Haunting Past becoming Visible: Chemmani Mass graves in Sri Lanka
In the northern soil of Sri Lanka, the past refuses to stay buried. Chemmani, once whispered in fear, now speaks in bones and broken belongings—fragile remnants of lives erased by a war waged not just on the battlefield but on bodies, identities, and memory itself. As fresh graves reemerge decades later, they don’t merely indict individuals, they expose a state apparatus built on silence and denial. This is a story about the dead, and about the living who demand truth. Chemmani is a wound, a witness, and a test: of justice, of memory, and of global solidarity against impunity.
Child’s toy, a blue school satchel, entangled with these remnants of innocence were fragile skeletal bones of children- the horrifying testimony of the violent arc of impunity in Sri Lanka were unearthed recently in the Chemmani mass graves in Jaffna. Undeniable evidence that even children were not spared from the horrors of war, exposed the enormity of cruelty that Tamils had to endure through the war. Sri Lanka is dotted with mass graves where evidence of thousands of extra-judicial murders and disappearances lay buried without accountability. While official records identify over thirty mass graves, proper exhumations have happened only in few. The majority of exhumations so far have taken place only when mass grave sites were unintentionally discovered during constructions and in some rare instances, when individuals from the security forces disclosed information, Chemmani being such an exceptional instance.
Krishanthy Kumaraswamy
Chemmani was seared into the conscience of the Lankan society with the brutal rape and murder of 18-year-old Krishanthy Kumaraswamy in 1992. A school girl, Krishanthy was on her way to give her exams, when she was stopped at the checkpoint, raped and killed. Her mother, brother and neighbour who went looking for her were also murdered by the army and their bodies were found in Chemmani. Poet Vinothini, a native of Jaffna, captures this horror in her poem “Krishanthi” from the collection Mukamoodi Seypaval
As the birds sang
And the sun fell into the sea
Her death took place
in the open space of white sand,
No one knew about it.
When she was born a female child,
she wouldn’t have thought of such an end,
Her mother neither.
First their look pierced her like a thorn,
then their terrible hands seized her arms,
No sound arose.
She fell in a faint
they raped her senseless body
It happened
at the open space of white sand
She was buried
at the edge of the salty cremation ground
When she was born
Would she have thought of such an end?
(Trans. Prof. M.A Nuhman)
Following investigations, five members of the Sri Lankan army were convicted and sentenced to death. One of whom, Army Lance Corporal Somaratne Rajapakse, denied involvement and said that the convicted soldiers didn’t rape or kill Krishanthy, but buried her and that there were many more buried by the army in Chemmani. In his disclosure from the docks of the Colombo High Court, he had said: “almost every evening, dead bodies were brought there and the soldiers were asked to bury them.” Following this unexpected confession, mass protests were organized by Tamils, and with international attention seeping in, the exhumations in Chemmani started. Around fifteen bodies were found, after which in the course of war, the exhumations stopped abruptly. In February this year, routine excavation work by the Nallur Pradeshiya Sabha in Jaffna led to the unexpected unearthing of skeletal remains, drawing fresh public attention.
This finding prompted a court-ordered forensic investigation led by archeologist Professor Raj Somadeva, which has since uncovered additional proof of mass burials and extrajudicial killings of Tamils during and in the aftermath of the civil war.
Mass Graves and Disappearances
Enforced disappearances were used extensively as an instrument of terror in Sri Lanka by state security forces with thousands of Sri Lankans forcibly disappeared, a majority being Tamil. In the immediate cessation of conflict, thousands vanished following their surrender to the state, while others were detained or abducted in the aftermath of the fighting due to alleged involvements with Tamil militancy, political activism, or criticism of the government, held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and various Emergency Regulations (ERs). An estimated 65,000 enforced disappearances have been reported since the early 1980s, the second-highest number globally (UNWGEID, 2016). Official truth-seeking mechanisms and official policies of transitional justice have also met with limited success in Sri Lanka. According to Prof. Vasuki Nesiah, the history of these commissions provides an indicator of how truth and reconciliation commissions can be manipulated to deflect dissent by channeling criticisms of human rights violations into institutions that the government uses as a shield against critique. The Office of Missing Persons (OMP) which was one of the outcomes of the transitional justice policy of post-war Sri Lanka is a case in point and largely been ineffective in spite of raising people’s hopes at its inception. As political analyst Nilanthan from Jaffna had said, there is no transitional justice in Sri Lanka, because there have been no transitions in devolution of power to the Tamil community nor distribution of justice.
