Sri Lanka’s most recently unearthed mass grave has led to the discovery of 19 bodies, including those of three babies. The discovery of the mass grave has reopened old wounds for Sri Lanka’s Tamil community, which suffered the worst violence of the island’s 26-year civil war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a group that was seeking a separate homeland for Tamils.
Many Tamils were forcibly disappeared by the state, with a 2017 report by Amnesty International estimating that between 60,000 and 100,000 people have disappeared in Sri Lanka since the late 1980s.Past excavations have not fully yielded answers to the questions about forced disappearances and killings during the war, in part because the government has not followed through on the findings, say archaeologists. Recent excavations of other mass graves in Sri Lanka have failed to lead to meaningful answers, setting off allegations of coverups.
Read more here.
