Will you join calls for justice? Uma Kumaran presses Foreign Secretary on Muttur massacre

Uma Kumaran has urged the Foreign Office to work with British experts on mass grave protection and to press Sri Lanka over the unpunished killing of 17 aid workers at Muttur, in a parliamentary exchange that took place days before her own appointment as a minister in the department.

Questioning the then Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper at the Foreign Affairs Committee on 14 July, the Labour MP for Stratford and Bow raised the excavation of the Chemmani mass grave in Jaffna, noting that more than 400 sets of remains had been recovered since she last raised the matter, including those of children and babies.

"The families of the disappeared and Tamil civil society organisations have repeatedly called for excavations to be placed under international monitoring, citing the repeated failure of Sri Lankas domestic mechanisms," she said.

Kumaran said the United Kingdom was a world leader on mass graves, and that she and her team had met Bournemouth University, which developed the Bournemouth Protocol on Mass Grave Protection and Investigation, a framework produced with the International Commission on Missing Persons that sets out legal principles for safeguarding and investigating such sites. The protocol, she noted, highlights the need to identify and protect a chain of custody in evidence collection for future accountability.

"Would you and the FCDO consider working with Bournemouth University on the Bournemouth protocol, and would you support DNA identification involving affected families, working with our international partners?" she asked.

Cooper said she would look at the universitys work, adding that she was not aware of the details.

"I can also tell you that I met the Sri Lankan Prime Minister at the end of May, alongside Minister Malhotra, and we explicitly discussed the issues around the investigation of historical abuses and the importance of delivering justice for victims and their families. We discussed that and its importance," she said.

Kumaran then turned to the massacre of 17 staff of the aid organisation Action Against Hunger at their office in Muttur in August 2006, noting that the victims had been clearly identified as humanitarian workers by their clothing.

"There is compelling evidence pointing to the likely responsibility of Sri Lankan security forces. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission and other NGOs have concluded that the massacre was also subject to attempts at concealment by the authorities. The absence of justice for the families of those aid workers, and the impacts on aid workers in conflict zones around the world, is being met with impunity," she said.

She asked whether the department had raised the case with the Sri Lankan government and, if not, whether it would join Action Against Hunger in calling for justice.

Cooper said she did not know whether the individual case had been raised and undertook to check and report back.

"We have certainly raised the broader issues around the need for accountability and detailed investigations, because it becomes part of what is effectively a truth and reconciliation process. That is critical. I will follow up on that individual case," she said.

The exchange took place just days before Kumaran was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office under the new prime minister Andy Burnham, becoming the first British Tamil to hold ministerial office. Cooper is no longer Foreign Secretary, with the post now being held by Ed Miliband.

The questions she raised remain live. The Muttur anniversary passed on 4 August with no one held to account, two decades after the killings, and with Action Against Hunger renewing calls for a fresh international investigation. At Chemmani, the toll has since climbed to 491 sets of remains identified, beyond the figure Kumaran cited in July, while the process of identifying the dead has yet to begin.