What we hear from Chemmani… When the soil speaks for people’s justice
7 July 2025 01:27 amViews - 51 0 Bookmark
After the first phase of excavation forensic archaeologist Prof. Raj Somadeva confirmed that at least 19 skeletons have been unearthed
What emerges from Chemmani is more than evidence; it is indictment. It is the collapse of conscience. It is a searing reminder that beneath this island’s surface lies not just bones, but stories systematically silenced, voices smothered by a state that built its post-war peace on amnesia
By Sakuna M. Gamage
Chemmani is Speaking Again
“At the foot of the Kaneru flower tree
You fell down and bled from your chest
You were lost to me
Not to this country
But to the earth..”Don’t get up, even though if you get up,
Where should we go?
Where indeed can people go when justice itself has been buried? Who will speak for them?
These lines, written by Rathna Sri Wijesinghe in a sinhala poem during a time of unspeakable war, return today with even more disturbing resonance. On the seventh day of the second phase of re-excavations at Chemmani in July 2025, I stood before a shallow grave where skeletal remains of a child were found, still carrying a UNICEF school bag, and within it, a tiny doll. This is not merely a memory of war. It is the brutal continuity of impunity. What we hear from Chemmani is not the echo of the past, it is the present breaking open. It is the soil itself rejecting silence.
What emerges from Chemmani is more than evidence; it is indictment. It is the collapse of conscience. It is a searing reminder that beneath this island’s surface lies not just bones, but stories systematically silenced, voices smothered by a state that built its post-war peace on amnesia.The return to Chemmani is a confrontation with memory. It is reckoning with silence. It is an accusation against a justice system constructed not to remember, but to forget.
In 1996, the gang rape and murder of Krishanthi Kumaraswamy led to the uncovering of the Chemmani mass graves. Now, nearly three decades later, her story and the countless unnamed who disappeared into these soils, resurfaces to haunt a nation that has mastered the art of erasure. Because the silence is not accidental. It is orchestrated. Deliberate. Loud in its denial. And still unbroken.
Re-excavating Chemmani: The Process and the Pain
The 2025 re-excavation of Chemmani’s mass graves began almost by accident. A construction project in February uncovered bones that triggered official intervention. But what followed was not a coordinated national reckoning it was another fragmented, under-resourced, and politically ambivalent response. After the first phase of excavation forensic archaeologist Prof. Raj Somadeva confirmed that at least 19 skeletons have been unearthed, including three infants under 10 months old. Drones and satellite imagery identified more potential burial sites, but less than 40% of the known area has been excavated. This is not an isolated archaeological undertaking. It is a national trauma site, a burial ground of truth. On July 4 (Friday), excavation teams at the Chemmani mass grave site in Jaffna uncovered four more sets of skeletal remains, including two believed to belong to children. This brings the total number of remains unearthed during the ongoing operation to 40.
Families of the disappeared, represented by human rights lawyer Ranitha Gnanarajah, have joined the excavation, not as passive observers, but as active custodians of memory. Over 600 families from Jaffna alone are still searching for missing loved ones. Many fear a repeat of past betrayals: incomplete exhumations, judicial evasions, and eventual political silence.
Their fears are well-founded. Sri Lanka’s history of investigating mass graves, from Mannar to Kalavanchikudy and Matale to Sooriyakanda, has been a catalogue of obstruction. The Mannar excavation unearthed 346 bodies between 2018 and 2019. To this day, no identities have been confirmed, no accountability established, and no compensation offered. This bureaucratic negligence is not just a failure of process, it is an ethical failure. A moral collapse!
The death of humanism
The tragedy unfolding in Chemmani is not merely local. It is deeply intertwined with a broader erosion of human values globally. In 2025, we live in a world where war crimes are live streamed from Gaza, where children’s deaths are counted in real time, and where international law is paralysed by great power vetoes at the United Nations. Genocide is no longer hidden, it is performed in full view.
