The new president has the opportunity to help the nation come to terms with its brutal civil war.
by Ruth Pollard, Bloomberg News, New York, July 22, 2025
Dissanayake must lead Sri Lanka out of its violent past.Photographer: Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP/Getty Images
Delve into the recent crop of prize-winning Sri Lankan literature and you will find a country mired in grief. From Shehan Karunatilaka’s 2022 Booker prize-winning The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, to last year’s winner of the UK Women’s Prize for Fiction, Brotherless Night, by V.V. Ganeshananthan, to the 2023 Miles Franklin Award winner Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran, this tiny island nation is reckoning with its past.
The 26-year civil war between the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the government ended in May 2009 without any real attempt to investigate abuses or heal fractured communities. The military has not been held accountable for the atrocities they committed — including torture, rape, extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances. The LTTE leadership died in battle or were executed, so their use of summary killings, bombings, abductions and child soldiers will never be investigated.
There have been few other places for this anguish to go but onto the pages of a book. Until now.
The excavation of the Chemmani mass grave in the northern city of Jaffna — which has so far unearthed 65 sets of human remains, including one child — has renewed the difficult discussion around who is accountable for the massacres that occurred during the war. Over 100,000 people died in the decades of conflict. A study by a United Nations panel of experts found that up to 40,000 civilians were killed in the final months of fighting alone, while some estimates indicate that between 60,000 and 100,000 people disappeared from the late 1980s until the war’s end.
Successive governments have failed to follow through on information gathered from previous excavations. The largest, in Mannar, has unearthed more than 300 skeletons since 2018 that have yet to be properly examined.
A new president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, has the power to change that.
The UN Human Rights Council is due to hold a session on Sri Lanka in September, where the government will be expected to lay out its plans on Chemmani and beyond. Dissanayake needs to show he has a vision for the country that stands apart from his predecessors.
Sri Lanka has finally broken free from decades of rule by the same old political elite, including the Rajapaksa clan. Many of those atrocities were carried out under their leadership: As secretary to the Ministry of Defense, Gotabaya Rajapaksa oversaw the 2009 campaign of his brother, then-president Mahinda, to crush Tamil guerrillas that ended the civil war. (The brothers have repeatedly denied any link to the violence.) Gotabaya went on to become president in 2019, before he was driven from office by popular protests in 2022 after the nation defaulted on its sovereign debt and plunged into crisis.
Funds from the International Monetary Fund have helped stabilize the economy, while the conclusion of its $12.6 billion debt restructuring will ensure the continuation of further aid. When Dissanayake, who leads the left-leaning Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna party, won office last September, he promised to fight corruption and balance the nation’s economic revival with the impact of IMF conditions. He had less concrete proposals over how to deal with the culture of entrenched impunity over decades of wartime violations.
Governments have long exploited the deep divide between the Sinhala-speaking and largely Buddhist majority, and the Hindu Tamil and Muslim communities. Dissanayake comes from a different place on this, though. “Although the war is over, the national question remains,” he told The Hindu newspaper in December 2023. “We believe and accept that there are issues, especially regarding the Tamil and Muslim people of this country, in regard to their language rights, cultural issues as well as their participation in governance.”
He can start with the Chemmani site, where forensics officers recently had to stop work for several days due to a lack of resources. Sri Lanka should accept international assistance to investigate the mass graves and identify the remains already recovered. The families of the thousands who were forcibly disappeared, including during the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna insurgencies of the 1970s and 1980s, deserve answers. His government should also reform or replace the deeply flawed Office on Missing Persons, use the evidence it has gathered to investigate and prosecute those responsible, and reveal the fate of the missing.
There has been a recent uptick in interest in progress at Chemmani from across society, says Bhavani Fonseka, a senior researcher and lawyer at the Colombo-based Centre for Policy Alternatives. That has come with fresh demands on the government to deliver justice for the victims, she told me. Notably, there’s been a shift away from the delaying tactics that have stalled previous cases, while the usual trenchant opposition from Sinhala nationalist groups is subdued.
Still, victims groups are fearful that Dissanayake’s administration will fall back on the country’s bad old ways. Chemmani first came to national attention in 1998, when a soldier was convicted of the rape and murder of schoolgirl Krishanthi Kumaraswamy, her family and a neighbor. During his sentencing, he alleged that between 300 and 400 Tamil civilians had been buried there. Fifteen skeletons were discovered during excavations in 1999, and yet the investigations have gone nowhere.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk visited Chemmani on June 25 and renewed calls for an independent investigation. There is now fresh momentum from both inside and outside the country. This is an opportunity for Dissanayake to lead Sri Lanka out of its violent past and help citizens begin the process of recovery. Is he brave enough to take it?
Ruth Pollard is a Bloomberg Opinion Managing Editor. Previously she was South and Southeast Asia government team leader at Bloomberg News and Middle East correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald.