Hundred Not Out
Posted on August 4th, 2025
N Sathiya Moorthy Courtesy Ceylon Today 1 August 2025
For the uninitiated readers of the national media, and possibly the majority Sinhala media, Chemmani may yet to happen. But after weeks of digging up unmarked graves in Northern Jaffna town, Government officials under Court supervision have already taken out over a hundred human skeletons, including those of infants and grown-up children. The numbers are growing with each passing day of digging, which is at times halted for logistics reasons, one should assume.
Yes, only scientific studies would show if they are of recent origin, but the fact that they have been recovered from dig-outs six to eight metres deep may indicate that they are not ancient. Yet, they are historic in their own way, adding heft to the Tamils’ charges that the Armed Forces ruthlessly killed their civilians during the three-decade-long ethnic war – and are yet to be held accountable.
There are two sides to the coin. On the one side is the Tamil grouse about injustice and ‘State-sponsored violence’ on innocents during the war years. On the other hand is the Southern Sinhala argument that has not found full expression this time that all those whose bodies were recovered were LTTE ‘terrorists’, who were ‘waging a war’ on the Sri Lankan State. Be it as it may, they would still have to explain how an infant’s skeleton in her mother’s hands was also among those recovered from the Chemmani dig-up. Unlike someone who is ready to prove that the mother was an LTTE cadre and her child had died with her while fighting or resisting the Armed Forces, all such arguments fall flat. Even then, the question remains if the infant was dead or alive when buried. Imagine if it were alive when buried, the cruelty of the war and violence would stand out more than already.
Decent closure
Fifteen-plus years down the line, the war deaths require a closure, a decent closure. As a war-victorious President, Mahinda Rajapaksa could have done it on day one. While kissing the motherland at the Katunayake Airport on return from Jordan at the end of the war, he could have declared that he also prayed for the war deaths, both Sinhalese and Tamils, Armed Forces personnel and LTTE militants/terrorists – and more so civilians of all ethnic hues.
Mahinda had a second opportunity when he addressed Parliament, where he announced the war victory and declared the end of the war. He could have taken the Tamils as a community that too had suffered, and whose deaths, too, the nation mourned. Even if the Government did not mean to apologise to the Tamil community, with appropriate wording, he could have conveyed it to the Tamils and at the same time implied to the Sinhala majoritarians that he was referring only to the innocent Tamil victims of the LTTE. In technical terms, they constituted what’s accepted as ‘collateral damage’ of the war, but whose numbers were a legion.
Instead, under wrong advice, the President claimed that there were no civilian deaths, meaning Tamil civilian deaths. Later, his brother and then Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa repeated the claim ad nauseam without bothering about challenges and consequences, especially from the international community (read: West). And the Rajapaksa Brothers were well aware of the ‘international consequences’ of their ‘shifting the goalposts’ on a post-war political solution. They were even aware where it would come from – by the US and the rest, through the instrument of the UNHRC. Their chest-thumping did the nation in.
Instead, if the Government had conceded that there were ‘unavoidable’ civilian casualties and given a credible number, and apologised to their families and the larger community, maybe that could have set in motion the closure process, if not becoming closure itself. In the weeks and months surrounding the first US-sponsored UNHRC resolution on ‘war crimes’ and ‘accountability issues’ in Sri Lanka, an erstwhile Government representative had put the number of civilian war deaths at around 5,000.
Acceptable fatalities
The number made sense even three years after the end of the war, as in those weeks and months since May 2009 and later, most Western diplomats in Colombo were known to have come to some kind of a consensus that (only) 5,000-8,000 Tamil civilians might have been killed in the last phase(s) of the war. Better still for the Government, they were actually defending the Government and supporting the Armed Forces that in a ‘hostage-release situation’ that they had faced, the fatality figure was ‘acceptable’.
Recall how weeks before the end of the war, the Armed Forces had freed nearly 300,000 Tamil civilians from the clutches of the LTTE at Mullivaikkal. Even Tamil civilians who now talk about Mullivaikkal as the venue where the Armed Forces exterminated the world’s most dreaded terrorist organisation of the day, are woefully short on truth about their own freedom from the LTTE’s clutches. They all seem to have suffered an amnesia in the matter – which continues till today, and will live beyond their times, too.
The fact is that at the conclusion of the war, Western governments and their representatives in the country said that they accepted that it was the largest hostage-taking incident in the world, and the loss of up to 8,000 civilian lives in a total of around 300,000, was well within the ‘acceptable range’ of five per cent. In fact, the figure worked out only to 2.5 per cent or thereabouts, as they had calculated for the benefit of their domestic listeners, especially the sorrowful Tamil leadership.
Human shields
Granting later-day human-shield figures of 150,000, instead of the originally projected figure of 300,000, the civilian casualties in what the West readily conceded as ‘extended action’ that lasted weeks, doubled to, say, five per cent. Sri Lanka’s concerns grew only after the Government went into a ‘denial mode’.
So, when the Darusman Report put the number of civilian deaths at a high 40,000 without evidence, the Tamil Diaspora, especially and their Western backers, used the figure to erase all memories of the LTTE’s hostage-taking and human shields. And they succeeded, as the Government also did not refer to the human shields any more. So did the Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarian nationalists, to this day.
Nowhere else in contemporary history have you come across a more gruesome guerrilla leader who had used his civilian backers as unsuspecting human shields to protect himself from harm’s way – the Armed Forces, their guns and missiles. Recall for how many long years /decades Prabhakaran held on to the charade by claiming that he had adopted the parents and siblings of his ‘war heroes’ or ‘maveerars’, or ‘martyrs’, and was taking them along wherever he went or retreated – and without anyone suspecting him. You will then and then alone accept how cold-blooded the man was, and how selfish and self-centred his security tactics, too, were.
It may be wrong to charge the Rajapaksas, the Armed Forces or the Sri Lankan State with ‘triumphalism’, which is yet another Western idiom that found its way into Sri Lankan NGO lexicons almost from day one of the war’s end. Yet, there is no denying that they left behind the war and its memories to live their new lives, denied to them by war, violence and terrorism in capital Colombo and further Down South. That was the mistake for which the nation is still paying.
Ethnic spite
To this day, whether it is this Government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake or those before him, no Sri Lankan ruler or dispensation has taken a more sympathetic and empathetic view of Tamil civilian deaths during those war years. As the Muttur massacre in the East showed after the LTTE revived hostilities in 2006, the well-armed and trained outfit was pulling out its guns after firing, in civilian localities, so that the Armed Forces’ heat-seeking weapons would end up killing civilians and destroying their homes, hospitals, schools and places of worship.
This was happening all along in the war zones of the North and the East, but the ‘more knowledgeable’ Western interlocutors wanted to believe that the Armed Forces were wantonly targeting hospitals and schools in the Tamil areas, out of ethnic spite, at times dating back by decades and at other times, by centuries – to the days of Dutugemunu and Elara two thousand years ago, and of Rajaraja Chola’s invasion a thousand years later.
Today, Chemmani is a reality, and so are the skeletons that are falling out of those graves, and literally so. The Government needs greater sensitivity than its predecessors since 2009. Comprising leaders from the JVP, which too lost its ‘soldiers’ in their tens of thousands during their two insurgencies, in 1971 and 1987-89, this Government will be watched closely by their own dead cadres’ surviving family members, as to their sensitivity and sensibility in discussing, debating and deciding upon civilian deaths in another part of the country – but under near-similar circumstance.
It will mean a lot for national reconciliation that the Government hopes to achieve through the much-promised and even more delayed constitutional process, in the form of a new Constitution, that is.
(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst and Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)