More than a year after a set of skeletons presumed to be those of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fighters were unearthed from a mass grave in Kokkuthoduvai, their details are finally to be made public after repeated delays and accusations of a cover-up.
A court in Mullaitivu on Thursday finally ordered details of Tamil Tiger fighters’ identification tags recovered from 52 skeletons to be made public in the hope information of the deceased would come from the public. The skeletons believed to have been buried between 1994 and 1996 were accidentally discovered in June 2023 by construction workers from the National Water Supply and Drainage Board in Kokkuthoduvai, a small town in the north-eastern district of Mullaitivu.
The recovered dog tags from LTTE cadres and their numbers found on their uniforms have been ordered by the court to be made public in due course, after intense pressure from Tamil families of the disappeared.
Lack of funding by the Sri Lankan government resulted in the excavation being suspended for more than seven months. This prompted a protest in August by the Association for the Relatives of the Enforced Disappearances (ARED) that suspected the suspension as a cover-up, and demanded an international inquiry into all mass graves found in the island’s North and East. Relatives say the Office for the Missing Persons (OMP) had also attempted to silence their call for justice and accountability by intimidating them into accepting death certificates. Despite the continued international support to the OMP, since its inception eight years ago, it has not successfully traced a single disappeared person.
This follows the historical pattern reported by the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) in June 2023 on Sri Lanka’s record of dealing with mass graves. They concluded that out of the 20 mass graves partially exhumed, hardly any family has had the remains of their loved ones returned. The report highlights that there has been systemic political interference in actively preventing families of the disappeared from receiving the remains of their loved ones, and preventing the prosecution of those responsible for their disappearance and death.
According to the Jaffna District MP M.A.Sumanthiran, magistrates and forensic experts have been transferred abruptly, police have delayed carrying out judicial orders, families’ lawyers have been denied access to sites, no effort has been made to find living witnesses, no ante mortem data was collected and, in the very few cases where someone was convicted, they were then pardoned.
Mr Sumanthiran also expressed his disappointment about the lack of international expertise when witnessing the initial excavation of the Kokkuthoduvai mass grave. “Whatever is being seen and found is just being kept as forensic evidence. It is not done based on international expertise. Therefore, there is a danger of evidence going missing, particularly important evidence has been found.”
The complete set of reports will be submitted in court on the 12th of December. To date, very few exhumations have led to the identification of any victims, and no clarification has been provided to the Tamil families of the disappeared.
