By Rajan Philips –

Rajan Philips

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake made yet another visit to Jaffna last week. With all good intentions, he may be on course to set a record for visiting Jaffna more times than all his predecessors combined. There is no Lyn Ludowyk among us to make a political satire of presidents going to Jaffna, reversing the time honoured old trope he wrote as a play – “He Comes from Jaffna!”

The President’s visit was primarily to launch development projects in the peninsula. There was the launching of the 3^rd Phase of Myliddy Fisheries Harbour. Following that the President opened a new Jaffna Regional Office of the central Department of Immigration and Emigration at the Jaffna District Secretariat. He visited the storied Jaffna Public Library to inaugurate its E-Library Programme. The President’s work was not done yet. He found time to lay the foundation stone for the Jaffna International Cricket Stadium to be located at the islet of Mandaitivu. He even made an unannounced visit to Katchatheevu to assert Sri Lanka’s maritime sovereignty.

No Visit to Chemmani

If there was one omission on this crowded itinerary, it was the failure to visit the Chemmani site of mass graves. This was a lost opportunity in my humble view. The President and his entourage could have walked from the Secretariat to the cremation sites in Chemmani and nearby Ariyalai. The government has been taking a number of meaningful steps since the recent discovery of human skeletons at the two old sites of mass burial. A visit to the sites by the President would have conveyed a heartfelt demonstration of empathy and earnestness.   

If the President missed an opportunity to visit Chemmani while in Jaffna, no other government Minister would seem to have made the special effort to formally visit the site. At the same time, Justice Minister Harshana Nanayakkara has reportedly affirmed that the NPP government, whose progenitor JVP had suffered disappearances during its second uprising, is determined to uncover the buried crimes of the past. The government has also allocated LKR 11.7 million towards the Chemmani expenses and has assured that all expenses will be met without limit or exception. A presidential visit to the site would have been a capping confirmation of the government’s seemingly genuine intentions.

In a related development, the government has approved a special project to process complaints of missing persons by the end of 2027. Of the 16,966 complaints received by the Office on Missing Persons (OMP) since its inception in 2016, over 10,500 cases are reportedly pending investigation. To accelerate the process and bring answers to the affected families, the Ministry of Justice and National Integration is set to appoint 25 sub-committees of three members each, comprising retired judges, senior administrators, and lawyers. It will be the task of these sub-committees set up on a geographical basis, to expedite bringing closure and healing to what have been open wounds for many families throughout the island.

The 2016 law (Act No. 14) that created the OMP also provides for undertaking mass grave inquiries including funding, site investigations and the identification of victims. According to the OMP there are 14 mass grave sites in the country that are under investigation. As numbers go, earlier estimates by Amnesty International and the Asian Human Rights Commission indicate over 600 disappearances in the Jaffna peninsula during the 1995-1996 period, and over 16,000 disappearances in the south during the second JVP uprising.

While victims were buried in shallow pits in the north, victims in the south were allegedly burnt on tyre pyres. These victims were victims of State violence. There was no State violence without the violence of first the JVP and then the LTTE and its fellow Tamil discontents. The LTTE is now history and it is an irony of history that a progeny of the old JVP now runs the Executive Committee of the State. It, therefore, behoves the NPP government to make sure that the victims who were disappeared once, North and South, are not disappeared again.

Symbolism and Substance

Life goes on nonetheless even as we pause to pay homage to victims of a bloody past and find answers to assuage their long grieving survivors. Governments have many things going on at the same time and Sri Lanka’s NPP government is no different. While President AKD could be faulted for not visiting Chemmani, he should also be commended for leading the government’s Jaffna initiatives on fisheries, passports, E-books and of course cricket. Each one of these areas has connections to the troubled past and carries positive prospects for a reformed future.

Whether cricket could become the elixir for our ethnic maladies is better tested in practice than in theory. Forty years ago on 26 June 1985, then Principal of St. John’s College Jaffna, CE Anandarajan, was gunned down by the LTTE for allowing his school cricket team to play a friendly match against the army team in Jaffna. I knew Mr. Anandarajan, a brother in law of Silan Kadirgamar. He was the first Jaffna citizen that a visiting MIRJE (Movement for Inter-Racial Justice and Equality) delegation met in 1979 while on a fact finding mission after Jaffna was placed under Emergency Rule.

In what would become the security template for the future, six young men were spirited away from their homes at dead of night and were murdered. Two of them were brothers married to two sisters, one of them with a newborn and the other expecting a newborn. The MIRJE delegation visited the homes of all the victims and recorded its findings in Emergency ’79.  That was the first MIRJE publication which I wrote with contributions from Paul Caspersz and Upali Cooray.  I am the only one alive from that group of MIRJE delegates that included Paul Caspersz, Yohan Devananda, Jayaratne Malliyagoda, Kumar David, and journalist Gamini Dissanayake from the Lanka Guardian.