A joint report by International Truth and Justice Project, Families of the Disappeared, Center for Human Rights and Development and the Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka titled ‘Mass Graves and Failed Exhumations in Sri Lanka’ has identified the lack of political will as the reason for the shortcomings in the exhumations of mass graves. Looking at the exhumations in Mannar and Matale, the report notes how Magistrates and forensic experts have been abruptly transferred, judicial orders delayed by the police, lawyers representing victims’ families denied access to excavation sites and how authorities have made little to no effort to locate living witnesses or gather ante mortem data essential for identification. Even in the exceedingly rare instances where convictions were secured, perpetrators were later granted pardons, underscoring a persistent culture of impunity.
Based on the ICES research report titled ‘Mass Grave Sites in Sri Lanka’ by Sophie Bisping, the documentary In Plain Sight by filmmaker and photographer Ruvin de Silva highlighted the inherent connections between enforced disappearances and mass graves as mass graves present a possibility of providing answers to what happened to the disappeared. Families and relatives spend their entire lives searching for information of their disappeared loved ones, their grief politicised by different political groups, but the waiting remains a lonely ordeal. Sri Lanka from 2015 is a party to the “International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance,” which recognises the ‘Right to know’ as well as have strict provisions for political interference hindering investigations. But as the documentary notes, the mass graves exist as public secrets where influential politicians have actively interfered in tampering evidence without any accountability. Mass graves are also indexes of disrespect to the dead, placing the burden of reconciliation on the loved ones of the victims and not on the perpetrators of the violence. Families of the Disappeared, overwhelmingly women, have for years held public protests demanding information and accountability. In an absence of accountability in Sri Lanka, these protests have increasingly asked for international accountability and attention to their grief.
International Accountability
Following the recent exhumations in Chemmani, protests by families of the disappeared and civil society organizations started called the Anaya Vilakku (Eternal flame) protests, the demands of which include UN monitoring of the process of exhumation as well as referring Sri Lanka to the International Criminal Court. In response to the protests, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk visited Chemmani and paid his respects. He said in his media statement “It is always very emotional to visit places where the haunting past becomes so visible” and “When you are at a mass grave site, the one thing that needs to be done is thorough investigations, robust investigations, by independent experts with forensic expertise who can bring out the truth and close the pain and suffering of family members whose loved ones were disappeared”. While Anura Dissanayake had earlier promised to set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, (there were widespread disappearances during the crackdown on JVP insurrections in 1980s), the Association of Relatives of Enforced Disappearances in North and East have expressed skepticism considering the past failures in exhumations in North. Volker Türk’s visit has once again rekindled hopes for the families of the disappeared and predictably ruffled feathers in the political echelons of Sri Lanka.
In an editorial by Shamindra Ferdinando in The Island, Türk’s visit was termed as the ‘Geneva Strategy’ and as ‘flogging a dead horse’ in Sri Lanka for publicity while an active genocide is happening in Palestine. There was also the routine criticism of LTTE’s recruitment of child soldiers as if all of this justifies children being killed and buried in Chemmani. Interestingly Eelam Tamils have been strong in denunciation of the violence committed in Palestine as they have recognised the pain from shared experiences of war and conflict. Instead of pitting these experiences of war against each other, it would be far more productive to think of the accountability we hold to children of Eelam as well as Palestine. Empathy clearly is not enough, actual actions of solidarity matter. In his Semmani series of poems written in 2010, poet Ahilan from Jaffna had written of the return of Mother Mary to Chemmani, ‘When she passed the blackened grass/on which the wind lingers/ the dead bloated moon /in tin coloured water/ a lament rose up/ splitting eons’. Chemmani is a testimony, a lament, but also a test of where we stand on political accountability to the dead, the disappeared and the children we hurt.
References
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