> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Chemmani Blunder - URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/the-chemmani-blunder/ - Published: 2026-10-24T15:30:30.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-24T17:00:41.000Z - Author: Aruliniyan Mahalingam - Tags: JM Exclusive, Editorial, October 2026 ***Tamil Nationalists Turned a Cemetery Into a Genocide Story. The Families of the Disappeared May Pay for It.*** The archaeologists’ interim report on the Chemmani excavation reached the Jaffna Magistrate’s Court this week. It counts the remains of at least 574 people taken from the Sinthupathi Hindu cemetery, and nearly two-thirds of them were infants and children. Its authors, Professor Raj Somadeva and Anusha Wanninayake, say the site looks more like a place of formal burial than the clandestine graves documented elsewhere in the world. They also say the evidence so far is not enough for a firm conclusion. That leaves the Tamil politicians who made this trench a symbol of genocide with three problems, all of them self-inflicted. The excavation they championed sits in a cemetery, a few metres from its cremation platform, on ground where Jaffna families have buried their dead for generations. Most of the dead are children, while the people who disappeared in Jaffna were mostly young men. And when the archaeology refused to confirm what they had already announced, they ignored it and went hunting for a conspiracy. For more than a year, political parties, nationalist lawyers, sections of civil society and the loudest part of the diaspora told the world the trench held victims of wartime atrocity. Some called it genocide. They said so before anyone knew who was buried there, when they died or how. When the report did not deliver the verdict they had promised, they had an explanation ready: the government had hired two Sinhala academics to deceive the Tamil people. At a press conference on Friday, Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, leader of the Tamil National People’s Front, described Professor Somadeva as a Sinhala nationalist with a political agenda and said he should not be allowed to lead the excavation. ## **A cemetery full of graves** Sinthupathi has been a Hindu cemetery for generations. In northern Sri Lanka, Hindus traditionally cremate their adult dead and bury young children, usually those under five, and some families bury children up to the age of ten. Customs vary from family to family and community to community, and not every adult is cremated. The Pandaram caste and followers of the Veerasaiva sect still bury their dead. A cemetery used this way for decades fills up with graves, many of them small. The dead go into the ground with something of their own: beads, anklets, amulets and coins, a feeding bottle for an infant, toys and shoes for a toddler. The Sinthupathi trench has turned up all of these. They were the very objects held up to the public as evidence of an atrocity. The report describes ground that was in use for a long time. Newer graves cut through older ones. Later gravediggers left 51 heaps of loose bone, some mixed with nails and iron fittings that the archaeologists take to be the remains of coffins. Most undisturbed skeletons lie straight, with hands folded over the abdomen or resting at the sides. The oldest dated object found with a body is a coin minted in 1870\. An ash layer, left behind when an older cremation area was cleared, held coins dated from 1920 to 1994\. The report also notes rubbish pits, a buried cow and hospital waste strewn across the surface. Tamil nationalists have an answer to all this. No one remembers a burial at Sinthupathi after 1995, they say, so the bodies must belong to the disappeared, killed and buried there after the army took Jaffna. It did not occur to them to ask who was buried there before 1995. One elderly man I spoke with remembers going to a funeral at Sinthupathi in the 1960s, when a friend of his was buried there. Jaffna also had its share of epidemics, with cholera, smallpox and influenza sweeping the peninsula again and again. Outbreaks like those kill infants and young children in the greatest numbers. The most famous find is a girl the judicial medical officer told the court was four or five years old. She came out of the ground last year with a small blue schoolbag printed with the alphabet and a shoe with a cartoon bear on it. Tamil parties showed photographs of that bag to families of the disappeared, to United Nations officials and to visiting ambassadors as proof that the state had killed children and buried them in secret. In the report, she is Skeleton 25\. She was buried with her bag, her shoes and socks, pieces of cloth and an anklet. The small nails found around her may be all that is left of her coffin. Some findings do not fit an ordinary cemetery, and they deserve a straight answer. One skeleton was reported last year to have been found seated, with its hands bound, a fractured skull and a shattered jaw. Another, found in August, was headless, with both hands reported