The Spectacle of Mass Graves: Visual Necropolitics and the Rupture of Kinship
Photo courtesy of CHRD
“The body has always been political. It carries the weight of its history, its pain, and its trauma.”Anil’s Ghost
In Chemmani, on the outskirts of Jaffna, human remains continue to surface, unsettling a nation still grappling with its violent past. The Chemmani mass graves, first brought to public attention in the late 1990s, are believed to contain the bodies of hundreds of forcibly disappeared Tamil civilians – victims of extrajudicial killings during the military’s 1995-1996 occupation of the peninsula.
The revelation came from Lance Corporal Somaratne Rajapakse who testified that he personally helped bury hundreds of bodies in Chemmani. Court sanctioned excavations in 1999 unearthed fifteen skeletons, many blindfolded and bound. Yet, despite this evidence, successive governments minimized the scale and significance of the atrocity. In 2025, Chemmani returned to international headlines following the discovery of over 42 bodies during the construction of a crematorium. The excavation is continuing.
These discoveries are not isolated. They form part of a vast, island-wide archipelago of death: 155 bodies at Matale (2013), over 400 skeletal remains in Mannar (2013–2018) including 28 children and dozens more unearthed from Sooriyakanda to Mirusuvil. Hundreds of suspected mass graves dot the landscape yet only about 20 have been partially exhumed. Even when bodies are found, they remain unnamed, ungendered and ungrieved. Mass graves are not merely remnants of past violence; they are technologies of power in the present.
They are ongoing sites of visual necropolitics – a form of state power that governs life and death not only through violence but also through vision: what is seen, who may be seen and what remains invisible. Building on Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, the sovereign decision over who may live and who must die, visual necropolitics refers to the governance of death through visibility and erasure. As Nicholas Mirzoeff argues, visuality is not passive seeing but an active system that arranges power through perception. In Sri Lanka, the state constructs a visual order where Sinhala-Buddhist lives are hyper visible and mourned while Tamil and Muslim deaths are disappeared, denied or rendered natural. The invisibility of racialized and minoritized death is not a byproduct of war; it is part of the war’s architecture.
This architecture functions through intertwined mechanisms. First, the state produces anonymous death, transforming once known individuals into unknowable remains. Second, it ruptures kinship by withholding bodies and silencing familial mourning. Finally, it prevents the possibility of memorialization. These are not failures of procedure or justice; they are deliberate acts of disappearance. The logic of visual necropolitics in Sri Lanka has deep roots.
The Cemeteries and Burial Grounds Ordinance of 1899, a colonial era law still in force, granted the state legal authority over burial and death management. This law transformed the dead into state property, foreclosing familial claims. Later, Emergency Regulations and the Prevention of Terrorism Act intensified this control. Regulation 55FF, introduced in 1988, allowed security forces to dispose of bodies without inquests or autopsies. Legalized death without witness became a tool of unseeing, removing not only bodies but also the possibility of accountability.
What emerges is a state strategy that renders death both total and empty. Forensic ambiguity becomes a weapon. Reports are delayed; remains are left unexamined. In Mannar, where over 400 skeletons were discovered, the final forensic report due in 2019remained unsubmitted as of 2023. Chain of custody is routinely broken and ante-mortem data is left uncollected. In some cases, carbon dating is manipulated to suggest the remains are from “pre-political” periods. Magistrates and forensic personnel are shuffled in and out of cases in what locals call a transfer merry-go-round. In Mannar alone, seven magistrates cycled through the case. In Matale, one was transferred after ordering public notices. Even when visual identification is possible as in Chemmani, where two garage workers were identified by their clothes, bodies are not returned to their families. This refusal is not logistical; it is strategic. It withholds the possibility of grief, asserting the state’s necropolitical claim over the dead.
Yet the violence of mass graves exceeds even the disappearance of the individual. It extends into the intimate, relational and familial. The denial of remains is not only a refusal to recognize identity – it is a calculated rupture of kinship. Mass graves in Sri Lanka are not simply evidence of wartime atrocities. They are instruments for severing relational ties: mothers from children, wives from husbands and communities from collective memory. The dead are buried but so too is the social world they belonged to. The families of the disappeared are not just mourning lost lives; they are mourning the loss of the right to mourn.
This targeting of kinship is systematic. Families are routinely excluded from exhumation processes although international protocols such as the Minnesota Protocol require their consultation. In Sri Lanka, families often learn about new graves through newspaper reports. At Matale, the CID ignored court orders to issue public notices. In Mannar, lawyers were blocked from hearings and police failed to systematically interview relatives of the disappeared. These are not bureaucratic oversights; they are visual assaults on relationality. Tamil and Muslim cultures attach deep meaning to the burial of the dead and the performance of last rites. These acts are not only religious obligations; they are forms of kin-making across time. Denying them is an erasure not only of the body but also of the future the body represents.
Mothers like Manuvel Uthayachandra of the Mannar Families of the Enforced Disappeared articulate this rupture with chilling clarity: “If we also die, the evidence will also be erased.” Their grief is both individual and collective, mourning not just children but the possibility of transmitting memory itself. In this suspended state, neither allowed to mourn fully nor to forget, families live in a temporal limbo. The violence of disappearance is thus not only spatial but temporal. Time itself becomes unlivable. The state enforces a non-time where mourning is never complete, where justice never arrives and where grief is indefinitely deferred.
This collapse of time and kinship is not incidental. The nation-state is deeply invested in heteronormative futurity – the reproduction of life through the family. Mass graves shatter this logic. In Chemmani, the remains of infants have been exhumed: small bones stripped of name, lineage and belonging. These are not just the victims of war; they are the symbolic casualties of a state at war with kinship itself. Visual necropolitics, then, is not only about making death invisible. It is about making relation, reproduction and continuity impossible.
Sri Lanka is not exceptional in this. Across the globe, mass graves have been used to govern not just death but memory. In Argentina, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo hold vigil for the disappeared, still denied forensic clarity. In Bosnia, bodies from the Srebrenica genocide were scattered across secondary graves to evade identification. In Canada, the discovery of unmarked Indigenous graves revealed a different colonial necropolitics where the child’s body, the kinship line and the cultural future were all buried together.
What unites these cases is not only the disappearance of life but also the denial of grief. Visual necropolitics governs both the seen and the unseen, the dead and the living. Its most enduring violence is not only that it kills but also that it refuses to let the living mourn. In this refusal, it breaks time, severs relation and claims the dead as its own.
