Dr Mario Arulthas delivers the keynote speech on Parliament Hill. Photograph: Office of Gary Anandasangaree
The following is the keynote speech delivered by Dr Mario Arulthas at the event ‘Chemmani: From Mass Graves to Accountability’, co-hosted by MPs Gary Anandasangaree and Juanita Nathan on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on 20 October 2026.
We have come together here today to confront realities that have been brewing for three decades but remain heavy and urgent: the legacy of the Chemmani mass graves, the ongoing reality of structural impunity in Sri Lanka, and the fundamental question of what the push for justice means for the Canadian government.
To many outside the Eelam Tamil community, Chemmani may sound like a remote place, far from where we are. But to millions of Tamils across the globe - and to the hundreds of thousands of Tamil Canadians who call this country home - Chemmani is more than just a place on a map in a far off country.
It is a symbol of genocide, and an unaddressed scene of state violence. It is an indictment of the impunity Sri Lanka continues to enjoy.
It’s important to note here that mass graves are not accidental remnants of war. They are manifestations of state intent. They represent the physical attempt to erase human lives and bury the truth beneath the soil.
Today we are here to give visibility - another push that follows decades of attempts to do so by the families of those who were forcibly disappeared by the Sri Lankan state.
Krishanthi and the discovery of Chemmani
To understand why Chemmani remains important today, we have to look back 30 years, and the story of how the mass graves were discovered.
In late 1995, the Sri Lankan military captured Jaffna from Tamil control. They set up a tight-meshed net of camps, sentry points and encampments, turning Jaffna into one of the most heavily militarised areas in the world. The checkpoints were placed at strategic locations across the region. They were ostensibly tasked with constraining activities of the LTTE. However, the reality of what actually occurred continues to scar the Tamil psyche.
18 year old Krishanthi Kumaraswamy was one of many residents of Jaffna who had returned, after the most intense fighting on the peninsula had ended. On the 7th of September 1996, she had just finished an exam and was walking to visit the house of a friend who had died. Incidentally, her friend was hit by a military vehicle. As she passed the military check point at Chemmani, she was stopped. A neighbour saw her being questioned. And that was the last time she was seen alive.
The neighbour informed Krishanthi’s mother, who was worried about her not coming home. She went to the sentry point with her 16 year old son and a neighbour. They also were not seen again.
Hundreds of disappearances occurred in Jaffna that year. Amnesty International reported that on a single day that year alone, 39 Tamil men were detained by the military during a search operation and were never seen again.
The total number of disappearances only in Jaffna that year is thought to exceed 700. An enormous number, especially for the relatively small area involved. Somehow, Krishanthi’s case breached through the reign of terror and gained widespread attention, unlike hundreds of others. In the Sinhala south too, women’s organisations protested. International human rights organisations also put pressure on the state.
Gary Anandasangaree views an exhibition on Chemmani at the event, including a photograph of Krishanthi Kumaraswamy. Photograph: Office of Gary Anandasangaree
And - in an unprecedented move - the state acted and arrested some of its soldiers and policemen soon after the disappearance of Krishanthi and her family. The arrested took the investigators to Chemmani, right behind the checkpoint where Krishanthi was detained.
Here they found the bodies, buried in shallow graves.
It was during the trial that the true horrors enacted upon Krishanthi and her family became apparent. One soldier in particular gave testimony of her rape and murder. He testified in open court that 11 men, all Sri Lankan officials, were involved. He also said hundreds of Tamil civilians had been extrajudicially executed and buried in mass graves at Chemmani under military orders. He named commanders and identified mass burial sites.
A total of eight soldiers and one policeman were convicted of Krishanthi’s rape and the murders. But this conviction should not be taken as a sign that Sri Lanka is able to deliver justice. Rather, it was proof that it won’t. I’ll tell you why.
Based on the soldier's testimony, exhumations began in Chemmani in 1999 and 15 bodies were recovered, showing horrific evidence of torture and execution. Yet, as soon as the evidence mounted, the Sri Lankan state pulled back. DNA analysis was deemed "too expensive," international forensic assistance was rejected, and the other military personnel named, including senior commanders were never prosecuted.
