Human Rights Watch marks 20 years since the Muttur massacre

Twenty years after 17 aid workers were executed at their compound in Muttur, no one has been brought to justice, Human Rights Watchs legal and policy director James Ross has written, in a piece marking the anniversary of one of the most notorious atrocities committed by the Sri Lankan state.

Ross, who was in Sri Lanka when the killings took place on 4 August 2006, said that two decades on he "still cannot report that those responsible have been held to account".

The victims were the local staff of the Paris-based non-governmental organisation Action Contre la Faim, or Action Against Hunger, who had been providing relief to survivors of the December 2004 tsunami. Ross recounted that the killings came after several days of fighting between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam for control of the town, which LTTE forces had seized on 2 August.

After government troops retook Muttur around noon on 4 August, there was a horrific discovery: the bodies of 15 ACF workers lying face down in their compound, with bullet wounds to their heads and necks fired at point-blank range. Two others, who appeared to have tried to escape, were found in a vehicle nearby. The 17 dead comprised 13 men and 4 women, all ethnic Tamils except for one Muslim.

The Sri Lankan military told foreign journalists shown the scene that the LTTE had carried out the killings, Ross noted, but that official account was later debunked. He pointed to in-depth reporting by the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), which found that two police constables and Sri Lankan naval special forces commandos were responsible, and that senior police and justice officials were involved in a cover-up.

Waiting decades for justice

The Muttur massacre, Ross wrote, was just one of many atrocities committed by both sides during Sri Lankas 26-year civil war, which ended with the LTTEs defeat in 2009, and was among a dozen major rights cases that successive governments promised to pursue but never seriously did. The families of the ACF workers, he said, along with those of thousands of others unlawfully killed, forcibly disappeared or otherwise unaccounted for, have been waiting decades for justice.

Ross called on Sri Lankas president Anura Kumara Dissanayake to make good on its 2024 election-year pledge to establish an independent prosecutor to pursue emblematic cases from the war, including the Muttur massacre, and urged concerned governments to keep pressing for accountability in Sri Lanka and to highlight the need for justice for all victims of wartime abuses.

His intervention came weeks after Action Against Hunger itself renewed its call for a fresh international investigation, warning that the failure to punish the Muttur killings had signalled that attacks on aid workers could go unanswered.

Read his full piece here.