November remembrance sans justice

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s attendance last week at the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna’s (JVP) Il Maha Viru Samaruma (November heroes celebration), the annual commemoration of the party’s fallen comrades in two insurgencies against the State, was rich with political symbolism. 

Held in honour of those who died for the JVP including its founder Rohana Wijeweera, the ceremony marks not only a moment of remembrance, but a reminder of one of the darkest chapters in Sri Lanka’s recent history. Between 1987 and 1989, over 100,000 people were subjected to enforced disappearances or extrajudicial killings. The majority of these victims were young JVP members or suspected sympathisers, taken by State forces and never seen again.

For decades, families have lived with the grief of absence with no bodies returned, no answers provided, no perpetrators held to account. The President himself has discussed how a close relative was abducted never to be seen again. When President Dissanayake and his administration came to power a year ago, they did so promising structural transformation, transparency, and justice. One of those promises was to address the past atrocities committed by the State, including the mass disappearances of the late 1980s.

Yet one year on, there is little sign that these commitments are being translated into reality. The machinery of accountability has not moved forward. No credible process has been initiated. No meaningful steps have been taken to provide truth, redress, or a path toward justice for the families who continue to wait. For a government whose political roots lie partly in the very movement that suffered these atrocities, the silence is more than an omission but a moral failure of immense proportions.

This is not only about the victims of the JVP. Over the past 55 years, tens of thousands more, Tamil civilians, Sinhala youth, political dissidents, journalists, have been subjected to torture, enforced disappearance, and extrajudicial execution at the hands of State structures. Sri Lanka’s history is littered with unresolved crimes and unacknowledged suffering. Each era’s victims are different communities, but the perpetrator has been the same: an unrestrained State security apparatus operating with impunity.

If the JVP-led administration cannot bring justice even to its own cadres and their families, then it is failing at a level unprecedented even by Sri Lanka’s standards of political inconsistency. Until now, it was the perpetrators—and their political patrons—who occupied the highest offices of government. Today, for the first time, those in power include individuals and institutions with a direct historical responsibility toward many of the victims. The moral obligation is undeniable.

But justice requires courage; courage to confront the military and intelligence networks that have long held political power hostage; courage to initiate military reform and to challenge entrenched security-sector excesses; courage to speak honestly about the State’s crimes, even when doing so is politically risky. Running in fear of the military intelligence complex will not earn this administration credibility. It will only expose its inability to govern with principle.

The President and his government have a rare opportunity to correct a historical injustice and begin a long-overdue process of national healing. That opportunity is not limitless—and the patience of victims’ families has long since been exhausted. Until the government shows decisive action through credible investigations, truth-telling, reparations, institutional reform, the November commemorations will remain hollow gestures, steeped in hypocrisy.