Foreign News
Sri Lanka: Mystery Of Chemmani Grave, Did Army Commit Murder
Spectres from Sri Lanka’s very troubled past have returned to haunt the Sri Lankan Armed Forces (SLAF) and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, just a month ahead of his second anniversary as a popular and largely successful president.
In May 2009, the SLAF brought the 30 year long civil war against the terrorist organization Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to an end. Since then, they have been treated with reverence in the Sinhalese-majority south, for achieving what seemed impossible.
But the SLAF continue to be greeted largely with abhorrence in the Tamil-majority north of Sri Lanka – and by western rights groups, primarily for an alleged slaughter of civilians during the last phase of the conflict. Now, an even older massacre attributed to the SLAF has resurfaced.
Massacre At Chemmani
A gilded gateway with bright carvings of the Hindu pantheon welcomes visitors driving into the northern town on the Kandy-Jaffna highway. This is Yazh Varavu, or the Gateway to Jaffna. Here, the Chemmani Road – the B399 – peels off to the right, while the A9 continues straight to Jaffna. The flat land stretches away on all sides. There are shimmering lagoons, and sometimes, the startling white of evaporated crystals in shallow salt marshes. It’s a languid, beautiful landscape.
But on the triangular patch of land formed by the fork of the A9 and the B399, hell is said to have reigned supreme more than 30 years ago.
This is the location of the Chemmani mass grave, where more than 500 skeletons have been excavated in recent months. There are men, some beheaded and with arms tied to their torso. There are women, some huddled in protection over a child. Then there are tiny infants and children themselves. With feeding bottles, booties, school satchels and squeaky toys once dear to them, by their side.
The sight of these remains has aroused anger among Sinhalese and Tamils alike, and calls for the perpetrators to be found and punished are louder than ever before. International observers have visited Chemmani and the UN has called for a thorough investigation. During their visit and as umpteen times over the past three decades, clusters of Tamil citizens met them, clutching faded photos – and tattered hope – of their missing loved ones yet again.
More than 1,30,000 people were killed during the long and bloody war. Tens of thousands also disappeared. There were abductions, cold- blooded murders, and assassinations galore. And like in most unconventional conflicts between armies bound to the Geneva Convention and terror groups that are not, atrocities were committed on both sides.
The Chemmani excavation was first prompted by the 1999 testimonial of Somaratne Rajapakse, an SLAF soldier on death row, who had raped and /murdered a Tamil schoolgirl in 1996. He said that the armed forces had killed and dumped several hundred bodies at Chemmani.
Who Is Accountable?
The work re-commenced and gathered momentum earlier this year, and will carry on through much of August. Meanwhile, activists and citizens across Sri Lanka are demanding carbon dating, DNA testing of the bones, a detailed enquiry and – the much-bandied – “accountability”.
“These people were allegedly massacred by the SLAF so the government has to express regret,” says Jehan Perera, Director of Sri Lanka’s leading thinktank, National Peace Council (NPC). “The army leadership of that time must be questioned. There must be a truth commission for restorative, not punitive justice. And if there’s credible evidence that the SLAF committed these massacres, then we need accountability.”
But how can any commission pinpoint blame on a single entity or person, given the muddled, diffused landscape and multiple players, three decades ago?
The civil war broke out in 1983. Control of Jaffna was key from the start. The inglorious arrival of the Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) in 1987, ostensibly to oversee a ceasefire, added fuel instead. The LTTE quickly turned into the IPKF’s worst enemy. By 1987, the IPKF had snatched Jaffna from the LTTE.
When the bruised Indians beat a retreat in 1990, more than 1150 Indian troops had been killed and 3000 wounded. The LTTE took dog tags and uniforms off the dead. When IEDs or landmines were used, bodies were so badly mutilated, that identification was impossible anyway. Dozens of IPKF troops were reported Missing in Action (MIA). They remain unaccounted to date.
From 1990 – 1995, the LTTE held Jaffna. Its abhorrent practices of coercion and abduction to forcibly recruit child soldiers continued through those years (and beyond). It also executed dissenters, other Tamil political groups and their families and continued to fortify its own supremacy.