We are witnessing the death of democratic humanism as a meaningful global force. The institutions born from the ashes of WWII, meant to safeguard peace and dignity, have been rendered impotent. The UN Human Rights Council speaks, but its words carry little weight in the face of geopolitical impunity. Israel’s bombardment of civilians in Gaza and the complete inaction from the UN Security Council underscore this collapse.
However in late June 2025, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk made a solemn visit to the Chemmani mass-grave site. Türk personally inspected the excavation zone where 19 skeletal remains, three of them infants, had recently emerged, calling the sight “very emotional” and emphasising the urgent need for independent forensic experts He met with families and lawyers involved in the dig, listened to their pleas for UN-supervised exhumation, and laid flowers at the “Unextinguished Flame” vigil, a symbolic gesture of solidarity with families seeking justice . By spotlighting Chemmani, Türk underscored the haunting legacy of Sri Lanka’s civil war while urging accountability and international oversight.
Against this backdrop, Chemmani becomes part of a global story. It tells us that the earth has become a graveyard of broken treaties, of unfulfilled obligations, of justice denied by design.
Transitional justice and culture of amnesia
The first grave in Chemmani was exposed not by the state, but by a whistleblower. In 1998, Corporal Somaratne Rajapakse, facing execution for his role in the rape and murder of Krishanthi Kumaraswamy, revealed the existence of mass graves. He named names and gave coordinates. The state responded not with justice, but with a smear campaign.
When excavations finally began in 1999, only 15 bodies were found, most blindfolded, their hands tied, buried execution-style. The rest of the suspected graves were never touched. This was no coincidence.
Successive governments, regardless of party or mandate, have engaged in active forgetting. Evidence chains were broken. High-ranking officers were shielded. Witnesses were threatened or disappeared. Even the fate of convicted soldiers remains unclear, many reappeared in public life by the 2010s, reportedly released under presidential pardons. As legal scholar Kishali Pinto-Jayawardena aptly put it, “Transitional justice here has not been obstructed by lack of evidence, but by the deliberate burial of truth in bureaucracy and fear.”
A deafening silence from the NPP Government
In 2024, the National People’s Power (NPP) came to power on a tidal wave of public frustration, frustration with entrenched corruption, unchecked militarization, and the persistent shield of impunity protecting the political elite. The party’s promises were bold: truth, justice, and reconciliation. Its victory was not only sweeping in the Sinhala South, but historic in the Tamil-majority north and east.
Yet eight months into office, the silence over Chemmani is deafening.
No official visit. No public statement. No symbolic gesture. Not even a passing mention. The re-excavation of one of Sri Lanka’s most infamous mass graves, where the soil is again giving up the bones of the disappeared, has met with complete political indifference from the very government that claimed to champion justice.
Some argue that this time, at least, the judiciary will be allowed to function independently. But silence from the political leadership, especially from a party that claimed moral clarity, cannot be ignored.
Many within the NPP’s leadership have themselves been victims of state terror, from Sooriyakanda to Matale. They understand, intimately, the machinery of violence and the weight of impunity. And yet, now in power, they appear paralysed. Is this calculated political caution? Or the first signs of a quieter, more insidious complicity?
The NPP still has an opportunity. It holds rare moral space, spanning ethnic divides, earned not just through rhetoric, but through its electoral mandate from communities long abandoned by Colombo. With that trust, it could establish a credible, participatory truth-seeking mechanism, grounded in transparency and dignity for victims.
But time is running out. The longer the government remains silent, the more that silence will be heard, not as neutrality, but as betrayal.
Media polarization
The 2025 re-excavation of the Chemmani mass grave did more than unearth bones, it exposed the deep fractures in Sri Lanka’s media landscape. Tamil media outlets reported daily from the site, providing consistent coverage with interviews from grieving families, footage of unearthed remains, and analysis from forensic experts. The silence from the Sinhala mainstream media, by contrast, was deafening.
