Former Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa is accused of tampering with police records to obstruct investigations into mass graves discovered in an area where he served as a military officer during a Marxist rebellion in 1989.
The charges are contained in a report entitled ‘Mass Graves and Failed Exhumations’ publish-ed by a number of activist groups: Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS), International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP), Centre for Human Rights and Development (CHRD) and Families of the Disappeared (FoD).
“Witnesses to crimes are gradually disappearing: 178 mothers of missing persons have already died in recent years. We protest and fight for justice, not knowing when we will get it,” said Manuvel Uthayachandra, mother and president of Families of the Disappeared.
The paper highlights how successive Sri Lankan governments have interfered in the investigation of mass graves, pointing out that only 20 mass graves have been partially exhumed in the last 30 years and of over 550 bodies found almost none have been identified.
“None of Sri Lanka’s numerous commissions of enquiry have been mandated to examine the mass graves, while efforts to uncover the truth have been hampered,” says the paper, which focuses on the failure of investigations in Matale district in central Sri Lanka and Mannar town, located in Northern Province, where a mass grave was discovered in 2018.