August 14, 2016 marks the 10-year anniversary of the macabre slaughter of more than 61 Tamil children by the Sri Lankan state. And yet a decade after this fact and seven years since the end of the country’s armed conflict, justice for the girls killed, along with the thousands of other victims of the war’s impunitive crimes, is no closer to being realized.
In the air raid that injured up to 150 others, 16 bombs were dropped on the Senchcholai Girls Orphanage in the Mullaitivu District, where teenage girls mostly aged 15-18, were attending a first aid workshop.
“These were children from surrounding schools in the area who were brought there for a two-day training workshop on first aid,” said UNICEF Sri Lanka representative, JoAnna VanGerpen in Asia News days after the incident. She recounts being horrified at the carnage they discovered when they arrived on site.
The government justified the ghastly attack on the schoolgirls by claiming that the orphanage was in fact a Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) training camp for child soldiers.
However, in an investigation conducted by international observers, including UNICEF and the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) that same day, found zero evidence of LTTE installation or weapons. The executive director of UNICEF denounced the attack vehemently, conclusively stating that the girls were “innocent victims of violence”.
Sri Lankan government defence spokesman, Keheliya Rambukwella dismissed criticisms by foreign aid workers and monitors, saying they had not utilized military experts in their research.
“We have studied this for three years…. They used this place to provide the Tigers with combatants,” he said, just days after the aerial bombardment. “If the children are terrorists, what can we do?”
As Anjali Manivannan wrote in Forbes, in increasingly disturbing revelations, the LTTE had provided the military with GPS coordinates of the orphanage, in order to protect it as a humanitarian zone. After the most recent UN investigation into Sri Lanka’s attack, and in light of these facts, it was determined that the military had violated international humanitarian law, by disregarding principles of distinction and proportionality, and bombing a civilian strong-hold.
Similarly, doctors had given the military GPS coordinates of makeshift hospitals in a region sardonically determined by the government to be a “no-fire zone”, yet the military deliberately bombed them.
The Tamil National Alliance came out to condemn the attack as “atrocious” and “inhumane”, marking it as an event with a “genocidal intent”, and called it yet another instance of brazen state terrorism.
Years after the incident, the Sri Lankan government finally agreed to the The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ standards for international accountability last fall. However, since then the government has refused to include international judges, allowing only international technical assistance.
As Manivannan, a legal researcher and the Advocacy Coordinator for People for Equality and Relief in Lanka, writes in Forbes, international pressure is key to getting the government to fulfill its commitments towards realizing justice. In addition, Manivannan recommends that “transitional justice experts and local and diaspora groups ... strategize about forms of technical assistance that could hybridize domestic prosecution”.
“To best respect the memory of the victims of the Senchcholai massacre ten years ago,” writes Manivannan, “as well as the thousands more Tamils killed and violated throughout the war, perpetrators must be brought to justice.”
Telesur