Past is over, but where's the future?

More than 15 years after the civil war, THE WEEK reports from the site of a mass grave in Jaffna, where more skeletons are being found. A lot of the youth in the area, though, would rather focus on stable internet and better jobs

- LAKSHMI SUBRAMANIAN/JAFFNA

As shovel hit bone, ghosts of the past awakened.

This February, labourers brought in to start work on a cemetery in Jaffna's Chemmani area dug up what appeared to be human bones. Alongside skeletons, they also found school bags, toys and, as per one report, even a baby bottle.

The site was near a civil war-era mass grave, one of the largest on the island, but the locals did not expect more remains. This site is 250m from the place the bodies were found years ago.

In 1998, Sri Lankan soldier Somaratne Rajapakse, on trial for rape and murder of schoolgirl Krishanti Kumaraswamy, had claimed that bodies of hundreds of Tamils killed by the military were secretly buried at Chemmani. The first excavation began, uncovering 15 bodies, and the then government declared the digging complete.

But it seems dead men do tell tales. By September 1, when President Anura Dissanayake visited, 200 skeletons had been dug up. “The third segment of the second phase of excavations is going on now,” said lawyer V.S. Niranchan, one of the members supervising the excavation.

This was in late August, when THE WEEK visited the site. The huge iron gates were locked from inside, three army men stood guard, and men and women in protective gear sat next to a huge pit. “With today's recovery,” said Niranchan, “excavations carried out over 48 days have brought to light 191 fully exhumed sets of skeletal remains.”

The findings offer some degree of closure to the families of those who went missing during the conflict.

The Sri Lankan civil war, between the Sinhalese-dominated government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, lasted more than 25 years and reportedly claimed close to one lakh lives. Said Lawyer Ranitha Gnanarajah, who works with more than 600 Tamils looking for their lost kin: “The scanned area is three times larger than the site that has been excavated. Many Tamils were displaced in 1995 from Jaffna.”