bound. The Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka found that more than 90 percent of the remains had no clothing, and said there was a reasonable likelihood of extrajudicial killings. A cemetery can hide a murder as easily as it holds a natural death. These cases need forensic examination, and the interim report does not address them. ## **The children** The report puts 41 percent of the dead in its child category and 22 percent among infants, about 360 people in all. Several medical sources familiar with the remains confirmed that profile to Jaffna Monitor. The people who disappeared in Jaffna were overwhelmingly young men. Amnesty International recorded hundreds of cases after the army retook the peninsula in 1995 and 1996\. A government Board of Investigation examined 2,621 complaints and, according to figures later cited by Human Rights Watch, concluded that 378 people disappeared in Jaffna in 1996\. Human Rights Watch also reported that most victims of disappearance in Sri Lanka were young Tamil men. Of those documented by the Law and Society Trust, 60 percent were 30 or younger. Tamil children suffered terribly in the war. Shelling and aerial bombing killed many of them, infants included, and left others wounded, orphaned or homeless. Some disappeared with their parents. In May 2009, several LTTE officials who surrendered to the army at Vadduvakal reportedly vanished along with their children. Javan, head of the Voice of Tigers radio, was taken with his teenage daughter. Baby Subramaniam, who ran the LTTE’s education wing, was taken with his young daughter, Arivumathi. Ilamparithi, the movement’s political head in Jaffna, was taken with his two children. Those cases happened in 2009, in Mullaitivu, on a different scale and under different circumstances. Nothing in the record of 1995 and 1996 suggests the army abducted hundreds of infants and small children and buried them at Sinthupathi. No one has seriously claimed it did. ## **A kilometre away** Chemmani entered Tamil memory through a crime proved in court. In September 1996, soldiers detained Krishanthi Kumaraswamy, an 18-year-old schoolgirl, and killed her along with her mother, her brother and a family friend who went looking for her. After his conviction in 1998, one of the soldiers, Somaratne Rajapakse, said 300 to 400 more bodies were buried at Chemmani. He said he and his co-accused could point out 16 burial sites. Investigators dug where they pointed in 1999 and recovered 15 bodies, some bearing signs of assault and murder. Two were identified as young men who had disappeared in 1996\. One had his hands tied with rope. The other was blindfolded. Then the search stopped. Those sites lay near the army camp of the day, at least a kilometre from the present trench. The two places share a village name, and over the years public memory has merged them into a single grave. No Tamil party has tried to untangle them. None has demanded a full excavation near the old camp, where the evidence of 1996 is most likely to lie. Senior medical officials with direct knowledge of the examination of the remains told Jaffna Monitor that they did not believe the Sinthupathi trench was a place where murdered people had been buried. Based on their medical experience, they said, the graves looked like proper burials. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is before the court. Their formal findings have not yet been submitted. One of them put it bluntly months before the archaeological report came out. “We are bloody digging a cemetery, machan,” the official said. The officials said they dreaded the day the archaeological and forensic findings and the carbon dating become public, along with any international examination the government might later order. “It will make Tamil advocacy a joke, machan,” one of them said. Months before the report came out, curious about why he seemed so sure, I had asked him. “What would you expect when you dig up a known public cemetery and make so much noise about it?” he replied. Others close to the excavation were saying the same thing privately at the time. None would say it in public. In Jaffna, a Tamil who says such things risks being called a traitor. ## **Distinguished visitors** The trench has had distinguished visitors. In June 2025, Volker Türk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, came to Sinthupathi during his visit to Sri Lanka and called for a transparent investigation by independent forensic experts. In July this year, a European Union delegation, including the ambassadors of Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands, toured the excavation. Tamil parties and activists used both visits to present the site as evidence of wartime killings. Another official involved in the work said those visits would come back to haunt Tamil advocacy. Once the reports are released, the official said, the trips by the U.N. human rights chief and the European ambassadors will make Tamils a laughing stock. A Jaffna political observer who has followed the case closely said the damage would go well beyond embarrassment. He asked not to