s Church and surrounding buildings at Navaly—crowded with displaced families—were bombed during a government offensive. Human Rights Watch documented the attack.

In 1996, Tamil schoolgirl Krishanthi Kumaraswamy was raped and murdered at an army checkpoint. Her mother, brother and a neighbour who searched for her were also killed. During the trial, a convicted soldier disclosed the alleged existence of mass graves at Chemmani containing hundreds of bodies. Fifteen remains were exhumed in 1999; the investigation then faded into the familiar darkness of delay, missing records and abandoned accountability.

In 2000, eight Tamil civilians, including a child, were murdered at Mirusuvil. A soldier was eventually convicted—one of the rare cases in which the system reached a verdict—only to receive a presidential pardon in 2020. The pardon was condemned by the UN as an affront to victims and another demonstration of impunity. The case is examined here.

In 2006, five Tamil students were shot dead on the Trincomalee beachfront. Witnesses were threatened, a journalist covering the case was murdered, and a potential witness was abducted and killed. Thirteen defendants were ultimately acquitted after key witnesses were not heard. There is still no justice for the “Trinco Five.”

Seven months later, 17 Action Contre la Faim humanitarian workers—16 Tamils and one Muslim—were executed at close range in Muttur. Twenty years later, nobody has been prosecuted.

Each atrocity has its own evidence and circumstances. But the official response repeats with chilling consistency: denial, a commission, delay, intimidation, lost evidence and eventual abandonment.

Mullivaikkal was not “collateral damage”

The final months of the war in 2009 brought this machinery to its most catastrophic point.

Hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians were compressed into an ever-shrinking area of Mullaitivu. The government declared “No Fire Zones,” but shells struck those zones, hospitals, food-distribution points and other places where civilians had gathered. Human Rights Watch documented at least 30 attacks on permanent and makeshift medical facilities between December 2008 and May 2009. On May 2 alone, artillery struck Mullivaikkal hospital, reportedly killing 68 people and wounding 87. The hospital attacks were described at the time as evidence of war crimes.

The UN secretary-general’s Panel of Experts later found credible allegations that government forces shelled civilians and hospitals, denied humanitarian assistance and committed executions and disappearances. The 2015 OHCHR investigation found reasonable grounds to believe that grave violations were committed by both government forces and the LTTE, some potentially amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The LTTE’s crimes—including forced recruitment, child recruitment, attacks on civilians, preventing civilians from leaving and using civilians as shields—must also be acknowledged and prosecuted. But an armed group’s crimes do not cancel the state’s obligations. Civilians do not become lawful targets because combatants are nearby or because another party is unlawfully preventing them from escaping.

Mullivaikkal was the foreseeable culmination of an operation conducted without adequate regard for Tamil civilian life. Calling it the “end of the war” cannot erase what happened there.

The genocide question cannot be dismissed

For Tamils, “genocide” is not a fashionable slogan. It expresses a lived historical sequence: disenfranchisement, linguistic exclusion, state-enabled pogroms, cultural destruction, land appropriation, mass civilian killing, sexual violence, detention, enforced disappearance and the suppression of remembrance.

The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal concluded in 2013 that Sri Lanka was responsible for genocide against Eelam Tamils. Canada’s House of Commons has acknowledged the Tamil genocide, and Ontario legislated Tamil Genocide Education Week. Tamil legal and human-rights organizations have argued that there are reasonable grounds for a formal genocide determination.

No international court has yet adjudicated the genocide charge against Sri Lanka. That distinction must be stated honestly. But the absence of a judgment from a court that has never been given the case is not a judgment of innocence.

Genocide requires proof of an intention to destroy a protected group, in whole or in substantial part. The proper response is therefore not to forbid the word. It is to establish a competent, independent process empowered to examine the evidence of genocidal intent alongside war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The Sri Lankan state cannot control the evidence, reject international scrutiny and then use the absence of a judicial ruling as proof that genocide never occurred.