In 1996, the SLAF regained control of the peninsula. Both Rajapakse and activists claim that it is during this period that the SLAF slaughtered and dumped hundreds of Tamils, including women and children, in the mass grave at Chemmani.
Former infantryman Hemantha Dayaratne disagrees.
“We had just taken back Jaffna. We were defending it and building relations with the locals. The SLAF would not have carried out this Auschwitz-type mass execution,” he says.
The former army major points out that it is the SLAF, not NGOs, that had begun the investigation into the gruesome rape and murder committed by Rajapakse, and followed up on his revelations, in the first place.
“The LTTE was battling the IPKF till 1990. There would have been civilian casualties on both warring sides. Later, the SLAF lost men while taking Jaffna in 1996. So, who killed and dumped whom at Chemmani and when? Only carbon dating holds the answers.”
Rights groups don’t buy into that doubt. They rule out the possibility that the skeletons at Chemmani could be those of the IPKF or the LTTE. They point out that after 1996, Jaffna – especially Chemmani at its entrance – became a virtual ‘garrison’ through which the Tigers could not slip past with trucks full of bodies. But could the LTTE have killed and buried victims there, when they had full control of Jaffna from 1990-1995?
Is SLAF Guilty?
“We cannot say exactly who the perpetrators are yet, but the finger points to the (state) army,” Sri Lankan activist and founder of Families of the Disappeared (FoD) told NBC earlier this year.
Rights groups and Amnesty International have documented more than 600 enforced disappearances in the years under question. Families have told them of arrests at army checkpoints by the SLAF. At least two skeletons exhumed in 1999 were identified as Tamils who had disappeared while in SLAF custody.
So what’s the road ahead and can Sri Lanka -just emerging from a devastating economic crisis in 2022 -afford expensive but foolproof method like carbon dating? How will it gather DNA samples from Tamils scattered around the world, to establish relationships?
The renewed arrival of Western ‘observer groups’ in Sri Lanka is also of concern. Sri Lanka is still indebted to Donor nations, many of whose own track records on disappearances and mass graves remain dodgy and unquestioned.
But human rights have always come in handy as arm-twisting tactics, in return for strategic favours. And in light of the Iran-US war, Sri Lanka’s location in the middle of the Indian Ocean can’t get more strategic than now.
President Anura Dissanayake belongs to the Marxist-Leninist chauvinist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the senior partner of the current coalition government. His own party was behind a violent, armed rebellion against the then government to protest the IPKF’s presence in Sri Lanka in 1987-1989.
Around 40000-60000 persons either disappeared, or were killed in clashes between the government of that time and the JVP. According to a 1991 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), several thousands of those deaths are attributable to the JVP.
“It was Sinhalese versus Sinhalese,” recalls Perera. “In Ratnapura, the JVP’s own southern stronghold, Sinhalese people are still looking for their loved ones who disappeared at that time. want to find their family members who disappeared during those years. And the JVP was not only a victim of a brutal government crackdown, but also a perpetrator.”
Chemmani is not the only mass grave in Sri Lanka either. At least five others -including in Ratnapura district have been excavated and skeletons of civilians –even schoolboys -found.
So, will Mr Dissanayake deliver on his election promises to deliver justice to Tamils, knowing that Chemmani will open a hornet’s nest all over the country?
That’s a tricky one. Most investigations of this kind in Sri Lanka have not culminated in prosecution. There has been repeated political interference and funds have been withheld. It has been difficult to establish custodial and genetic links with relatives who migrated abroad.
So what hope can the investigation into Chemmani hold?
“No legal enquiry will be able to extract the entire truth,” says former army officer Hemantha Dayaratne. “There is a danger that old resentment could swell into something bigger again. That should never happen. We should swear that we will never divide and fight again.”
Padma Rao Sundarji is a veteran foreign correspondent and political analyst specialised in the Indo-Pacific and Europe. She has reported for ARD German TV for 11 years out of New York and New Delhi, was South Asia Bureau Chief for Der Spiegel for 14 years and an independent analyst for many others
