by Kishali Pinto-Jayawardene, Sunday Times, Colombo, July 6, 2025
In a global arena where the United Nations is desperately struggling to cope with a pronounced irrelevance as the world’s ‘superpowers’ continue to pound the Gaza Strip with all its might and main, of what use are symbolic visits and symbolic messages by the champions of an (increasingly tenuous) international human rights ‘rules based order’ to the people of Sri Lanka?
Sunny words and grim realities
To be clear, this is not to disparage the recent four day mission visit to this country by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk who, in a spirit of beaming optimism, responded in a wrap-up session of his visit that he had felt a ‘real momentum of change.’ Perhaps if the people of the North and the South had also felt this ‘momentum of change’ as much as the visiting High Commissioner, it may have been easier to accept these sunny words in better equilibrium.
But the contrary is the case. Again, perhaps if the National People’s Power (NPP) Government had stayed true to just one item of its ambitious mandate and replaced the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) with a counter-terror law that conformed to Sri Lanka’s constitutional safeguards and the protections laid down by the Supreme Court in accepted cursus curiae within at least six months of its coming into power, we may have been better positioned to accept this ‘momentum of change,’
Sri Lanka’s political history is, after all, replete with missed opportunities to bring about healing in the wounded hearts of its communities. At the close of a bitter war in the North and East, former President Mahinda Rajapaksa was handed this golden opportunity on a silver platter and squandered it by building walls of ethno-majoritarian hatred laced with pure racism (the Sinhala Buddhist against the ‘rest’) that set Sri Lanka back by decades.
Seductive rhetoric in opposition
Not satisfied with this, he along with his family members and hangers-on proceeded to wantonly rape Sri Lanka in the classic economic sense, pillaging and robbing the national coffers and toppling the nation into the abyss of bankruptcy to the extent that a spontaneous eruption (the ‘aragalaya’ erupted) in 2022. Many times Prime Minister and finally President Ranil Wickremesinghe was also given the chance to ‘mend’ Sri Lanka at various points during his ill-omened political life but again, frittered these gifts away by the gathering of a corrupt cabal around him.
Coming to power in 2024 with exuberant vows to ‘system change’ a seventy five year old political curse, the NPP seems to have succumbed to the easy lure of state power as much as its predecessors. What seemed like seductively powerful pledges on the election platform now echo in tired rhetoric that goes nowhere as the NPP rather than the ‘system’ appear to be undergoing a rapid transformation of a moral code that President Anura Kuma Dissanayake once preached with passionate fervour to party supporters.
As worryingly, not only the Government but its loyalists (from segments of the media to professionals) appear to be infected with a sort of blind optimism that brooks no criticism of their adored politicians. This forcibly reminds me of the near religious zeal of Ranil Wickremesinghe’s ‘good governance’ cheerleaders (2015-2019) who reacted with fury to any critique of its beloved leader at the time.
Anger of the North over Chemmani
And less said about the crusading enthusiasm (if one can call it that) of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s ‘vipath maga’ types who finally had to literally flee for their lives at the hands of incensed mobs as the country threw the Rajapaksas out. In all three cases, what we have is the loss of rationality, of clear headed criticism of each Government in power rather than following the bleating crowds of dazzled sheep.
But to return to current realities, what exactly do we have here? From the charade of a Parliamentary debate on a Commission of Inquiry report on the Batalanda (Southern) massacres which was easily predicted to turn out exactly as it did (a political smokescreen), we now have the re-igniting of the Chemmani (Northern) mass graves. Reportedly, government politicians representing the Northern communities had been chased away from the re-opened site of the Chemmani mass grave by furious residents of the area.
This anger is understandable, perhaps politically motivated as the case may be but the justification is all too clear. These graves stemmed from grisly disclosures decades back after Lance Corporal Somaratne Rajapaksa was convicted in July 1998 of the rape and murder of Krishanthi Kumaraswamy, and the killing of her mother, brother, and a neighbour. The disclosures that he made during the trial regarding the burial of hundreds of Tamil civilians extrajudicially executed by state forces in the Jaffna peninsula during 1996 were shocking.
The ‘disappearance’ of cases
At the time, the government promised an inquiry and the exhumation of the bodies took place in June 1999 with overseas forensic expertise. Specific security personnel were named by Rajapaksa as being responsible for the executions; five army soldiers named by Rajapkse as the alleged perpetrators were arrested. They too were released on bail thereafter. Thereafter, as much as all the other cases, this too disappeared into the fog of ‘disappeared cases, the list of which is as long as ‘disappeared persons.’
In fact, one reason for the ‘disappearance’ of this case was that the police informed the court that there had been ‘no instructions forthcoming from the Attorney General’s Department. Meanwhile, Rajapaksa agreed to testify as a witness in the habeas corpus applications filed by family members of victims. The preliminary inquiry before the magistrate implicated army personnel in several extra judicial executions and enforced disappearances, some of them who remained on active duty. These cases too remained pending.
So what is missing in this sporadic fueling of old, angst-ridden brutalities in Sri Lanka’s blood splattered past? The answer is simply put. Genuine reforms in law, accountability structures, and policies that transcend isolated incidents or isolated prosecutions simply because they become ‘politically convenient.’ Two years ago, a question was asked in these column spaces regarding Sri Lanka’s ‘mass graves’ and ‘failed exhumations’ that had no specific limitations to ‘Tamil’ victims in the North or ‘Sinhala’ victims in the South.
Reforms in law and policy
Put bluntly, it was asked as to why we have failed to adopt an exhumation policy on mass graves in conformity to international law giving family members of victims a firm right to be represented in the process? For that purpose it is not enough to point to Section 12 (d) of the Office of Missing Persons, OMP) Act under which the OMP may ‘apply to the appropriate Magistrate’s Court having territorial jurisdiction, for an order of Court to carry out an excavation and/or exhumation of suspected grave sites.’
The OMP is mandated to act as an observer at ‘such excavation or exhumation, and at other proceedings, pursuant to the same.’ In some instances, that power has been exercised as was the case in regard to another infamous site of the Mannar mass graves (2019). Here again, disputes over carbon dating of selected remains left the investigations paralysed with assertions of a ‘cover-up.’
Typically, these allegations will persist until a transparent and fair exhumation process with impartial and independent oversight with victims being offered full inclusivity in the process takes place. That is so in every country where mass atrocities have taken place. Revisiting Berlin last week, I was struck afresh by the manner in which every aspect of social life, from memorials to school curricula, painstakingly acknowledge and apologise for the brutalities of Nazi Germany.
The promise of national healing is long distant
In one instance where survivors, their children and grandchildren still gather every week to recite and chant the names of each family member who died in the concentration camps of the Third Reich. They are joined by the children of their Nazi torturers who mourn collectively.
Sri Lanka will not see such reparations and healing for generations to come, if at all.