The North-South Bridge

The North-South Bridge: Speech delivered at International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances Event, organized by the Office on Missing Persons at Matara — 25 August 2026

By Sanjaya Jayasekera.

I delivered this speech in Sinhala to an audience of parents and relatives of the forcibly disappeared, at an event organized by the Office on Missing Persons to mark the International Day of Victims of Enforced Disappearances.

I began with my personal story. I told the audience that I was speaking as one among them. Seven members of my family — including my mother's parents, her four sisters, and my own sister — were massacred by Army personnel of the Sinha Regiment-6, Katuwana Army Camp, on 27 August 1989, with the connivance of local politicians. My sister was just 6 years old and I was 8 years old.  My mother was present in the audience. I told them this was done because the perpetrators could not catch my uncle, a JVP cadre, who was later shot dead by the Beliatta police.

I recalled the state terror of that period: the tyre pyres, the headless bodies, the corpses floating down the rivers. I described how my parents tried to lodge a police complaint, and the harassment they suffered at the hands of the police. I explained how, for thirty-six years, my family was suppressed from commemorating our eight murdered relatives, and feared to grieve publicly or seek justice — a fear rooted in the continuing state terror, intimidation, and subjugation that accompanied the North-East war, through which the military's power was fortified against the working class of the country. My parents feared for the safety of their children, including myself.

I then explained to the audience how we were denied even the right to curse the army — the same military that committed these atrocities and was immediately redeployed to the North to carry out further massacres against another community. I told them that the suffering of the Tamil poor was the same as ours. I explained how the Sri Lankan ruling class did everything in its power to ideologically prepare the people of the South to support the suppression of the Tamil struggle for dignity and against discrimination. I then explained how the separatist LTTE exploited the ongoing discrimination, the university quota system, the pogroms, the burning of the Jaffna Library, and other atrocities to recruit Tamil youth — young people who were genuinely concerned for the plight of their own people, and who were prepared to wear a cyanide capsule to fight against the economic deprivation and racial discrimination that they and their people had endured for decades.

I linked this to the same economic conditions that produced youth unrest in the South, conditions which the JVP capitalized on to build a nationalist, anti-Tamil Sinhala chauvinism in defence of the unitary capitalist state. I drew on my own conversations with people affected by the North-East war during its final phase, including former LTTE cadres. I stated explicitly that the end of the war did not resolve the Tamil national question, and that the Tamil people still believe in — and still fight for — their national rights against the capitalist state, since none of their rights to dignity and against discrimination have been secured seventeen years after the war's end.

I then turned to the rights of the families of the disappeared. I emphasized their right to memory, to grieve, and to memorialize publicly — rights they already exercise privately every day, every minute — and I called on them to commemorate their disappeared relatives publicly at least once a year. I emphasized their right to know the truth about the fate of their relatives, and their right to justice against the perpetrators who are still living: their right against impunity. I named those perpetrators — the Army, the then-fascist leadership of the JVP, the then-leadership of the LTTE, the IPKF, the Karuna-Pillayan faction, and other paramilitary groups — but stressed that political responsibility rests, above all, with the ruling class of the South.

I returned again to my personal story, describing how the Middeniya police, acting on the instructions of UNP politicians in the area, did everything possible to suppress the case my father filed at the Walasmulla Magistrate's Court in 1994, following the massacre of my family. My father is a hero, I said. His struggles ensued in listing the names of the seven members of my family in the Muttetuwegama Presidential Commission Report. I explained why every mass grave must be exhumed and why justice must be delivered to the victims against the capitalist state.

I spoke of the necessity of historical memory, so that future generations are educated about this collective experience. I emphasized to the parents and relatives the vital importance of preserving individual testimony as part of the collective memory of a generation, so that its history, its struggles, and its lessons are transmitted to those who follow. This is urgent — many of these parents who carry this memory are already very old. 

I showed how the capitalist ruling class and the J.R. Jayewardene government, which introduced the 1978 Constitution and opened the country to foreign capital, sought to crush the youth unrest of that era — and how the same ruling class stands ready to unleash state terror again whenever the people rise against it. I noted that the JRJ government was implementing IMF dictates then, just as the current JVP government does now. I said that genocide and massacre are not merely measures of the past but a continuing present-day reality, as we see live in Gaza, where the Zionist Netanyahu regime is carrying out atrocities against the Palestinian people. Similar atrocities were committed against the Tamil poor, but the working people and the poor of the South were prevented from witnessing it as it happened. The ruling class went further still, seeking to convince the people of the South that no war crimes had taken place at all.

I explained the roots of these massacres and of the racist war, and why we must not fall into the trap the ruling class of every ethnicity sets for us: the division of poor and working people along ethnic lines. I said that we do not carry forward alleged animosities thousands of years old, and that no one can use ancient claims of land occupation as title to deny communities their right to the villages where they have lived for generations. Never again, I said — never again massacres, never again racist pogroms — and I stressed the need to remain vigilant against the resurgence of racialist forces. I closed by emphasizing the necessity of building unity between the working people and the poor of the North and the South against the ruling class, so that these crimes are never allowed to repeat against future generations.