Monitoring Mass Grave Excavations
Photo courtesy of Asanka Abeyrathna
The Colombo Port is an economic hub of Sri Lanka. In this densely populated area, a group of people are digging a pit during the day; it is not a gem pit or an oil well but a grave containing remnants of people who were victims hidden from the law and their relatives.
This was not a discovery but emerged randomly like the bone fragments found at the Matale hospital premises in 2012 where 154 bone fragments were investigated. There have been other such finds such as the mass grave that emerged when workers were digging a drain to lay water pipes at Kokkuthoduvai in the Mullaitivu District in July 2023 where 50 skeletons were unearthed and are under investigation.
At the port, workers using a backhoe to dig holes to install a concrete pillar for a new highway came across human bones about six feet underground. According to a worker at the site, “Only a part of a leg was discovered at first but later full skeletons were found buried deeper. These bodies were stacked at all angles and it was difficult to bring them to the surface. A large number of teeth, legs, fingers and pieces of ceramic plates were also scattered around.”
Construction was halted and the Additional Magistrate of Colombo, I.M.S. Bandara Illangasinghe, inspected the site and gave instructions to start excavating it. A team of archaeologists led by Professor Raj Somadeva began excavation work from September 5.
First we must define what is meant by a mass grave but there is no clear, global definition with no number as to what constitutes a mass grave. However there are different accepted theories, such as if two or more bodies are buried in the same grave or if the bodies are unaccounted for. But we shouldn’t take only the numbers into consideration. The ethics of traditional burial have to be considered. Bodies just dumped together is a violation of religious and traditional beliefs. No death certificate, no last rites by relatives, no coffins or clothes to cover them is not acceptable for any human being who has faced death. This method is used when there is a reason to hide the corpses from the law and from relatives as is evident in every mass grave discovered so far.
It is important to find the exact time period in which the bodies were buried through forensic investigations of the remains, which will confirm if damage was done to the bones by bullets or sharp objects. Investigations also need to be conducted on hard objects found near the bodies, the geometrical shapes of each bone and identifying them according to body contours. Similar discoveries in the past have led to the belief that they were the remains of forcibly disappeared victims because most skeletons were minus heads, arms, legs and other body parts. Although about 22 mass graves have been discovered in Sri Lanka, no proper identification has been carried out due to lack of carbon testing facilities.
Investigations on the mass graves discovered in the past years were not able to determine the time frame. For example, the two decisions given regarding the time period and the circumstances of the Matale mass grave were contradictory. Injuries were caused by blunt and sharp objects; severed limbs, iron hand cuffs and iron nails used to penetrate bones were found in the graves. Along with this evidence, social traditions found by the forensic archeology team indicated that the mass grave was from 1986-1989. But according to the carbon test report of a laboratory in the US, the bodies were of people who had died from the plague before 1945 but there are no such records at the Matale Hospital.
Close to the gravesite is the Matale Rest House, which is believed to have been a torture camp. “Bodies of tortured people minus limbs were bundled into gunny bags and taken to the Matale Hospital. The rest house was the torture camp. When I went there one day I recognised the man who was the executioner. I asked about the past incidents. He replied, ‘We were misled. Because they wanted to involve me in this, they killed my family and put the blame on the JVP so I hated the JVP and wanted to take revenge. It was much later that I found out that these massacres were carried out by the army,’” said a victim who had escaped from the Matale Rest House torture camp.
The building that is now the Port Museum was a torture camp in the colonial era. A temporary naval base was built there several years after independence. Part of a concrete wall and a water pipe were constructed so it is important to find the time period of the construction and whether bone remnants were found during these constructions and if so why they were not reported.
When information of the Port City mass grave was made public, a representative of the Families of the Disappeared (FoD) was there to inspect the excavation. The Office on Missing Persons has a legal responsibility to investigate proceedings of the excavation and their officials are conducting and coordinating investigations.
In 2012 FoD was allowed to visit the Matale site but not permitted to observe the excavations. It was the same in 2023 to 2024 at Kokkuthoduvai mass grave site where even the families in the North were not allowed to observe. The FoD stand for the rights of the victim families to observe the excavations whether in the North or South.
