The document was prepared by various groups of the third sector. More than 550 bodies have been found from massacres carried out by the military since the 1980s, but very few have been identified and returned to their families. An activist mother: “Witnesses to these crimes are disappearing.”
Colombo () – Former Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa is accused of altering police records to hinder investigations into mass graves discovered in an area where he served as a military officer during a Marxist rebellion in 1989. The allegations are contained in a report titled “Mass Graves and Failed Exhumations” published by some activist groups: Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS), International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP), Center for Human Rights and Development (CHRD) and Families of the Disappeared (FoD).
“Witnesses to the crimes are gradually disappearing: 178 mothers of the disappeared have already died in recent years. We protest and fight for justice, not knowing when we will get it,” said Manuvel Uthayachandra, mother and president of Families of the Disappeared.
The document makes it clear that successive Sri Lankan governments have interfered in the investigation of mass graves, noting that only 20 mass graves have been partially exhumed in the last 30 years and of the more than 550 bodies found, almost none have been identified. “None of Sri Lanka’s numerous commissions of inquiry have been tasked with examining the mass graves, and at the same time all efforts to uncover the truth have been hampered,” says the document, which focuses on the failure of the investigations. in the Matale district in central Sri Lanka, and in the city of Mannar, located in the Northern Province, where a mass grave was discovered in 2018.
“Magistrates and forensic experts were suddenly moved, police delayed execution of court orders, family lawyers were denied access to sites, no effort was made to find living witnesses, no ante-mortem data was collected. and, in the very rare cases where someone was convicted, they later received a pardon. “For the families of the disappeared, it is a story of unresolved tragedy; family members are forced to live and die without ever finding their loved ones.”
According to the report, when mass graves were discovered in Matale in 2013, Rajapaksa, who was a defense officer at the time, ordered the destruction of all police records older than five years in police stations in the region. The mass graves are suspected to date from the time of the communist rebellion against the Sri Lankan government, between 1987 and 1989. Rajapaksa, as a military officer, was involved in operations against the rebels. He was later elected president in 2019 and was forced to resign in 2022 due to violent protests by citizens during the worst economic crisis in the country’s history.
Brito Fernando, from Families of the Disappeared, explained that after three decades and 20 exhumation attempts, only a handful of bodies have been identified and returned to their families: “We all know that tens of thousands of bodies lie in shallow graves in the whole island” and for this reason we cannot classify the little progress as bad luck. It is a clear lack of political will,” he added.
KS Ratnavale, executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Development, shares those words. In a press release he stated: “The Attorney General’s Department views these mass grave investigations as part of normal criminal procedure and is hostile to the families of the victims. This was evident during the investigation of the mass graves in Mannar “.
