The aftermath of former Sri Lankan president’s Ranil Wickremesinghe disastrous Al Jazeera interview continued to reverberate across the island this week, after Colombo announced the tabling of the Batalanda Commission Report in Parliament. For decades, the report, which details the use of torture chambers and extrajudicial killings, has remained buried in political inertia. Successive governments failed to act on its findings, and those implicated, including Wickremesinghe, have never been held accountable.

The Dissanayake administration’s willingness to act now signals, at least on paper, a seeming readiness to confront past state crimes and hold those responsible to account. Such moves are long overdue. Sri Lanka has long been plagued by a culture of impunity, where crimes from executions to enforced disappearances, have gone unpunished. Addressing these injustices is crucial if the government is serious about breaking away from the corrupt and violent legacies of Sri Lanka’s past.

But it also cannot remain selective in doing so. The only reason the Batalanda report is being tabled now is because it was forced into the spotlight by Wickremesinghe’s trainwreck interview. It is reminder of the strength of international spotlighting of Sri Lanka’s crimes and of the limits of domestic accountability on the island. Even the ruling party, whose own cadres were killed, did not willingly revisit this dark chapter once it assumed power. Sri Lanka was humiliated into doing so. Without that, this report would still be gathering dust, like so many others before it.

Indeed, it is precisely because the current government’s political opponents are implicated that this flurry of activity has taken place. There is no doubt that Wickremesinghe, Rajapaksa, Kumaratunga and many more alongside them must answer for their crimes. But all crimes must be confronted, not just those appear politically convenient. Even within the National People’s Power (NPP) ranks there are those who are guilty of rights abuses and violations. They must be held to account.

The true test of the NPP government’s commitment to justice will not be Batalanda. Instead, it will be whether it extends its accountability efforts beyond select cases to the full breadth of state-perpetrated crimes – particularly those committed against Tamils.

Leader of the House Bimal Ratnayake, in his speech when announcing the tabling of the report, made reference to the July 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom, acknowledging that the United National Party (UNP) government used the killings to crush dissent and consolidate power. But what does his mention of the atrocity mean when, nearly 42 years later, not a single person has ever been held accountable for the mass slaughter, rapes, and destruction of Black July?

The omission of justice for crimes against Tamils is glaring. Indeed, even reinvestigating Batalanda, where the former comrades of the current government were the principal targets, is not a break from tradition. It is part of a long-established pattern in Sri Lanka, where justice is extended to the Sinhala population when politically expedient, but denied to Tamils no matter the scale of the atrocity.

If Sri Lanka is to truly reckon with its past, justice must not simply stop at Batalanda. It must extend to the genocidal violence at Mullivaikkal in 2009, the executions at Trincomalee, the massacres at Kumarapuram, the brutal history of pogroms, the enforced disappearances of Tamils, the bodies found in mass graves, and the decades of other crimes committed by the state against the Tamil people across the island.

If there is truly to be a new political culture on the island that breaks with the past, then the government’s stubborn refusal to prosecute those responsible for mass atrocities committed against the Tamil people must be broken. As events from the Philippines last week demonstrate, it is never too late to change positions and hold leaders, no matter how powerful they once seemed, to account. Rodrigo Duterte was once thought untouchable. Today, he is being forced to answer for his crimes at The Hague. The same must happen in Sri Lanka.

International accountability mechanisms must be enacted and those responsible for so much suffering must finally be held to account.