Probe Matale mass grave

April 2, 2013, 7:48 pm

Having blown hot and cold on the Matale mass grave for weeks, the JVP has finally called for a probe even at the risk of opening up a can of worms for itself. On Monday, it reiterated its call, demanding that all those responsible for killing 154 people whose bones were found there be brought to justice. It claims that the victims were its activists tortured and killed during its second uprising in the late 1980s.

The JVP has asked President Mahinda Rajapaksa, a former human rights campaigner, who took up the cudgels for the victims of the then UNP government’s ruthless counter terror operations in the late 1980s to probe the mass grave and ensure that justice is done. JVP General Secretary Tilvin Silva has told the media that incumbent Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa served as the army’s commanding officer cum district coordinator in Matale during the JVP’s reign of terror with some officers who led the Vanni offensive from the front, under his command. The JVP is obviously trying to lay the blame for the mass grave at the doorstep of Gotabhaya et al. Its claim will surely be grist to the mill of the LTTE and its sympathisers on a campaign to have the Rajapaksas and Sri Lanka’s military commanders who destroyed the LTTE’s military muscle and Prabhakaran arraigned on war crimes charges and hauled up before an international war crimes tribunal. However, that does not mean that the mass grave should go unprobed. Now that a large number of human skeletons have been unearthed from it and a senior archeologist has said they date back to the 1986-1990 period, there must be a thorough investigation to get to the bottom of it.

More forensic experts need to be called in to assist in the probe and some more advanced scientific tests conducted to ascertain exactly when those whose remains lie in the grave died or were killed. If it could be established scientifically without any doubt that they were killed and buried during the JVP’s two-and-a-half-year-long second uprising then all army commanding officers who served in Matale during that period including Gotabhaya, who was there for six months, senior police officers in charge of that division and the then ruling party politicians in the area will have to be questioned. Besides, statements should be recorded from public officials like Grama Niladharis, District Medical Officer/s who ran the Matale hospital in the late 1980s and other hospital employees.

The existence of the Suriyakanda mass grave containing the remains of a group of schoolchildren killed during counter terror operations, in spite of being situated on a deserted mountain top, was known to some people, but, strangely, the Matale mass grave allegedly dug in the late 1980s had been sitting right next to a crowded government hospital all these years, unbeknownst to anyone until some construction workers chanced upon a few bones which led to the discovery thereof. Not even one hundred and fifty dogs or cats could have been killed and buried in that manner in so huge a grave, unnoticed by either hospital workers or the residents of the area.

The JVP or any other political party for that matter has a right to push for a probe into the Matale mass grave, but playing politics with the issue will only put paid to efforts to get at the truth. The fate that befell the much-hyped Batalanda investigation with which the Kumaratunga government tried to fix its bêtes noires is a case in point.

island.lk