By Dinesh Shakthi.
A skeleton (429th) excavated yesterday (19) — Day 37 of Phase 3 of the excavation at the Chemmani mass grave — was found buried in a sitting position: legs folded, arms resting on the lap, body oriented toward the northeast. This is the second such discovery. An identical posture was found in the 227th skeleton during Phase 2 in 2025. None of these findings became news for any of the established media stations in the South.
Someone buried this person with deliberate, specific orientation. That detail is a wound that refuses to close.
Chemmani-Sittupatti is now Sri Lanka’s largest mass grave — over 400 skeletal remains, including 18 children, six of them infants. Excavations began only because construction workers accidentally struck bones while digging a crematorium foundation in February 2025. The dead literally surfaced from beneath the earth.
The graves trace back to 1995–96, when the Sri Lankan army retook Jaffna. An army corporal convicted for the rape and murder of Tamil schoolgirl Krishanthi Kumaraswamy confessed in court in 1998: hundreds of Tamil civilians — “suspects,” abductees, the disappeared — were executed and secretly buried here on the orders of senior military officers. Warrants were eventually issued for seven military personnel. All were released on bail. By 2004, the entire case was quietly interred.
For nearly three decades, successive governments — UNP, PA, SLFP, UNP again, SLPP, and now the JVP/NPP which celebrated the 2009 military “victory” — have guaranteed one thing above all else: impunity for the killers.
Today the JVP Justice Minister visits the site (19 June), faces hundreds of protesters demanding truth and accountability, and walks past them to promise justice “within two years.” But the obscenity does not end there. After standing at Sri Lanka’s largest mass grave — over 400 skeletal remains, including the bones of infants — the minister, answering questions from people at a meeting held at the Jaffna Divisional Secretariat Office publicly cast doubt on whether Chemmani is even a mass grave at all, suggesting it may simply be a normal graveyard. He stated, “first of all, it is a cemetery, cause of death of bones should be inspected, and complaints are required before we can proceed with DNA identification”. This is not confusion. This is not ignorance. With 400 dead beneath the soil of a Hindu cremation ground, with six infants among them, with bodies buried in clusters at a depth of barely 1.6 feet, with a convicted army corporal’s sworn court testimony naming senior officers who ordered the killings — to call this a “normal graveyard” is the language of a cover-up. It is the language of impunity spoken in plain sight.
And it could not be more fitting that it comes from a minister of the JVP — the very party that spent the entire 26-year war waging a communalist campaign for military victory, that actively strengthened the hand of Rajapaksa whose forces committed the documented atrocities now being disinterred from this earth, and that celebrated the 2009 “triumph” despite the killing of 40,000 Tamil civilians. This is the same government that halted Phase 2 excavations for eight months by refusing to release funds, that maintains over 100,000 troops occupying the North and East, and that rejected the UN Human Rights Council’s call for an international war crimes investigation just last year. The minister’s doubt is not incidental — it is the government’s policy, expressed without shame.
And Chemmani is not alone. Mannar. Thiruketheeswaram. Kokkuthoduvai. Kalavanchikudy. The North and East are a landscape of unmarked graves.
No justice will come from this capitalist state — not under the JVP, not under the UNP, not under the SLFP, not under any formation of the Sinhala bourgeoisie whose entire political order was built on anti-Tamil communalism. Nor will justice come from Tamil nationalist parties that appeal to the same “international community” — Washington, London, Brussels — that armed, trained, funded and politically backed the Sri Lankan military throughout the war, then looked away as 40,000 died in the Vanni in 2009. These same imperialist powers are today backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
And let there be no illusion: justice is equally owed for the crimes of the LTTE and its breakaway factions — the forced recruitment of child soldiers, the assassination of Tamil political opponents, the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from the north, the bombings of Sinhala civilians. Those crimes too will never be honestly reckoned with under a capitalist order in which the Tamil bourgeoisie has its own interest in suppressing any genuinely independent working-class accounting of the war.
The sitting skeleton, legs folded, arms at rest, facing northeast — buried in haste by soldiers following orders, covered up for thirty years by generals protected by presidents — is a testament to what capitalism produces when it governs a multi-ethnic society divided against itself.
The buried will will not stay buried. But justice will not emerge from within this system.
It will come only when Tamil and Sinhala and Muslim workers unite — not behind any bourgeois party, not behind the imperialist “international community” — but in a common struggle to overthrow the capitalist order that made Chemmani possible, and to build a Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam.
Until then, the earth keeps speaking.
