Ramanisblog

The skeletal remains have been sent for carbon dating in a bid to establish the era the grave came into existence, officials said.

Some argue that the grave contains the victims of the aborted 1971 armed insurrection of the Janatha Vimukthi Perumana (JVP) in 1971 while there are others who say it could go back to the 18th century during the colonial era.

 

 

[TamilNet, Monday, 01 October 2012, 22:21 GMT]
An official who recently visited the outskirts of Mu’l’livaaykkaal with the soldiers of the Sri Lanka Army told TamilNet this week that he had personally witnessed skeletal remains of hundreds of slain people surfacing along the few kilometers long, L-shaped bunker, running from Vadduvaakal to northwards along the land of the genocidal onslaught. A vast area is still not cleared and is strictly prohibited from access to anyone except SL military officials. “There are booby traps and UXOs. Rotten automatic rifles and RPG ammunitions are lying around in the area. When I walked across a bunker, I was able to sense that it was a bunker of mass slaughter. As the bodies buried underneath have rotten, the soil was going under as we walked across,” he said. Meanwhile, some other mass graves show the use of chemicals that have burnt even the bones to become ashes, journalists report.

 

 

The end of war in Sri Lanka, captured for posterity by Google Earth published last week by Groundviews was the first look at the end of the war in Sri Lanka through historical satellite imagery freely accessible via Google Earth. The article was an open invitation for those using Google Earth to scan for and alert others over areas and artefacts of interest, that in turn could strengthen discussions around the hellish final weeks of war in Sri Lanka. Given the nature of imagery from around this period and centred on Nandikadal, the article explicitly noted,

What Google Maps and Earth does NOT enable one to do, given (1) the quality of some of the historical imagery (which sometimes features extensive cloud cover of vast regions) and (2) the large gaps between the available historical imagery (mid March, late May, after the official end of the war and killing of the LTTE’s leader, then mid-June and early August) is any robust analysis on when shelling in a specific region took place, and importantly, by whom.

Shared widely on Facebook, Twitter and via email, the article clearly indicated that one of the best references today for the research and study of the end of war in Sri Lanka is Google Earth. Imagery accessible via Google’s servers simply isn’t available through other sources or archived elsewhere in the public domain.

Whereas the previous article studied the sheer scale and extent of the destruction and human displacement in Sri Lanka during the final phase of the war, between March and May 2009, the focus here is on mass graves in and around the so-called Civilian Safe Zones (CSZs). Our first article was anchored to two key UNOSAT reports. The present study is anchored to the High-Resolution Satellite Imagery and the Conflict in Sri Lanka report by the Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Programme of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), published in August 2009. As with the UNOSAT reports, the AAAS study – commissioned by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International – was met with official condemnation and Ministry of Defence counter-analysis after its public release, largely anchored to the sections dealing with the removal of IDP structures within the CSZ between 6 and 10 May 2009,..

Source:

Sri Lanka Guardian.