In the wake of elections, many hope Sri Lanka is on the brink of positive change. But the country must still confront its brutal past, human rights activist Ruki Fernando cautions.
The victory of leftist, anti-establishment candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake in Sri Lanka’s presidential elections on Sunday has raised hopes that the country is at a turning point. The election, the first to be held since mass protests ousted the former leader Gotabaya Rajapaksa in 2022, was seen as a firm rejection of a political elite widely blamed for Sri Lanka’s debt default and economic collapse.
Dissanayake has vowed to weed out corruption, address the economic crisis that plunged millions into poverty and renegotiate the International Monetary Fund’s bailout. But a deeper national trauma haunts Sri Lanka – one that, if left unresolved, could hinder the country’s recovery.
“The war in Sri Lanka led to a lot of human rights violations and ethnic polarisation, particularly between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil numerical minority,” says Ruki Fernando as he quietly sips a hot cup of Ceylon tea. It’s 9 am and a cool breeze drifts into the cramped kitchen of the apartment he’s staying in, a walk from Geneva’s train station.
The 51-year-old seasoned activist has spent years seeking justice for wartime atrocities and working in peacebuilding. His work has brought him to Geneva repeatedly to attend the Human Rights Council, which has passed since 2012 an annual resolution calling on Sri Lanka’s government to investigate grave violations during the final months of the civil war and hold the perpetrators accountable.
On 18 May 2009, Sri Lankan troops finally crushed the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the north and eastern parts of the island, ending 26 years of conflict, where both sides had resorted to brutal violence, with civilians – particularly Tamils – caught in the crossfire. The aftermath left a trail of atrocities from indiscriminate bombings to summary executions, rape and torture, but no perpetrators. To this day, the death toll is unknown. In 2014, the UN estimated that some 40,000 people had been killed, while a former Catholic bishop found that roughly 147,000 people were unaccounted for, according to Fernando.
“We are a country of countless killings but no killers,” he says. Past governments have made efforts, such as creating an office of missing persons and an office for reparations, but these have yielded little amid reluctance to expose the army to prosecution. In 2014, Fernando was arrested and slapped with a gag order and travel ban while visiting the north of Sri Lanka to document rights violations.
“We have lost hope on domestic mechanisms,” he says. His faith now lies with the Sri Lanka Accountability Project, a Human Rights Council initiative launched in 2021 to collect and preserve evidence of crimes from the war.
“Several families of the disappeared were at the Human Rights Council. They are looking for their sons and husbands who were taken away by the military. Some of them surrendered to the military on the last day of the war in front of thousands of eyewitnesses,” he says. “These are not things of the past. These are things of the present, and these are likely to be things of the future.”
Fernando is waiting for the new leader to make a clear commitment to accountability for past crimes – an issue that previous governments have stubbornly resisted, both domestically and in Geneva, where they have consistently voted against the resolution on Sri Lanka since 2019. A proposal to renew the accountability project is set to be considered at the end of the Human Rights Council session in early October, though it is unclear whether Sri Lanka’s interim goer will oppose it this year.
Fernando, who grew up in Colombo, is Sinhalese, the ethnic group that comprises 74.9 per cent of Sri Lanka’s population. He is also part of the seven per cent catholic minority. In Sri Lanka, ethnic and religious divisions have long been the cause of tensions and are at the root of the civil war, according to Fernando.
Dissanayake has promised to govern inclusively, which the activist views as a positive first step. He notes, however, that he won only 42 per cent of the votes and lost in the north and east, where Tamils are the majority.
“The JVP (Dissanayake’s Marxist party) supported Mahinda Rajapaksa as president and Gotabaya Rajapaksa (Mahinda Rajapaksa’s brother) as the defence secretary to wage the final phase of the war,” says Fernando. There's a lot of suspicion and anger against this party and its president among the Tamils.”
Beyond the political class, the Sinhalese majority has also yet to acknowledge the ethnic dimension of the conflict. Fernando has faced this animosity personally. “Some of my relatives and even some of my school friends consider me a traitor. There were times that in the past that I was called ‘Sinhalese tiger’,” he says – a reference to the Tamil insurgent group that was used as a slur to imply he was a terrorist.
“Of course, there were acts of terrorism committed by the governments and the Tamil armed groups. But there was no LTTE when Sinhala was made the official language in 1956 or when the Colombo Sinhalese-led government started to colonise the northern and eastern provinces to change the demography,” he says.
But the 2022 uprising changed something in Sri Lanka. While mainly a Sinhalese-driven contestation against the rise in prices of electricity and other goods, it opened the eyes of many to the discrimination faced by the Tamil, Fernando believes.
But that is still a long way from granting the Tamils greater autonomy. Fears persist that it could lead to a secession. “Our history teaches us that it is the lack of power-sharing that led to an attempted separation. In the 60s and 70s, the demands of the Tamils were not for a separate state; it was for power sharing along federal lines. If there were a positive response to that, we probably wouldn't have seen a war,” he says.
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