Sri Lanka’s Unending Humanitarian Tragedy

How many Tamils died in Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict, more so during the war’s closing stages? Seventeen years after the military conflict ended, there are no clear answers even as the country battles scrutiny at another UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva.

The easier answer to the question above would be that the Sri Lankan government doesn’t care about the total fatalities. The more unbiased view is that the situation is far more complicated, with more guilty parties than just one. This is the real reason why Sri Lanka is finding it so difficult, almost impossible, to achieve a genuine reconciliation between communities which have otherwise lived together for generations – and still do so.

Most Sri Lankans (read Sinhalese) get worked up whenever it is alleged that around 40,000 Tamil civilians died in the military blitzkrieg against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2008-09. The figure is fiercely contested. It is argued, and rightly so, that this is from a UN report of 2011 – two years after the war ended – and that the global body itself has admitted that this was not an authoritative total.

It is also pointed out, again rightly, that the military rescued hundreds of thousands of Tamils from the conflict zone amid brutal battles and that some 12,000 LTTE fighters who surrendered were rehabilitated and sent back to their communities.
Fine, if 40,000 civilians didn’t perish in the darkest end phase of the conflict; how many did die?

The official answer is silence

The official answer to this is silence. If international actors persist in their questioning, as at the 63rd UNHCR meet underway in Geneva (it will end on Oct 9), the normal retort is that Colombo’s own mechanisms are enough to get to the truth. Thus, an unending cat-and-mouse goes on – even as distraught Tamils keep seeking answers about their kin who disappeared into a black hole in Sri Lanka, at times after surrendering to the military.

“Mass grave excavations are a stark reminder that thousands of cases of enforced disappearances remain unresolved,” said a statement on Sri Lanka in Geneva from the UK’s Human Right Ambassador, Eleanor Sanders. She was speaking on behalf of the Sri Lanka Core Group which also includes Canada, Malawi, Montenegro and North Macedonia besides the UK.

The ugly reality is that the Sri Lankan state never stopped killing non-combatant Tamils in large numbers right from the time when Tamil militancy slowly metamorphosed into insurgency from 1983. Indeed, some of the worst massacres in Tamil villages in Sri Lanka’s multi-racial eastern wing did more than anything else to create a huge number of recruits for the uncompromising Tamil Tigers.

The LTTE’s forced recruitment of Tamil children, mostly from impoverished families, came later. Governments changed in Colombo but the military-intelligence set-up’s inability to appreciate that most Tamils were not with the Tigers (even if the LTTE claimed otherwise) ended up justifying civilian deaths as an inevitable part of the conflict – much like how many Americans accepted torture as a necessary evil in the war against global terror. Yes, there were men in uniform who were good souls but they were the exceptions.

Eventually, after over two decades of bloodshed, when the military routed the Tigers, Sinhalese triumphalism overpowered civilizational sanity. And since the Sinhalese form the overwhelming majority in the victorious military, Sri Lanka’s dominant ethno character refused to even identify (forget punishing) those who killed innocents.

In a rare few cases where the law did take its course, powerful politicians in Colombo joined hands with a flawed legal system to derail the victims. The 2009 rout of the LTTE and the decimation of its leadership birthed a misplaced notion that Sri Lanka had vanquished a grandiose politico-military organisation.

The grim reality is that the Tigers were a politically bankrupt outfit which lasted as a potent force for long thanks to the follies by Sri Lanka, India earlier, and also the Western world – at different points of time. While the Sri Lankan state must be held to account for atrocities heaped on innocent Tamils, the LTTE is no less guilty for turning the Tamil Eelam struggle into one of the most cruel and heartless insurgencies.

Compare the LTTE with the secular Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) to understand the horrors the Tigers imposed on others, including the community whose interests it claimed to represent. The PLO was an umbrella group dominated by Yasser Arafat’s Al Fatah which kept peace with smaller and ideologically-diverse fellow Palestinians – for long, long years.
In contrast, the LTTE, after massacring Buddhist pilgrims in Anuradhapura in 1985, turned its guns on fellow Tamil militants, brutally killing and torturing tens of thousands dubbed “traitors”. The horror never ended, consuming even sections of the Tigers and fracturing the Tamil society like never before.

The bloody madness drowned almost every Tamil who dissented: other militants, unarmed politicians and activists, students and academics, and ordinary civilians, confining many in its underground prisons that would have put the later day Islamists to shame. It is this undemocratic streak that made the Tigers recruit children as young as 10-12 and, during the end stages, to kill civilians fleeing its shrinking lair for the military zone. In any case, the LTTE fought its last war amid a mass of civilians knowing well that that the military would rain death on everyone.

The anguish from the war continues

The end result was a massacre – which has mired Sri Lanka in a shame many do not want to see. The tragedy has triggered counter narratives. Tamils who backed the LTTE are most vocal in accusing Colombo of genocide while military generals insist they did no wrong except to fight for their motherland.

The ordinary Tamils who suffered are still agonising: the families of those taken away by security forces and never seen again or the countless children forced to enlist with the LTTE and die. And we are not talking about just 2008-09. This is where the UNHCR sessions have become an annual ritual. Critics denounce Sri Lanka for war-time atrocities; Colombo says it only fought and defeated terrorism. Both sides then brace for the next UNHCR boxing.

The anguish from the war continues. In Jaffna, skeletons continue to be dug up. Women whose husbands, siblings and children vanished long ago are still protesting. Devoid of education and skills, hundreds of ex-LTTE fighters now battle untold hardships. The Tamil community is in disarray, many still unable to come to terms with the rout of the Tamil Tigers.
President Anura Dissanyake did sound like a statesman while campaigning in 2024, promising to undo simmering wrongs in the Tamil region.

He could have offered a national apology for all victims of the conflict. It would have been applauded as a first step towards a much-needed reconciliation. He chose not to. Today, while the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) makes slow but steady inroads in Tamil areas, many Tamils who eagerly embraced Dissanayake two years ago have distanced themselves from him. To them, the Marxist has proved no different than his predecessors, all of them Sinhalese. No wonder, while the war has ended, the ethnic conflict continues. This is a Sri Lankan tragedy.

M.R. Narayan Swamy is a veteran journalist.

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