The case fizzled out in the following years, with no further action taken and the mass grave abandoned. Some of those commanders named in the case received promotions.
It wasn’t until last year, when unrelated construction work was conducted on the site, that the mass grave hit the headlines again. Workers came across more skeletons, not far from where Krishanthi was found. Over the last year and a half, we have watched the numbers climb to staggering levels.
By the end of the latest phase of the excavation in August, skeletal remains of 582 individuals had been discovered , including those of several infants and children, alongside toys and school bags. Some of the remains appear bound, many bear signs of torture.
The excavations will continue over the next months, although Sri Lanka neither has the expertise nor the political will to appropriately deal with the fallout from Chemmani. DNA testing needs to be conducted to identify family members and inform those who have been waiting for three decades for certainty about what happened to their loved ones. And those responsible must be held accountable.
But nothing in Sri Lanka’s history indicates that the state will take action against its own impunity. The Sri Lankan state apparatus is structurally incapable of investigating its own military forces for crimes committed against a marginalised nation within its borders. When the soil continues to yield the bones of massacred civilians thirty years later, we are looking at an active, unresolved crime scene.
The machinery that built the graves
We cannot speak of Chemmani as a relic of the past when the legal mechanisms that enabled those disappearances remain. For over four decades, the notorious Prevention of Terrorism Act provided the legal framework for these arbitrary arrests, prolonged detention without trial, and systemic torture - and disappearances and killings of detainees. Due to international pressure, the Sri Lankan government pledged to repeal the PTA. They are currently in the process of introducing its new counter-terrorism legislation . But observers say this act is even worse than the previous legislation. This is affecting our magazine, The North-Eastern, too. We have a longform piece on Chemmani in the forthcoming issue. But due to the new laws, and subsequent concerns by my colleagues on the island, we have been forced to pull other pieces, including poetry and artwork.
When a state repeatedly enacts legislation designed to criminalise legitimate political expression and shields its security forces from scrutiny, it is sending the world a clear message - the machinery that built the graves at Chemmani remains.
It is precisely because of the continuing repression and this structural impunity that the role of the international community, including Canada, remains vital. And let us be clear today: On the question of Tamil justice, Canada has, at critical moments, shown genuine and courageous global leadership.
But we need to put this in its historic context. Canada has historically supported the Sri Lankan state in its war against Tamils. The continued proscription of the LTTE has criminalised the Tamil Canadian population for political expression for 20 years this year. For only three of those years was the LTTE active. For 17 of those years, the organisation has not existed.
A recent report by the Tamil Feminist Collective also details Canadian arms shipments to Sri Lanka, during intense fighting against Tamils in the 1980s. This is also something Tamil Canadians are forced to grapple with.
But Canada has come some way since then. We must credit Canada’s parliament for its historic adoption of the resolution in 2022 recognising the 18th of May as Tamil Genocide Remembrance Day . That motion gave voice to a historic truth that governments and international institutions are still seeking to evade.
Furthermore, following US action in 2019, Canada also took a landmark step by imposing targeted sanctions on former Sri Lankan state officials and military officers for gross human rights violations. That decision sent shockwaves through the military and political establishment in Colombo and sent a powerful message - it’s not over. The UK then followed suit in 2025 . These actions showed that when Canada chooses to lead, it can shift the international landscape.
Yet, this makes Canada's broader foreign policy retreat on Sri Lanka all the more glaring.
While Ottawa was willing to take these bold domestic and legislative steps, its multilateral policy on, and bilateral relationship with, Sri Lanka raises questions. This retreat has been noticed on the island too. Our civil society contacts are explicit in what they perceive as a pulling back in recent years. I spoke to a prominent activist, who has been targeted repeatedly for his journalism yesterday and he told me that visits to the Tamil areas by high commission staff have become more limited, including a significant reduction in engagement with human rights activists and political actors.
