Impunity buries the truth. Denial keeps it there.

Illustration by House of Thulasi

Her name was Kalai, which my mother later told me meant "talent" in Tamil. What I remember most are her eyes. She sat on the lap of an older girl who wore a simple shirt and a skirt with hair in a single braid, who couldnt have been more than sixteen years old. We sat on plastic chairs with the sun in our faces. Every time the girl clapped her hands, Kalai would clap back. My little brother, my parents, and I, still a child myself, took turns clapping just to hear her laugh. By the end of the visit, my brother and I were inconsolable. We couldnt understand why we werent taking Kalai back home with us to the UK. We had come to deliver donations during our holiday, such as colouring books, pens, and other supplies, but, to us, leaving the baby behind felt unimaginable. In our sheltered, childish naivety, the “unimaginable” only stretched so far. 

This was my introduction to Sencholai childrens home in Vallipunam, Mullaitivu, in the early 2000s, at a time when the de facto state of Tamil Eelam was in place. The next time I would hear of Sencholai girls’ orphanage, it would be in 2006, through tense voices shrouded in grief and disbelief, as we learned the latest news: that the Sri Lankan Air Force had bombed the Sencholai orphanage. Fifty-three Tamil schoolgirls and four staff members were killed, and more than hundred were injured. The schoolgirls, aged between sixteen and eighteen, had been attending a first aid and leadership programme when four Sri Lankan Air Force Kfir fighter jets dropped sixteen bombs on the site. 

Sencholai was a designated humanitarian location. Its GPS coordinates had been shared with the Sri Lankan military through UNICEF and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). After the bombing, the Sri Lankan government denied targeting civilians, claiming instead that it had struck an LTTE training camp, a claim that has been rejected by independent observers, including the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission. The international community’s unwillingness to act decisively when confronted with clear evidence of atrocity crimes not only permitted the Tamil genocide that followed in Sri Lanka in 2009 but also helped create the conditions that would enable similar atrocities around the world, as anyone following the news recently would be easily able to observe. To many of us in the diaspora, the Sencholai bombing awakened a goliath of a feeling of impending doom - that we, as a nation, may be alone in our struggle. If the deliberate bombing of schoolgirls does not demand accountability, what does? The international community’s failure to condemn such a heinous act therefore sent a dangerous message: that attacks on children could continue without consequence. 

And it did. The years that followed saw escalating aerial bombardments, attacks on hospitals, humanitarian zones, and densely populated civilian areas, inevitably culminating in the 2009 Tamil genocide. To this day, there has been no meaningful justice and accountability for the genocide, and Sri Lanka continues to profit from its culture of impunity. Incidents such as Sencholai and Mullivaikkal shaped the political consciousness of many young Eelam Tamils in the diaspora. We’d all visited that orphanage. 

As the world marks two decades since the Sri Lankan state’s murder of the Sencholai schoolchildren, excavations at the Chemmani mass grave continue to uncover the scale of Sri Lankas unresolved past. Over five hundred sets of human remains, including those of children, have now been discovered. There is still no independent international accountability mechanism, despite the longstanding demands of Tamil families of the disappeared. Instead, the international community continues to place its faith in domestic mechanisms created and run by the very state accused of these crimes, that have inevitably and repeatedly failed to deliver justice or accountability. Decades of presidential commissions and commissions of inquiry have kept the box of “progress” ticked, yet with no solution or end in sight. Countless mothers, fathers and siblings have died, searching for over ten years for answers on the whereabouts of their loved ones till their last breath. 

Like a mass grave, impunity buries the truth, but denial keeps it there. Sri Lanka cannot credibly speak of reconciliation while this legacy of impunity remains unaddressed. Furthermore, there has been little meaningful public reckoning within Sri Lanka with atrocities committed against Tamils. While many voices within Sri Lankan civil society have rightly condemned attacks on civilians elsewhere, including in Gaza, there has been comparatively little public engagement with atrocities such as Sencholai or the ongoing mass grave excavation at Chemmani. International recognition and condemnation of past crimes and meaningful accountability measures are essential where domestic institutions have failed. When the international community remains silent or continues to defer to ineffective domestic processes, denial endures.

While we honour the children who were lost, we also recognise the consequences of international inaction. The failure to act in 2006 paved the way for the atrocities that followed and we now see echoes our genocide in the ongoing genocide of others. The international community must finally abandon its reliance on failed domestic mechanisms and support an independent international accountability process for Sri Lanka. Truth, justice, accountability, and recognition of the Eelam Tamil peoples right to self-determination are essential for a just and lasting peace.
 

Ahrabi Rajkumar is the Advocacy and Research Director at People for Equality and Relief in Lanka (PEARL).