The Hon. Sivagnanam Shritharan

¶ 01 Hon. Presiding Member, I wish to reiterate: when the then Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera addressed the UN Human Rights Council in 2015, he accepted a hybrid accountability mechanism with international participation, including international legal experts and judges, to implement investigations domestically. You now deny what was accepted then. If perpetrators themselves become judges and investigators, how will victims ever get justice? We are effectively handed over to those who fired phosphorus shells, dropped cluster munitions, detained us, and caused disappearances—until investigations against them conclude. Is this not absurd?

¶ 02 Long-suppressed problems persist in this country. Today, human skeletal remains are found at Ariyalai and at the Chemmany-Sindupathy Hindu cremation ground in Jaffna, and they are clearly Tamil. I have always said: nature makes no mistakes. No one dreamt of, politically marked, or officially identified those grave sites; nor did the Sri Lankan Government instruct anyone to excavate them. Nature revealed them. Nature’s verdict calls for justice and struggle for justice. That is what I highlight here.

¶ 03 I table copies of letters I sent to Hon. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake dated 2025.08.04 and 2025.07.31 regarding the military’s role in civil matters and the situation concerning mass graves and skeletal remains. These have been placed in the Library.

¶ 04 I draw attention to the continuing plight of the Tamil people. Recently, in Mullaitivu District’s Muthaiyankaddu area, a young man was beaten to death. Humans can err, but who granted the military the right to kill? This is outrageous.

¶ 05 Please understand: we have kept the doors for dialogue open and are ready for talks. Our problem is long-standing. We wish to live together—with mutual recognition—as two native peoples of this land, each preserving our identities. That is why I stress this repeatedly.

¶ 06 We bring today’s motion because the government must devote serious and compassionate attention to the long-unresolved political problem of the Tamil people. You have a duty because when the 1987 Indo–Lanka Accord was concluded, you opposed it. You opposed the North–East merger and in 2006 filed cases against it, leading to de-merger. Therefore, the responsibility to resolve lies with you—those who drove these outcomes. I ask you: what is your plan?