A blue schoolbag in a mass grave. Sri Lanka’s bloody past is re-emerging from the soil

By Helen Regan, Kumanan Kanapathipillai, Kunal Sehgal, Hanako Montgomery, CNN

(CNN) — Two human skeletons lie entangled on the rough earth – the arms of one wrapped around the other’s head, as though protecting them from danger.

Simply known as numbers 177 and 178, their identities remain a mystery.

They are among 240 human skeletal remains, including children and babies, uncovered at this mass gravesite in Chemmani in Sri Lanka’s northern Jaffna district.

“This place is a crime scene no entry,” reads a sign at the entrance.

Numbered white cards placed alongside the bones mark how many skeletons have been found since digging began in May of this year, reviving decades-old allegations of wartime atrocities and cover-ups.

In the heartland of the country’s ethnic Tamil minority, a bloody and brutal history is re-emerging from the soil.

But it is difficult to bury the past entirely.

From 1983 to 2009, the South Asian island nation of 21 million endured a brutal civil war between the Sri Lankan army and the separatist militant group the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). More commonly known as The Tamil Tigers, the group was listed as a terrorist organization by many countries including the United States.

The war was fought along ethnic lines, pitting the majority Buddhist Sinhalese state against the predominantly Hindu ethnic minority rebels fighting for a separate Tamil homeland in the north and east after years of anti-Tamil violence. The Tigers were ultimately defeated.

Atrocities were committed by both sides, according to the United Nations, which estimates up to 100,000 people were killed in the conflict, with thousands of others forcibly disappeared.

Sixteen years after the war ended, families of the victims and missing are still fighting for justice and accountability.

“One day the truth will come,” said V S Niranjan, a lawyer representing relatives of people who went missing in Jaffna.

A blue school bag

Just a stone’s throw from a main road, the Chemmani gravesite is one of more than 20 mass graves identified in Sri Lanka.

Many of the gravesites that pockmark the north and east of the country are believed to contain the victims of atrocities committed during the civil war. Caught between warring rebel fighters and the Sri Lankan army, the Tamil community in these regions bore the brunt of the violence.

The military occupied Jaffna from 1995 until the end of the war. Chemmani first gained international attention in 1998 when Sri Lankan soldier former Lance Cpl. Somaratne Rajapakse, who was on trial for the rape and murder of schoolgirl Krishanthi Kumaraswamy, confessed that hundreds of Tamils had been buried there after the Sri Lankan army retook Jaffna.

For decades, the mass grave remained hidden until construction workers clearing land in the grounds of a Hindu cemetery in February unearthed human skeletal remains.

Their discovery prompted a court-ordered forensic excavation of the site in May and June, which initially uncovered 19 skeletons.

Since then, the bones of hundreds more people have been found.

A baby’s milk bottle, a blue schoolbag, bangles and cloth fragments have been uncovered alongside the bones.

More than 90% of the remains had no form of clothing. The bodies were buried in a disordered way, heaped together in shallow graves of 1.5-2 feet, according to the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, an independent national body that investigates violations of fundamental rights.

Tamils, who have lived in the north and east of Sri Lanka for thousands of years, are primarily followers of Hinduism, with a significant Christian minority population, but the commission determined that the fact the bodies were buried naked rules out customary Hindu burials. “There is a reasonable likelihood that the burials were unlawful and pursuant to extrajudicial killings,” it said.

Teams of archaeologists, crime scene officers, and forensic medicine specialists under the jurisdiction of the Jaffna magistrate were working at the site digging, dusting and storing the remains. As investigators carefully chipped away the earth at one location, the head of a skeleton slowly emerged from the dirt, followed by a torso, arms and the rest of the body.

Equipped with fine tools, shovels and hammers, they meticulously separated earth and rock from bone, often using their gloved hands to sweep away the dirt.

One small, rectangular block of earth has been cut out of the ground. A tiny spine and rib cage can be made out – the remains of what investigators believe was a baby.

“There are children with a doll we recovered… These are very disturbing things,” said Niranjan, the lawyer who attended the gravesite every day to monitor the excavation on behalf of the families.

Investigators in September appealed to the Jaffna court for a greater area to be mapped and excavated as ground radar suggests additional human remains could be buried there. But by the end of November, work had not restarted.

