Colombo: Former Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has been accused of tampering with police records to hamper investigations into mass graves discovered in an area where he was a military officer at the height of a bloody Marxist rebellion in 1989.
In a report, activist groups, including the International Truth and Justice Project, Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka and Families of the Disappeared said even though hundreds of remains were unearthed in about 20 exhumations of mass graves in the past three decades, no action has been taken to identify the victims and return their remains to their families.
Tens of thousands of remains could still be buried in undiscovered mass graves, the report said. None of the numerous commissions of inquiry established by successive governments was mandated to look into mass graves. Instead, efforts to uncover the truth were stymied, the report said.
When mass graves were discovered and investigations began, judges and forensic experts were transferred abruptly, families’ lawyers were denied access to sites, no effort was made to find living witnesses, no post-mortem data were collected and, in the very rare cases in which someone was convicted, they were later pardoned, it said.
“It is a story of a lack of political will – an inadequate legal framework, a lack of a coherent policy and of insufficient resources. For the families of the disappeared it is a story of unresolved tragedy; the bereaved are forced to live and die without ever finding their loved ones,” it said. Gotabaya's alleged role in the exhumations of mass graves was an example of political interference, it added.