Editorial - What Sri Lanka can admit

Twenty years ago this week, seventeen aid workers were found executed at their office in Muttur. Sixteen were Tamil, one was Muslim, and all worked for the French humanitarian organisation Action contre la Faim, having stayed behind in a town consumed by fighting to serve families displaced by war and still recovering from the tsunami. Fifteen lay face down in the compound, shot at point-blank range through the head and neck. Two more, who appear to have tried to flee, were found in a vehicle nearby. Two decades on, not a single person has been charged. 

The presidential commission of inquiry appointed amid international outcry collapsed into farce, its panel of international observers withdrawing after concluding the process could not meet minimum standards. Action contre la Faim eventually left the island altogether, declaring the domestic investigations incapable of ever identifying those responsible and calling for an international inquiry. This year, ahead of the anniversary, the organisation wrote to the Sri Lankan government once more, asking it to open an investigation and end twenty years of impunity. It has received no response. The testimonies of the victims families, published for the first time to mark the anniversary, had to be released anonymously. Twenty years later, on an island the government insists has moved on, the relatives of murdered aid workers still fear reprisals for speaking.

Four days before the anniversary, Sri Lankas courts demonstrated what its justice system is capable of. A special three-judge High Court, hearing the states own appeal against earlier acquittals, convicted the former police chief and the former defence secretary over their failure to prevent the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, and sentenced both men to death. The former head of the State Intelligence Service sits in detention over allegations connected to the same attacks. Gotabaya Rajapaksa has been barred from leaving the country by a magistrate. The cases are moving through a fast-track bench appointed for the purpose, at a pace Sri Lankan justice rarely achieves in any other cause.

The question the two stories pose, sitting side by side in a single week, is why the machinery runs in one case and rusts in the other. The answer is not capacity. The state that reversed acquittals and condemned its own former police chief plainly knows how to prosecute powerful men. Nor is it evidence. The Muttur killers were identified within months, by name and by unit, in findings no credible observer has disputed, while the Easter negligence cases turned on intelligence files the state itself held. What separates the two cases is what each prosecution asks the Sinhala nation to accept and shakes at the foundations of the island’s brutal ethnic conflict.

The Easter prosecutions ask very little. A conviction has taken hold across the south, voiced from the Cardinals pulpit and aired in whistleblower testimony on British television, that the attacks were orchestrated or permitted by figures within the political establishment, with fingers pointed at those around the Rajapaksas and the path the bombings cleared for Gotabayas election. For the NPP, which rose to power against that entire establishment, the prosecutions are a reckoning with a political class it regards as its opposition. The old security apparatus, the intelligence chiefs, the former presidents and ministers now facing corruption charges, Ranil Wickremesinghe among them. And nothing in this offends the Sinhala national story. A corrupt elite betrayed the nation, allowed its citizens to be slaughtered, and must now answer. Figures within the state contributed to the deaths of civilians, and the state can admit it, because the admission indicts only men the public has already condemned. Each verdict lands as proof of the NPP’s promised reckoning with the old order.

Muttur asks something else entirely. Nobody doubts those aid workers were killed, or seriously disputes who killed them. But to account for it would be to place Sri Lankan soldiers in the dock for the deliberate execution of Tamils. That admission has no home within the tale that the Sinhala polity has told itself for decades. In that story the military is the saviour of the nation, the war was a humanitarian rescue, and whatever happened to Tamils along the way belongs to the excesses of their just cause. As one relative of a murdered aid worker said this week, his sister was targeted “because she was a Tamil humanitarian worker whose life could be erased without consequences”. They belonged “to an identity that can be eliminated without accountability”.

To put their killers on trial would not settle political scores within the establishment, but would put the Sinhala Buddhist narrative itself in the dock. And no Sri Lankan government, of any party or promised new era, has ever been willing to do that. The seventeen of Muttur are unavenged not because the state cannot prosecute its own, but because their case demands an admission the Sri Lankan state will never be prepared to make - regardless of who heads it.

This is the trap that must be named plainly, because the international community persists in pretending it does not exist. Every UN resolution that defers to domestic processes, or communiqué urging Colombo to investigate itself, assumes that Sri Lankan justice is a neutral instrument awaiting activation. It is nothing of the sort. It operates within the boundaries of what the Sinhala polity can accept. The crimes committed against Tamils, at Muttur and across the decades of atrocities that surround it, lie beyond them. Amnesty International warned this week that the twentieth anniversary must not become "another milestone marked only by remembrance". It will become exactly that unless the cases go beyond Colombo’s reach.