Report accuses former President Rajapaksa of obstructing mass grave investigations

The document was drafted by various third sector groups. Of more than 550 bodies found from the massacres carried out by the military since the 1980s, only very few have been identified and returned to their families. An activist mother: 'The witnesses of those crimes are disappearing'.

Colombo (AsiaNews) - Former Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa is accused of tampering with police records to obstruct investigations into mass graves discovered in an area where he served as a military officer during a Marxist rebellion in 1989.

The charges are contained in a report entitled 'Mass Graves and Failed Exhumations' published by a number of activist groups: Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS), International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP), Centre for Human Rights and Development (CHRD) and Families of the Disappeared (FoD).

"Witnesses to crimes are gradually disappearing: 178 mothers of missing persons have already died in recent years. We protest and fight for justice, not knowing when we will get it," said Manuvel Uthayachandra, mother and president of Families of the Disappeared.

The paper highlights how successive Sri Lankan governments have interfered in the investigation of mass graves, pointing out that only 20 mass graves have been partially exhumed in the last 30 years and of over 550 bodies found almost none have been identified.

"None of Sri Lanka's numerous commissions of enquiry have been mandated to examine the mass graves, while efforts to uncover the truth have been hampered," says the paper, which focuses on the failure of investigations in Matale district in central Sri Lanka and Mannar town, located in Northern Province, where a mass grave was discovered in 2018.

Magistrates and forensic experts were suddenly relocated, police delayed the execution of court orders, lawyers of the families were denied access to sites, no effort was made to find living witnesses, no ante mortem data was collected, and in the very rare cases where someone was convicted, they were later pardoned,' it goes on to say.

"For the families of the disappeared, it is a story of unresolved tragedy; family members are forced to live and die without ever finding their loved ones."

According to the report, when the mass graves in Matale were discovered in 2013, Rajapaksa, then a defence official, ordered the destruction of all police records older than five years at police stations in the region.

It is suspected that the mass graves date back to the period of the communist rebellion against the Sri Lankan government, fought between 1987 and 1989. Rajapaksa, as a military officer, was involved in operations against the rebels.

Later elected president in 2019, he was forced to step down in 2022 due to violent protests by citizens during the worst economic crisis in the country's history.

Brito Fernando, of Families of the Disappeared, explained that after three decades and 20 exhumation attempts, only a handful of bodies have been identified and returned to their families. 'We all know that tens of thousands of bodies lie in shallow graves across the island, so we cannot describe the lack of progress as bad luck: it is a clear lack of political will,' he added.

These words are echoed by K.S Ratnavale, executive director of the Centre for Human Rights and Development, who said in a press release: 'The Attorney General's Department regards these mass grave investigations as part of normal criminal proceedings and is hostile to the families of the victims. This has been evident in the Mannar mass grave investigations'.