Sri Lanka is fast turning out to be a Uganda of Idi Amin of Asia.
A mass grave was discovered by Archaeologists in Matale,Sri Lanka.
The problem is not the killing per se; it is de facto.
But the victims?
It is estimated that the remains are 25 years old.
It could be the result of the standoff between JVP and The Government, LTTE and Government, or The Marxists or innocent Tamils.
Over 200 bodies were found at the last count
As fate would have it ,that another activist who played the role of the ombudsman to the grieving parents, whose offspring had been snatched away by the State military apparatus and deadly para- military groups’ is now the President of Sri Lanka. When Mahinda Rajapaksa went to Geneva, he attempted to smuggle, concealed in a false compartment of his suitcase, the gory pictures of headless corpse of State terrorism in 1989-90. He was stopped at the airport and the photographs were confiscated…:
Ceylon Today covered this extensively and has a Leader on this.
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On Sunday, the Judicial Medical Officer of Matale urged the family members of the disappeared youth of that era (1989-90) to come forward to identify the remains of the 154 nameless victims that had been buried at the site.
The general tendency at the conclusion of brutal and costly civil wars and insurgencies is to forget the past, ostensibly to look forward to a much better future. The common argument, which is put forward in defence of this practice – and against retributive justice – is that investigations into past brutalities blamed on the security apparatus would complicate the reconciliation process. In some of the highly polarized and unequal societies in Latin America, the wheels of justice turned exceedingly slowly. In places like Guatemala, where nearly 200,000 people were killed and 40,000 disappeared during the US- supported counter insurgency campaign against a populist and largely indigenous rebellion, the victims had to wait until 2012 to put ex-dictator Gen Ríos Mont on trial for monstrous atrocities he and his forces had committed.
However, in some better enlightened and relatively prosperous places in Latin America, such as Argentina, the process had been much faster, though it too had to overcome numerous hurdles, including uprisings in the barrack by soldiers and officer corps who were complicit in past atrocities.
Successive Sri Lankan Governments, including that of previously activist President Chandrika Kumaratunga, let past military atrocities be swept under the carpet, despite the fact that she herself led the campaign for the excavation of the suspected mass grave in Suriyakanda. That highly emotive campaign was the catalyst in Kumaratunga’s speedy rise to the Presidency of Sri Lanka.
However, barring a handful of cases, the majority of nearly 30,000 victims, who were documented as missing and disappeared by the Truth Commission instituted by President Kumaratunga’s administration did not receive justice. Their killers are roaming freely, and their ilk, momentarily resurface in white vans, which continue to haunt this country.
Sri Lanka has repeatedly shied away from instituting due legal mechanisms to punish the perpetrators of grave human rights violations, which characterized the nation along with its famed Ceylon tea during various phases of our history: 1971, 1983, 1988-89, and the three-decade-long Northern conflict.
The indifference of the political leadership towards the human rights violations of monstrous proportions and the lack of courage and political will to act decisively was instrumental in cementing a climate of impunity in the country.
http://www.ceylontoday.lk/52-28791-news-detail-make-a-decisive-move-on-mass-grave.html
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