Photo courtesy of Tamil Guardian
Some truths are not uncovered by force. They rise slowly, persistently, from the ground because the dead cannot remain forgotten forever.
In the quiet village of Chemmani, nestled within the war scarred terrain of the Jaffna peninsula, a patch of soil became the unlikely custodian of one of the nation’s most haunting secrets. What lay beneath was not just a series of mass graves but the buried echoes of an entire generation – names never recorded, stories never told, justice never served.
This is not just the story of Chemmani. It is the beginning of a reckoning. A reckoning that stretches across Mannar, Murakkoddanchenai, Kokkuthoduvai and Mirusuvil. It began not with an inquiry, nor a commission but with an unexpected voice of a soldier on trial for one of the country’s most brutal crimes.
In 1998, Sri Lanka was shaken by the brutal rape and murder of 18 year-old Tamil schoolgirl Krishanthi Kumaraswamy. She had been stopped at an army checkpoint in Kondavil while returning home from an exam. She never arrived. Her mutilated body was later found, alongside those of her mother, brother and a neighbour who had gone searching for her.
The resulting trial of several army personnel revealed more than just the details of a singular crime. One of the accused, Somaratne Rajapakse, made the chilling claim under oath that hundreds of Tamil civilians who had disappeared following the military’s recapture of Jaffna in 1995–1996 had been executed and buried in mass graves near the village of Chemmani. He claimed to know where 300 to 400 bodies were buried. The silence that followed his statement was deafening but the world had already heard.
In 1999, under mounting international pressure, the government allowed court monitored excavations at Chemmani. With global eyes watching and human rights groups observing, the ground began to yield its truth. Fifteen bodies were uncovered. Two were later identified as men who had disappeared in 1996. The evidence was damning. Charges were brought against seven military personnel. But this flicker of justice quickly dimmed. The investigation stalled. Files gathered dust. No further excavations were conducted. By 2006, Chemmani was all but forgotten in the official narrative. Yet for the families who had long suspected the worst, the silence was not peace – it was prolonged agony.
Then in June 2025, more than two decades after that first excavation, the earth spoke once again. At the Chemmani burial site, court ordered excavations resumed. What was uncovered devastated the conscience of a nation all over again: 19 human skeletons, including three infants, one of whom is believed to have been less than a year old. The images were unbearable. Tiny bones lifted gently from the soil, fragments of clothing stained by time and questions too painful to ignore. This was not a relic of the distant past. These were not anonymous fossils of history. These were victims of violence, of war, of silence. And now their memory demanded answers.
Chemmani is not an isolated tragedy. It is part of a wider pattern of concealed horror, one that crisscrosses the northern and eastern provinces.
In 2013, 11 skeletons were discovered during construction in the town of Mannar but it was in 2018 that the largest mass grave was uncovered. Excavations near the Sacred Heart Church unearthed 346 skeletons, including 29 children. The lead forensic archaeologist suggested the remains were no older than 30 years yet delays, political interference and a lack of funding disrupted further investigation. Artifacts went missing. Scientific testing stalled and with time public memory dimmed. No one has been held accountable. The victims remain unidentified. The families continue to wait.
In Mirusuvil in 2000, eight Tamil civilians were abducted by the military. One escaped. His return led investigators to a shallow grave where the other seven bodies were found blindfolded, bound and shot. In a rare instance of legal consequence, a staff sergeant was sentenced to death in 2015, 15 years later. Yet as is often the case accountability stopped at the lowest ranks. No superior officer was tried. No system was questioned. Justice, even when it arrives, remains woefully incomplete.
In Murakkoddanchenai in Batticaloa and Kokkuthoduvai in Mullaitivu, skeletal remains surfaced during routine construction work. Instead of triggering forensic investigations, authorities hastily labeled them historic without any meaningful examination. The files were closed. The ground was sealed. And the silence resumed, thicker now, compounded by the denial of even the possibility of truth.
These graves scattered like mute tombstones across Tamil majority regions are not random or isolated. They form a map of suffering, each site a pin pressed into the memory of a nation that has never fully reckoned with its civil war. These sites tell a story the state has long refused to confront; a story of disappearance, denial and the deliberate erasure of pain.
Behind every skeleton lies a life. Behind every grave, a void that can never be filled. A daughter’s torn school uniform. A mother’s final lullaby. A father taken at midnight. A child who simply vanished. Families of the disappeared are left not only with grief but with the cruel burden of proof. In Sri Lanka it is not enough to suffer loss. You must prove it happened, defend your mourning and survive the silence that follows.
But in the face of denial, memory becomes resistance. Across the north and east, from Kilinochchi to Mullaitivu, families still gather. They carry laminated photographs, light candles by roadside shrines and march in silence year after year. They are not calling for vengeance. They are asking for the right to grieve, the right to know, the right to remember.
Sites like Chemmani are not just evidence of past horrors; they are spaces of sacred potential. If the nation dares to confront its own history, these places could become memorials not to pain alone but to truth, to justice and to healing. In their silence these graves ask questions that must be answered.
Who were they? Who killed them? Why were they hidden? Why does no one answer? And the most haunting of all: will we ever care enough to know?
The story of Chemmani and of Mannar, Mirusuvil and so many unnamed fields is not just about the past. It is a mirror held up to the present. To excavate a grave is to unearth more than bones. It is to expose shame, institutional neglect and the buried truths of a broken country. In doing so, we are given a choice: to rebury them with silence or to begin the long, painful, necessary journey toward justice.
We owe it to the mothers who still wait, to the children who never grew, to the people who died nameless and to the generations yet to ask what we did when the dead came calling.
Let Chemmani and every grave that followed not be a graveyard of hope but a memorial of truth. Let the silence end. Let justice rise from the soil.