Mainstream WeeklyIn a country where thousands of Tamils were killed in the war against the Tamil Tigers, the horrific rape and murder of a school student way back in 1986 is still haunting Sri Lanka. Now, it threatens to pit liberal Europe against Colombo.
Krishanthi Kumaraswamy was sexually assaulted and done to death by soldiers in Jaffna at a time when Sri Lanka was waging what looked like an unwinnable war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
When her mother and brother, worried where she was, went to check with the military at Chemmani, on Jaffna’s outskirts, they too were murdered. And so was a neighbour who sought to know what happened to the family. None of them had any links with the LTTE.
By then, killing of Tamil civilians on the slightest suspicion of rebel links had become common. Unfortunately for the murderers, Krishanthi’s death triggered an unprecedented earthquake.
A soldier, Somaratne Rajapakse, went on trial in 1998 for Krishanthi’s slaying. Stung that only he was being punished for a crime committed by half-a-dozen, he alleged that 300-400 Tamils were murdered and buried on the orders of their seniors in Chemmani area.
All the crimes allegedly took place after the army seized Jaffna, the Tamil heartland, from the LTTE in late 1995.
Amid an international shadow, the remains of 19 bodies of Tamils were dug up in 1999. Four more soldiers were arrested. But the four were freed in 2000. And just when a Norway-brokered truce shattered in 2006, Sri Lanka put a virtual lid on the case.
After the LTTE was decimated in 2009, Chemmani’s unofficial graveyard became ominously silent. But families of those who disappeared from the military-controlled area in the 1990s kept demanding answers – and justice.
It was finally in 2025, a year after Anura Dissanayke became the president, that a court-ordered excavation led to 19 more skeletons. The digging in and around a cemetery has since continued, and the number of skeletons discovered has by now shot up to a shocking 446.
No one knows how many more remains of Tamil men, women and children would be found, making Chemmani the largest such mass grave in Sri Lanka. (One Tamil source, however, cautioned that not all skeletons may be of people killed by the military.)
On July 22, a high-level delegation of European diplomats based in Colombo and led by European Union ambassador Carmen Moreno visited the area and told anguished relatives that the matter would be raised at the United Nations.
After the affected families submitted a 12-page memorandum, one diplomat remarked: “The petition you have given us is not a piece of paper. We accept it with our hearts… We know your pain and suffering. As far as we are able, we will raise your concerns at the UN and with countries that uphold human rights.”
Nearby, relatives of the disappeared, university students and Tamil political activists gathered on a key road to demand an international investigation into not only Chemmani but all mass graves discovered in Sri Lanka.
They said they had no faith in Sri Lanka’s domestic mechanisms as promises made by successive governments to deliver justice had been broken. One Tamil told the European diplomats: “We are placing our lives in your hands.”
The LTTE emptied large parts of Jaffna when the military seized it in late 1995, forcing tens of thousands of civilians to shift to its territory. Over the months, however, many Tamils trekked back unable to stand the hardships in the rebel zone and wanting to live in Jaffna, their home for generations.
The military chose to kill some of the very Tamils who defied a LTTE fiat not to go back to Jaffna.
The diplomats who visited Jaffna included the ambassadors of Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands, countries with which Sri Lanka has robust economic ties. They are also home to thousands of Tamils of Sri Lankan origin, a factor expected to play a key role in Europe’s stand.
A day earlier, the Europeans were urged by the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK), Sri Lanka’s main Tamil political party, to back a separate scientific investigation (carbon dating) to know the years when Tamils were killed and buried in Chemmani.
This, former Northern Province Chief Minister C.V.K. Sivagnanam said, would help establish who controlled the area at that time and potentially help investigators in identifying those responsible.
Chemmani, which would have remained an obscure village but for Krishanthi’s murder, exposes all that went wrong with Sri Lanka’s conduct of the quarter century long war against the Tamil Tigers.
How many non-combatants died in 2008-09 when the war ended? No one knows for sure. The estimates vary from a few thousands to around 40,000. The final phase of the conflict had few witnesses: those who survived (civilians and surrendered Tigers) are dubbed biased while others who may know (including an Indian medical team) have remained largely silent.
Sri Lanka points out the large number of Tamils rescued amid the fighting. This is widely recognised even if LTTE supporters ignore this. But what is under the radar is those killed in the war or after they surrendered, not the rescued.
Chemmani of course happened more than a decade before the guns fell silent in Sri Lanka, ending one of the world’s longest running insurgencies.
But 17 years after the war ended, Tamils are still struggling to get answers about civilians who got killed though they had nothing to do with the Tamil Tigers except for living under its domain.
At the heart of the Sri Lankan quagmire is an ‘us’ and ‘them’ syndrome.
Colombo considers soldiers (overwhelmingly Sinhalese) as ‘us’, whose reputation must be defended at all costs irrespective of what they did, legal or extra-judicial.
The ‘them’ are Tamils, a community which suffered (and continues to suffer) simply because the LTTE arose from its midst; so, everything that happened during the war – legal or extra-judicial — is fair. The Tamils, in other words, must pay the price for the follies of the Tamil Tigers.