Amnesty International estimated as many as 100,000 people were “forcibly disappeared” – the secret arrest, imprisonment or abduction of a person with the blessing of state organizations, or rebel groups – in Sri Lanka during the war, and the United Nations Human Rights Office has laid most of the blame on Sri Lankan security forces and affiliated paramilitary groups.

CNN sent repeated and detailed requests for comment about the Chemmani gravesite and allegations of wartime abuses to the Sri Lankan army, the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Justice. The army directed CNN to a defense ministry spokesperson who said the matter “is being handled purely by the law enforcement authorities under the supervision of the judiciary.” Sri Lankan Justice Minister Harshana Nanayakkara said he was not available to comment.

Speaking at the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances in Geneva on September 29, Nanayakkara said the Sri Lankan government “believed in securing justice for the victims and finding truth and closure, in line with its commitment with human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

‘Where is my child?’

Mothers and widows are leading the charge in Sri Lanka demanding answers.

For more than 30 years they have struggled to find out what happened to their loved ones, pressing the government and authorities through the courts and on the streets.

Previous investigations into other gravesites were not successful in identifying victims, did not lead to prosecutions, or were halted due to lack of funds or political will.

Clutching photos of their missing relatives, hundreds of residents marched in the stifling heat from Jaffna to the Chemmani gravesite on August 30, calling for independent international oversight of the investigation because they don’t trust the local justice system to give them answers.

“Where are our children?” the protesters chanted.

Each came with similar stories – a husband, a brother, a son; sometimes a whole family missing, without a trace.

At the protest, Sivapatham Elangkothai dropped to the dusty ground, and in an expression of grief and anger slammed her hand to her head and heart.

“Where are you? I want to see you all, I want you all to come to me,” she cried.

Elangkothai, who helped to organize the protest, held a photo of her daughter, son-in-law and her three young grandchildren, who she hasn’t seen in more than 16 years.

Back at her house in Jaffna, she recounted their last months together.

Like many others living in the north and east of Sri Lanka during the war, intense fighting had forced Elangkothai’s family to flee their home.

They ended up in Vavuniya, a strategically important district for the Sri Lankan army as a gateway to the largely Tamil-controlled northeast.

In late 2008, Elangkothai’s daughter gave birth to her third child – another grandchild for Elangkothai and her husband to dote on.

“We loved them dearly,” she said.

But the family was split between north and south Vavuniya, and when the Sri Lankan army began its final and most bloody assault, they became separated forever.

Elangkothai later learned through family friends that her daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren were herded onto a military bus, along with other residents, and taken away by Sri Lankan army soldiers. Her youngest grandchild was just 7 months old at the time.

At her home in Jaffna, surrounded by photos of her family, Elangkothai hugged two saris that belonged to her daughter.

“When I hear a knock at the door, I think it’s my child,” she said. “I searched everywhere for them. They aren’t to be found.”

Despite filing multiple affidavits and appeals to the government, Elangkothai still does not know what happened to her family.

She now assists the Jaffna branch of the Association for Relatives of the Enforced Disappearances, a civil society group of Tamil families of the disappeared that holds regular protests and pushes for accountability from the state.

“What was our crime? Was it being born a Tamil?” she said.

Investigations

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk laid flowers at a vigil demanding justice near the Chemmani mass grave in June.

“Today, an opportunity presents itself for Sri Lanka to break from the past,” said Türk, after he visited the gravesite, and called for “a clear and formal acknowledgment of the violations, abuses and crimes that occurred, including during the civil war.”

Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who took office last year, has promised to restore trust, investigate crimes and bring justice to victims’ families. The government said it would establish a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate wartime abuses in Sri Lanka, and an independent public prosecutor’s office.

But the discovery of the Chemmani mass graves has strengthened calls from Tamils for international justice, including referring Sri Lanka to the International Criminal Court.

Those calls for an international investigation appeared to have been shut down in September when Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that accountability would be handled “through credible domestic processes” as “external action will only serve to create divisions.”

Herath said investigations into the Chemmani gravesite are being conducted “independent of any government interference” and “the government has and will continue to provide adequate resources for the related processes.”

Over the years, successive Sri Lankan governments have established various state-run commissions of inquiry and investigative bodies, but they have had little success in bringing perpetrators to account.

