Image courtesy NAFSO

The archiving of tweets documenting the violence in Weliweriya began after a reader, @apelankawe, asked us to do so.

Ended up archiving every single tweet containing the hashtags #Weliweriya, #Weliveriya, #weliweriyaclash and #weliweriyaclash.

The final report from the investigation into the incident is in the hands of the Army Commander as well as the President for several weeks, but still unavailable in the public domain. Questions over the inaccessibility of the report posed to Anuradha K Herath, Director (International Media) at the President’s Office and to Charitha Herath, Secretary, Ministry of Mass Media and Information, have gone tellingly unanswered to date.

Perhaps one reason the government doesn’t want to release the final report is because of the nature of those placed in charge of the investigation. As noted in online media,

The Army’s Adjutant General Maj. Gen. Jagath Dias who was put in charge of the army inquiry into a violent military crackdown against civilian demonstrators in Weliweriya on August 1 has been rejected by the United States for training programme on account of his implication in alleged war crimes during the final days of the war.

Much as the government desires it, the public record of the violence and the Army’s murders in Weliweriya can’t be easily hidden or erased. From 1st August 2013 to 9th September 2013, Groundviews archived over 1,750 tweets, linking compelling photographs, videos, articles, eye-witness testimony, citizen journalism and mainstream news reports around the violence and responses to it.

The full archive is now accessible here. This search interface will always show the latest tweets, updated hourly, every day.

Download a complete list of the tweets published till 9th September 2013 as an Excel spreadsheet here.