be named. A Tamil who questions the Chemmani campaign in public, he said, is quickly branded a traitor. Diplomats who stand at a grave site, he said, carry what they were told back to their capitals and into briefings, statements and U.N. reports. If the science shows that Sinthupathi is largely a cemetery, the officials who were brought there will remember it the next time a Tamil group asks them to look at a grave. So will the Sri Lankan government. In his view, Colombo can now point to Sinthupathi and Mannar, in Geneva and elsewhere, to argue that Tamil allegations of mass killing are exaggerated and to fend off outside scrutiny of sites where the evidence is stronger. The joke the medical officials feared has already begun. This week, young people on Sinhala social media with no history of racist politics have been mocking the Tamil claims. They are the very people Tamils most need to persuade about 1996. Mannar went through the same cycle. In 2018, more than 300 skeletons were dug out of a pit at the Sathosa site, and Tamil nationalists declared it a wartime grave. Radiocarbon tests on selected samples returned dates between 1499 and 1719\. The results were disputed, but the dispute did nothing for the Tamil case, and Mannar has been cited against Tamil mass grave claims ever since. ## **Finding a conspiracy** When the report came out, Tamil politics went after its author. Professor Somadeva has been called a Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist, an accusation that answers nothing in his findings. Consider what he actually did. He excavated a trench where nearly two-thirds of the dead were infants and children. Epidemics kill children in far greater numbers than adults, and Jaffna has had plenty of them, so he listed an epidemic among the possible explanations. He named it as a possibility, and he said himself that the evidence was not enough to decide. Any archaeologist would have raised the same question. For this, he is a Sinhala nationalist. In June 2025, when he said his first interim report had identified the site as a mass grave, Tamil activists quoted him widely. He was the same man then, with the same background. Archaeologists I consulted said a Tamil archaeologist working the same trench would have reached the same findings. Given Sri Lanka’s record on wartime investigations, victims are right to demand independent scrutiny. But critics who see inconsistencies should name them, and those who believe evidence was left out should produce it. Few of the critics have done that. Most have attacked the man instead. Sri Lanka has very few trained forensic archaeologists, and as far as I can establish, none of them is a Tamil from the north or east. For decades, Tamil politics has demanded international investigations while investing almost nothing in forensic archaeology, anthropology, pathology, DNA analysis or the archival work those investigations depend on. Mr. Ponnambalam is now calling for an international investigation at Sinthupathi. He may get one. Sources in the ruling National People’s Power say the government is prepared to order it. “The government knows this is not a war-related mass grave, so why would it hesitate?” one of them told me. If foreign experts come and conclude that Sinthupathi is a cemetery full of proper burials, what will the Tamil nationalists say? I suspect they already have their answer. They will accuse the international experts of serving someone’s agenda, just as they accused Professor Somadeva. Then there is Dr. S. Pranavan, the judicial medical officer who leads the medical examination at Chemmani. He is a Tamil from Jaffna. His report has not yet been released. If it reaches the same conclusion as the archaeologists, what will they call him? Sinhala nationalist won’t work. A government stooge, perhaps, or simply a traitor. I am sure they have something ready. **What should be done** The first task is an authoritative record of who disappeared in Jaffna in 1995 and 1996, built from family testimony, human rights files, detention records and the earlier inquiries. The second is to reconstruct the original Chemmani investigation. Every site Rajapakse and his co-accused identified should be mapped against the military camps of the period, the 1999 excavations, and witness accounts. Each site that was never dug should then be excavated with international forensic support. The third is full forensic work at Sinthupathi: dating, trauma analysis and DNA comparison with families of the missing. That work should go alongside research into the cemetery’s own history through burial records, old maps and public health archives. If the science shows that Sinthupathi is largely unrelated to 1996, Tamil leaders should stand up and say so. They should not reach for another conspiracy theory, accuse the scientists of serving an agenda, or come up with new excuses. The energy they poured into a cemetery belongs in the search for the people who are still missing. Some of their families have waited more than thirty years to find out what happened to a son, a brother, or a husband.