Families of victims, human rights defenders and international bodies such as the UN have criticized the commissions for a lack of transparency, for being ineffective and ultimately unfit for delivering accountability.

The Office on Missing Persons (OMP) was established in 2017 with an explicit mandate to establish the fate of missing persons. It has records of more than 23,000 cases, but has traced just 23 people, a Sri Lankan delegation told the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances on September 29.

The UN human rights office said the OMP’s independence had been “undermined” by “appointing members lacking credibility and independence” and it had lost the trust of victim communities.

CNN has reached out to the OMP for comment.

The Sri Lankan delegation told the UN committee that “Sri Lanka had a long-standing practice of investigating complaints of disappearances” and “all investigations of mass graves were carried out with judicial oversight in accordance with legal standards.”

The government was “working on addressing” challenges within the OMP, had allocated additional funding to the body and hoped to “achieve positive results through its investigations and gain public trust,” it added.

Sri Lanka’s government “had the political will to investigate cases of enforced disappearance” and was “working to introduce a new system to compensate victims’ families,” the delegation said.

Scars of war remain

Mary Ranjini Nirmalanathan is in her 70s and spent her whole life in Jaffna.

She and her husband saved hard to build their dream home but it sat between an army camp and the Jaffna hospital, and as the war intensified around them, they were forced to abandon it, she told CNN.

Her husband did some work for the army as a translator – Nirmalanathan thought it would offer them some protection. But one day in 1990, he didn’t return from the army base.

Nirmalanathan said she used to go to the military camp demanding answers from the soldiers. As a lone woman with two young children in tow, she said she feared for her life and that of her sons.

Soldiers would say her husband was working and fine.

Weeks became months, months became years, and her husband never returned home.

Her two boys grew up without a father and carried the trauma of war.

“They saw children their own age die before their eyes,” Nirmalanathan said. “When there was an airstrike, the children would run to the bunkers. That’s how they played. We did not teach them. Even while studying, if they saw a plane, they would drop everything and hide.”

She would tell her children that, one day, their father would come home.

But the fighting got worse. She applied for passports for her sons to move away from Sri Lanka – to join the huge exodus of Tamils who fled to Europe, India, Canada and elsewhere during the war.

In 2007, tragedy struck again. The morning that her eldest son’s passport arrived, he was taken on a motorbike by soldiers.

Her son, 19 at the time, was last seen at a massive army camp near the airport in Jaffna. She has had no word from him since.

Today, she and other women hold a protest every month demanding answers and an international investigation.

Nirmalanathan said she faces harassment from the authorities for her protests. Some nights, between 2 and 4 a.m., she sees and hears security personnel outside her door.

She believes it’s an intimidation tactic to stop her galvanizing other family members.

United Nations observers noted in a report released in August “continued patterns of surveillance, intimidation and harassment of families of the disappeared, community leaders, civil society actors, especially those working on accountability for enforced disappearances and other conflict-related crimes.”

Speaking in Geneva in September at the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances, a Sri Lankan government representative accused freelance Tamil journalist Kumanan Kanapathipillai, one of the authors of this CNN report, of “terrorist activities and financial crime.” Kanapathipillai had previously been brought in for questioning by counter-terrorism police following his reporting on the Chemmani mass graves.

The Committee to Protect Journalists and several other press advocate groups called on the government to end its “harassment” of Kanapathipillai. More than 100 other Sri Lankan organizations and individuals issued a joined statement saying the “ill-founded accusations and persistent harassment are an attempt to silence” Kanapathipillai, and serve as “a warning to other Tamil-speaking journalists and activists” working on historic and continued repression of the Tamil community.

The country’s Foreign Minister Herath said the government “will not hesitate to take action on any alleged harassment or intimidation.”

The discovery of the Chemmani gravesite reopened old wounds but also gave many mothers like Nirmalanathan hope that some answers may finally come.

“Today there is a reason why the relatives come and sob. After all these years they strongly believe that (their loved ones) will come home… many mothers just like me are waiting with so much hope,” she said.

“Our loved ones couldn’t speak up when they were alive, now their bodies are coming out to tell the truth.”

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Stephan Sansigan contributed reporting.