Sri Lanka’s New Mass Grave Reveals the Failure of ‘Peace’ Through Violence
Remains of Civilians and Victims of Extrajudicial Killings Found Near Jaffna
June 10, 2025
The discovery of a new mass grave in Sri Lanka has once again exposed a truth many have long chosen to ignore—when a government uses violence in the name of peace, it does not stop with those initially targeted. It normalises a dangerous value. That value shapes the system, and in time, becomes the state’s default method of control. Eventually, it turns against everyone.
According to Sri Lankan media reports, excavations at the Sindhubath Hindu cremation grounds in Chemmani village, near Jaffna city in northern Sri Lanka, unearthed the remains of 19 individuals, including a child. On June 8, the Jaffna Magistrate’s Court formally recognised the site as a mass grave.
The remains recovered so far are believed to represent only a small portion of the estimated 400 Tamil civilians allegedly killed and buried during the Sri Lankan military’s reoccupation of Jaffna between 1995 and 1996. Separately, the United Nations has estimated that up to 40,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the final months of the civil war in 2009, during the Sri Lankan government’s military offensive against the Tamil Tiger rebels in the country’s north and east.
In 1998, a soldier named Somaratne Rajapakse, while on trial for a separate case involving the rape and murder of an 18-year-old Tamil student, testified that hundreds of civilians had been summarily executed and buried at the Chemmani site. He named more than 20 army officers. The following year, international forensic teams supervised excavations that recovered 16 bodies. Two were identified as people who had disappeared in 1996.
The Sri Lankan government responded not with further investigation, but with dismissal. The accused soldiers were granted bail. The soldier’s family received threats. Amnesty International warned that his testimony had exposed the government’s discomfort with truth. The case was shelved. And for more than two decades, Chemmani remained untouched.
About two weeks before Chemmani was formally declared a mass grave, former President Mahinda Rajapaksa—under whose presidency the final stages of the civil war took place and who has been accused of war crimes—said the war was fought to establish peace and preserve national unity, not to oppress or capture anyone, as reported by Daily News. He made these remarks during the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna’s (SLPP) War Heroes’ Day event held on May 20 near the War Memorial in Battaramulla. The event was also attended by former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who served as Defence Secretary during the war.
The killings around Chemmani took place at a time when state violence against Tamil civilians was systematic. Yet the majority of the country—particularly sections of the Sinhalese population—either denied the evidence, ignored the victims, or accepted the state’s narrative that such measures were unfortunate but necessary to restore order.
Thirteen years later, in 2022, Sri Lanka plunged into an unprecedented political crisis, triggered by an economic collapse and a mass uprising known as Aragalaya (struggle). This time, the Sinhalese majority also came under pressure from the same repressive state they had once supported. With no fuel, no medicines, no savings and no faith left in their leaders, they took to the streets demanding accountability—only to be met with the same state force that had long been used against Tamils and Muslims.
Tear gas and batons were now turned on the very people who had once accepted the government’s claim that peace could be achieved through lawless military action. The Rajapaksa government, long seen as a guardian of Sinhalese-Buddhist interests, fell in disgrace. But the damage had already been done, not just to institutions, but to the very idea of what peace ought to mean.
To this day, there are no national memorials for the victims. Instead, triumphalist military monuments, many of them built in Tamil-majority areas, celebrate a victory in a war whose collateral damage amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
What happened in Chemmani, and in other parts of the north and east, must be understood as part of a longer pattern. After independence in 1948, Sinhalese political leaders tapped into legitimate grievances over colonial imbalances, where Tamils had benefited from English-language education and civil service access. But this energy was quickly redirected into exclusionary politics.
The Sinhala Only Act of 1956 codified linguistic discrimination. The anti-Tamil riots of 1983, in which state-backed mobs killed and displaced thousands, revealed how deeply this project had taken root. Tamil political demands were ignored. When young Tamils took up arms under the LTTE banner, the state responded with full-scale militarisation.
The danger is not only that such violence occurred, but that it was applauded. For years, the state claimed it was necessary to act with force to eliminate the LTTE, and by extension any Tamil political challenge. Many in the Sinhalese majority supported this strategy, persuaded that national peace required absolute control.
But when the same government later governed with impunity, drained the economy, and crushed dissent from within the majority itself, it became clear that the violence once seen as targeted was never meant to stay contained. The tools forged in war—emergency laws, surveillance, unchecked military power—were now deployed against citizens who had once been convinced they would never be the target.
There is no lasting peace without justice.
The Chemmani mass grave reveal the structure of impunity that allowed it. The state was not held accountable, the military officers were not prosecuted and the public was not asked to confront what had been done in their name.
The lesson for Sri Lanka—and for any society tempted to tolerate violence under the pretext of security—is that political violence sanctioned by the public is not an instrument, it is a disease. It corrodes democratic accountability. It rewrites civic values. It creates a state that answers not to law, but to fear.
When majorities agree to let governments brutalise others, they give up their right to expect protection in the future. They make themselves vulnerable to the same tactics they once dismissed as necessary. The silence of the majority does not shield them. It only guarantees that the line between enemy and citizen will keep shifting—until it includes them too.
The bones now being recovered are an indictment not just of a military operation, but of a national failure to say no when it still mattered. Peace through violence is not peace. It is a temporary silence—held in place by fear, broken only when the fear becomes unbearable.
The question now is whether Sri Lanka, having unearthed the past once more, will finally reckon with the politics that made Chemmani possible, or look away again until the ground opens further. People in other countries face the same question.
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