Most Sinhala-language outlets either ignored the excavation altogether or relegated it to the margins, buried in back pages or framed through the sanitised lens of “security concerns.” This wasn’t journalistic oversight. It was deliberate editorial evasion.
Such silence is not neutral. It is part of a systemic architecture of denial. In a media culture steeped in decades of military hero-worship and Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism, Chemmani poses a narrative threat. Acknowledging mass graves tied to state forces risks puncturing long-protected myths. To speak of army crimes is to risk being labelled unpatriotic, pro-LTTE, or a traitor to the nation. But the contents of that child’s schoolbag, a sandal, a toy, cut deeper than politics. They call to the conscience of the nation.
This refusal to report truthfully is not just moral cowardice, it is complicity. It reframes justice as a threat, and accountability as betrayal.
Yet the Sri Lankan state is constitutionally obligated to protect all its citizens, regardless of ethnicity, religion, or political affiliation. When the state shields only Sinhala-Buddhists and suppresses truths that challenge that hierarchy, it ceases to function as a republic. It becomes a sectarian project.
Chemmani is not an isolated case, it is part of a repeated, deliberate pattern of erasure and impunity.
At Sooriyakanda, 33 schoolchildren were massacred by army personnel in 1990. No one has been held accountable. At Matale, a mass grave linked to the 1989 JVP insurrection was uncovered in 2012. Still, no perpetrators have been identified. In Mannar, 346 bodies were exhumed, silence followed. In Kokku Thoduvai, Thiruketheeswaram, Kalavanchikudy, and elsewhere, graves emerged, momentarily entered the news cycle, and then disappeared,uninvestigated, unacknowledged, unresolved.These are not Tamil graves. They are not Sinhala graves. They are Sri Lankan graves, burial sites of inconvenient truths, smothered under nationalism, militarism, and political expediency.Justice cannot be selective. A nation that only exhums where it is politically safe, and stops when the findings challenge the dominant narrative, is not in pursuit of truth. It is running from it.
International oversight
As the OHCHR noted in 2024, Sri Lanka lacks the technical, financial, and moral capacity to conduct exhumations that meet international standards. The Office of Missing Persons (OMP), originally created to bridge this gap, has become a “white elephant.” Underfunded. Underpowered. Untrusted.
Victims’ families are right to demand international oversight. It is not a foreign imposition, it is a lifeline. Without credible monitoring, Chemmani risks becoming yet another wound that scabs over without healing.To those who argue that international mechanisms infringe on sovereignty, the response is simple: sovereignty without justice is tyranny.
The people have spoken. Will the Government listen?
The NPP’s 2024 electoral victory was not just a rejection of the Rajapaksas. It was a mandate for justice. A cross-ethnic coalition of hope. The people have done their part. Now it’s time for the state to do its own.The question is not whether the government has the political capital to act. It does. The question is whether it has the courage.
It can create a domestic truth commission with international guarantees. It can offer reparations. It can prosecute at least one chain of command to set precedent. It can support forensic teams instead of ignoring them. It can speak. Because Chemmani is speaking. The silence now belongs to the government.
Chemmani as a test of our republic
Chemmani is more than a grave. It is a mirror. It reflects not just the brutality of a past war, but the moral decay of the present. It asks us what kind of republic we want to be: one built on truth or on convenient lies. The bones beneath Jaffna’s soil are not bones of the enemy. They are citizens. Children. Loved ones. They are the responsibility of a state that promised to protect all.
What we hear from Chemmani is not merely a call for justice. It is the sound of a republic on trial.
A new mandate for accountability
As the 2025 Chemmani excavation continues, the government must act, not out of political convenience, but from historical responsibility. The NPP has been given an extraordinary mandate, from the wounded south to the grieving north. That trust must not be betrayed. Accountability is not a threat to unity. It is its foundation.To protect this nation, the state must admit to its sins. To build a new Sri Lanka, it must first bury its lies, with truth.
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