A country of accidentally discovered graves

Official Sri Lankan data recognizes at least 17 mass-grave sites. UN experts reported in 2025 that more than 20 sites had been uncovered since 1989, most of them accidentally during construction. Excavations have repeatedly suffered from inadequate funding, limited forensic capacity, broken chains of custody, transferred experts, missing records and failure to gather information from families. Very few have produced identifications, prosecutions or reliable explanations. A joint UN communication details these failures.

Chemmani is not an isolated mystery. There have been discoveries at Kokkuthoduvai, Mannar, Muhamalai, Batticaloa, Colombo Port and elsewhere. Each site must be investigated on its own evidence. Not every grave necessarily belongs to the same period or has the same perpetrator. That is precisely why scientific, independent investigation is indispensable.

Every suspected mass grave must be treated as a potential crime scene—not as an inconvenience to be cleared, forgotten or politically explained before the dead are identified.

Archaeology has also become part of the struggle over land and memory. Human Rights Watch has documented the Department of Archaeology seizing Tamil and Muslim land and religious sites while asserting that they are Buddhist archaeological sites. The UN resident coordinator has described a post-war pattern in which Hindu and Muslim worship sites in the North and East were reclassified as Buddhist heritage, sometimes without credible evidence, consultation or due process. The wider land-seizure record is well documented.

This history understandably creates suspicion that archaeological designations could also obstruct scrutiny of burial sites. But there is not yet reliable public evidence proving that identified mass graves were formally designated archaeological sites for the specific purpose of concealing bodies. That allegation should be investigated, not repeated as settled fact.

The government can answer it immediately: publish the coordinates of every known or suspected mass grave alongside every archaeological, forestry, wildlife and military land designation in the North and East. Freeze construction, rezoning and religious development wherever sites overlap. Invite independent forensic and archaeological experts—including Tamil and Muslim experts—to inspect the land.

Transparency would end speculation. Secrecy will deepen it.

What responsibility requires

President Dissanayake’s government must now:

1. Secure every known or suspected mass grave as a protected crime scene and publish a national register of sites.
2. Establish an internationally supported forensic programme, a properly governed DNA identification system and a national ante-mortem database developed with families’ informed consent.
3. Create an independent special prosecutor and judicial mechanism with international judges, investigators, prosecutors and forensic experts.
4. Publish the reports and evidence gathered by earlier commissions, including records concerning surrendees, detainees, secret detention locations and people last seen in military custody.
5. Criminalise crimes against humanity and provide for command responsibility so that accountability does not stop with the lowest-ranking perpetrator.
6. Repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act, protect witnesses and end the surveillance and intimidation of victims’ families and memorial events.
7. Cooperate fully with the UN Sri Lanka Accountability Project and permit its investigators to work inside the country.
8. Impose a moratorium on disputed archaeological and land designations in the North and East until an independent, multi-ethnic review is completed.

Foreign governments must also stop treating accountability as an annual speech in Geneva. They should support universal-jurisdiction investigations, impose targeted sanctions on individuals credibly implicated in serious abuses and connect military cooperation and trade privileges—including GSP+—to measurable progress.

Taking responsibility does not require today’s president to accept personal guilt for every crime committed by an earlier government. It requires him to accept the state’s continuing legal duty to investigate, disclose and prosecute.

But if this government protects the same institutions, rejects independent scrutiny and allows the same cases to die, it will no longer be able to blame only its predecessors. It will have chosen impunity for itself.

We Tamils are not asking for charity. We are not asking the country to forget the LTTE’s crimes. We are demanding something much more basic: the names of the dead, the whereabouts of the disappeared, the truth about Mullivaikkal and criminal accountability for those responsible—whatever their rank, uniform or political office.

Do not ask Tamil mothers to reconcile with a sealed archive.

Do not call a mass grave “the past” while its occupants remain unidentified.

Do not invoke sovereignty to deny families the truth about what sovereign institutions did.

The earth at Chemmani has opened. Mullivaikkal has never been silent. The evidence is waiting.

What remains in question is whether Sri Lanka’s government will finally confront it—or try once again to bury the Tamil dead.

*This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.