The end of the war and the privatisation of cricket would seem to have dissolved some of the ethnic rigidities at least on the playing fields. It is a sociological feat that in a country where cricket clubs were founded and managed along ethnic lines (to wit – the Tamil Union, the Sinhalese Sports Club, the Moors, Saracens and the Burgher Recreation Club, with the Nondescripts Cricket Club being the exception with NM Perera characteristically being one of its founders), cricket is now played as a franchise with teams displaying vibrant ethnic mixes instead of the old and stale ethnic homogeneity. The story of the Jaffna Kings, formerly Jaffna Stallions, is Exhibit A for this metamorphosis.

Seen in this light, the President’s blessing and the government’s support for a new cricket stadium in Mandaitivu is a welcome development. There would be significant spinoff benefits for the area in infrastructure and business opportunities for tourism and recreation. One would only hope that the government ensures that all environmental and engineering considerations are properly identified and addressed. The island is one of the smaller islets off the peninsula, and is low lying and flood prone. It should not be overburdened with excessive construction and the conveniently common recourse to using septic tanks should be avoided at all cost.    

From cricket to fisheries, the President and his government should know that before the ravages of war, the village of Myliddy was a vibrant fishing centre on the northern coast of Jaffna. Its hauls were rich and plenty to load daily convoys of lorries carrying fish to markets in Colombo. The curse of war and its proximity to Palali placed the village in the government security zone in the 1990s. With that, fishing stopped in Myliddy, life shut down and the people evacuated the village.

For 27 years the village was a dead zone and it was formally returned to the people on May 3^rd, 2017. During the intervening years, the people of Myliddy were placed in camps for the ‘internally displaced’ located within the City of Jaffna. Toddlers spent their entire growing years in these camps, and their fathers forced away from the sea and their traditional livelihood were forced to learn carpentry and masonry to work for their income.

Pual Caspersz, Kumar David, Marshal Fernando, Vijaya Kumar and yours truly visited one such camp during the 2002 ceasefire, when we reenacted our 1979 MIRJE visit to Jaffna. We also learnt that it was their absence from the sea that created the vacuum that was promptly filled by bottom trawling boats from Tamil Nadu, and not without some help from the Sri Lankan Navy. Territorial fishing rights have now become a full blown bilateral issue between India and Sri Lanka.

The President’s visit to Katchatheevu dramatizes the issue but is not enough to resolve it. At the same time, the new harbour in Myliddy hopefully would benefit a new generation of its to return to the trade of their forefathers augmented by new technology, facilities and the prospect of export markets.

If I am not mistaken, President AKD is the first Sri Lankan Head of State to visit the Jaffna Public Library. I believe then British Prime Minister David Cameron posed for a picture from the balcony of the library during his visit to attend a Commonwealth Conference in Sri Lanka, but I haven’t seen any pictures showing Sri Lankan leaders at the Jaffna Library. Politics can be as much about symbols as it ought to be about substance, and the symbolism of President AKD’s visit to Jaffna Public Library that was burnt down by the security forces in 1981 would seem to have gone unnoticed in 2025. May be the return of Chemmani has taken the political oxygen out of all the other troubling memories.

The government will also have its work cut out for this year’s pilgrimage to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. Thanks to Donald Trump and Netanyahu, the United Nations has been shut out of Gaza as it is mercilessly razed to the ground with the world watching. But there is no end in sight for the UNHRC’s engagement with Sri Lanka over the aftermaths of the war that ended in 2009. It is logical and even legitimate to ask why selectively pick on Sri Lanka. It is equally possible to see this nagging engagement in Geneva as an opportunity to exorcise Sri Lanka’s haunting ghosts at home, once and for all.

The government seems to be taking a balanced approach that equally avoids the empty human rights rhetoric of Ranil Wickremesinghe and the pseudo patriotism of the Rajapaksa brothers. The government has reportedly briefed the UNHRC and the Colombo Diplomatic Community on what it has been doing over the last 11 months in office, and has asked for time and space in taking the next steps to address outstanding issues.

Remarkably, it is not only the UNHRC that the government is constrained to engage with. It is also compelled to pay attention to many critical voices at home emanating from all sections of Sri Lanka’s ethnic landscape. Unlike Ranil Wickremesinghe who superciliously ignored criticisms and the Rajapaksas who brusquely stifled them, the NPP government seems to be both encouraging and engaging with civil society voices on human rights matters. There is still a long way to go, but the government has come a long way already from where its predecessors left us as recently as an year ago, last September.