Make no mistake. Symbolic recognition and targeted sanctions are vital tools. Even the fact that Canada enables Tamils to commemorate the genocide with monuments, such as the one in Brampton is important. But if these actions are followed by a retreat from justice and not treating the Sri Lankan state how any genocide perpetrator should be treated, these actions become a hollow substitute for accountability rather than a route to it.
I believe I don’t need to restate the key points of the prime minister’s address at Davos earlier this year here. Canada has since, in some ways, demonstrated that it is truly serious about this global pivot, but this leads us to ask: Where does that principle actually get tested?
While not easy, it comes naturally to this principle to invoke international law in the geopolitical theatres that dominate global headlines, where Western interests broadly align and the political consensus is pre-packaged. But another important test of Canada’s foreign policy pivot does not happen only in the capitals of major powers. It happens in places that are routinely dismissed as politically "less significant." Including in places like Sri Lanka.
Consider Canada’s record at the human rights council in Geneva. Just over a decade ago, Canada took pride in co-sponsoring UN Human Rights Council resolutions that explicitly demanded international involvement and independent international investigations into atrocities in Sri Lanka. Canadian diplomats rightly acknowledged then that domestic courts lacked the independence or political will to prosecute their own military.
Yet over time, as political calculations shifted and diplomatic fatigue set in, Canada quietly stepped back from those demands. Canada shifted from insisting on independent international judicial mechanisms to endorsing watered-down resolutions that defer back to domestic Sri Lankan processes. We watched Canadian foreign policy shift from demanding international trials to quietly discussing technical assistance and domestic capacity-building for the very state apparatus responsible for the same genocide that the Canadian parliament recognised.
These are processes that not just Canada, but also human rights activists, academics who study such processes and so on, beyond any shadow of a doubt, believe are structurally rigged to deliver zero accountability. We know this. I don’t think anyone here believes otherwise.
Isn’t this precisely the kind of performative compliance Prime Minister Carney called out?
To sanction on one hand former state officials for gross human rights abuses here in Ottawa, but then on the other hand endorse resolutions in Geneva that leave justice in the hands of the perpetrator, is more of the pretending the prime minister rightly criticised. It signals to authoritarian regimes globally that if they simply wait, commitment to international law will eventually collapse into quiet accommodation. If Canada wants to demonstrate to the world what its new middle-power pivot actually means, not just in relation to the US and the EU, but beyond - places like Sri Lanka are the ideal testing ground.
And Chemmani looms large in this context. On the Tamil question, no doubt, Canada has taken important steps, steps that no other country has taken. But the benchmark can’t be based on the inefficacies of the international justice system. We also know that establishing international accountability mechanisms will also be a challenge.
Although - however unlikely you believe an international justice mechanism is - Sri Lanka delivering on accountability is multitudes less likely than that.
Canada has to build on the leadership it has shown so far and recalibrate its policy on Sri Lanka. Canada has more tools in its repertoire.
Civil society organisations like PEARL and victim communities are explicitly demanding that Canada move from administrative measures to criminal accountability - by invoking the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act to exercise Universal Jurisdiction and investigate perpetrators.
On Chemmani, Canada must support Tamil demands for international oversight with independent protocols in place - and it can use its own experience with mass graves and galvanise an international coalition supportive of this.
And lastly, Canada must increase its engagement with the Eelam Tamil population in Sri Lanka on all fronts and maintain separate channels from Ottawa to the North-East, in collaboration and consultation with Tamil Canadians. For Tamil Canadians to fruitfully engage in the growing social, cultural and economic space in the North-East, their access mustn’t be conditional on keeping quiet on justice issues, which is likely to be the case if this engagement is facilitated through Colombo.
On the Tamil question, Canada has taken steps that no other country has yet taken. Canada must continue that work. The struggle for justice is long and we might not see the end we imagine. But the act of participating in these processes is just as important as any outcome. Tamil Canadians stand side-by-side with the families of the victims in their unequivocal demand for truth, accountability and their political rights. They expect their government to stand by them.
Dr Mario Arulthas is a postdoctoral researcher in conflict, rights and justice at SOAS University of London and Editor-in-Chief of The North-Eastern.
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