The Trinco-5 And The Matale Mass Grave: Behind The Facade Of Accountability
J.S. Tissainayagam
Anxious to escape reprimand by the international community at the next UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) sessions and Commonwealth heads of Government Meeting, Sri Lanka has arrested 12 persons in connection with the 2006 extrajudicial killing of five Tamil boys in Trincomalee. This however is only a façade. The government’s actual attitude to ending impunity in Sri Lanka and promoting reconciliation is evident not only in the glaring lapses in the way it is handling this case, but also in the recently-unearthed mass grave in Matale.
Since the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka, the refrain of the international community has been the importance of accountability and reconciliation. As the Sri Lanka government displayed an aversion to both, the UNHRC adopted two resolutions in 2012 and 2013 advising Sri Lanka to move forward on these matters. The 2013 resolution asks Sri Lanka to implement the recommendations by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights for accountability reconciliation. Her recommendations highlight the killing of the five boys (known as the Trinco-5 case) and urges Sri Lanka to accept proffered UN expertise in criminal and forensic investigations to resolve these cases in keeping with international standards.
Trinco-5 has two intertwining threads running through it, both reflecting government highhandedness. On January 2, 2006, six boys were seated chatting in the gathering dusk at the waterfront in Trincomalee in eastern Sri Lanka. A grenade was lobbed at them, following which a jeep full of masked men approached them. The men first assaulted the boys and then shot them in cold blood. These were civilian deaths during the 2002-2008 ceasefire, in a city that was not under siege but in the full control of the Sri Lanka military.
