The Forgotten Genocide: Sri Lanka’s Tamils and the Long Silence of International Justice
In May 2009, on a narrow strip of beach in northeastern Sri Lanka called Mullivaikkal, the last chapter of a twenty-six-year civil war was written in blood. The Sri Lankan armed forces, in the final weeks of their offensive against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, drove hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians into a shrinking enclave that the government itself had designated a no-fire zone. What followed was not the regrettable collateral damage of modern warfare. It was a systematic, deliberate massacre. Hospitals were shelled. Civilians were denied food, medicine, and escape. Those who surrendered were executed. UN estimates have placed the death toll in those final months at between 40,000 and 70,000 civilians. Some assessments place the figure considerably higher. More than 140,000 people were unaccounted for when the guns fell silent.
Seventeen years have now passed. The world has moved on. The Tamil people have not been permitted to.
Sri Lanka’s Tamil community has endured not one act of mass violence, but a succession of them — each building on the last, each met with the same international response: expressions of concern, the passage of resolutions, the appointment of commissions, and ultimately, impunity. The 1983 Black July pogroms, in which government-armed mobs used electoral registers provided by the state to hunt and kill thousands of Tamils in Colombo and beyond, destroyed 18,000 homes and displaced upward of 150,000 people. No one was prosecuted. The decades of indiscriminate aerial bombardment, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and sexual violence that characterised the war years generated the largest number of disappearance cases reported to the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances of any country in the world at the time. No one was prosecuted. And Mullivaikkal — widely described by international legal scholars as the defining atrocity of the early twenty-first century — produced the same result: no accountability, no prosecutions, and a government that to this day celebrates the 18 May, the date of the Tamil people’s final defeat, as a national victory day.
This is not an accident. It is a policy.
The legal case for characterising what was done to the Tamil people as genocide is not a fringe position. It has been developed by eminent international lawyers and scholars, examined by the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, and addressed in submissions to the UN Human Rights Council and its special procedures mechanisms. The elements of the 1948 Genocide Convention — acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group — are capable of being satisfied on the evidence. Sri Lanka’s systematic use of discriminatory legislation from 1956 onwards to strip Tamils of language rights, civic equality, and political representation; the repeated pogroms carried out with state support; the targeting of Tamil cultural institutions including the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in 1981; the deliberate starvation and bombardment of Tamil civilians in the no-fire zones in 2009; and the ongoing military occupation of the Tamil homeland in the north and east, accompanied by enforced Sinhalisation and demographic displacement — taken together, these form a pattern of conduct from which genocidal intent is not merely arguable but compellingly supported.
And yet the word ‘genocide’ remains, for most governments and international institutions, politically impermissible in connection with Sri Lanka. The reason is not a deficit of evidence. It is a deficit of will.
The international community’s failure on Sri Lanka did not begin in 2009. It was already well established. In the final months of the war, as Tamil civilians were corralled into the killing grounds of Mullivaikkal, the UN Security Council failed to convene a formal session on the crisis. Diplomatic cables later revealed that UN staff on the ground had documented the shelling of hospitals and civilian areas and concluded that tens of thousands were being killed, but that their superiors in New York were suppressing the figures for fear of embarrassing the Sri Lankan government and its allies. The UN’s own internal review — the Petrie Report of 2012 — concluded that the organisation had suffered a ‘systemic failure’ in Sri Lanka, a failure characterised by the subordination of human rights principles to diplomatic and institutional convenience. It was a damning finding. It changed nothing.
In the years since, the principal accountability mechanism has been the UN Human Rights Council. The Council has adopted successive resolutions on Sri Lanka — eight to date — calling for accountability, institutional reform, and cooperation with international investigations. Sri Lanka has rejected each one. It withdrew its co-sponsorship of resolutions it had itself agreed to. It refused to implement the transitional justice mechanisms it had pledged to establish. Successive governments have appointed at least ten separate domestic commissions since the 1990s, none of which produced accountability of any kind. In March 2026, international rights organisations appearing before the sixty-first session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva made clear that, more than a year into the presidency of Anura Kumara Dissanayake — elected on explicit promises of reform and accountability — no measurable progress had been made. As those organisations stated plainly: the pattern is clear. Commitments are made in Geneva, but impunity continues at home.
In October 2025, the Human Rights Council renewed the mandate of the UN Sri Lanka Accountability Project — the evidence-preservation mechanism established in 2021 to collect and safeguard material for future prosecutions — for a further two years. It is a welcome, if modest, step. But evidence preservation is not accountability. A warehouse of documented atrocities, however meticulously maintained, does not constitute justice for the families of those who were killed, disappeared, or subjected to sexual violence in the final months of the war. The Tamil community has been waiting for justice for over seventy years. The international community’s answer, in 2026, is to promise that it will continue to collect evidence for a future that remains as distant as ever.
Meanwhile, on the ground in Sri Lanka, the structural conditions that gave rise to the violence remain largely unchanged. The Prevention of Terrorism Act — a law routinely used as an instrument of oppression against Tamil and Muslim communities — has not been repealed, notwithstanding repeated government promises to do so. Its use in the first five months of 2025 exceeded the total for all of 2024. Mass graves continue to be discovered in the Tamil north and east, but excavations are obstructed and DNA testing withheld. Military occupation of Tamil land continues, accompanied by the sustained demographic and cultural transformation of the Tamil homeland through state-sponsored colonisation. Memorials to the Tamil dead have been demolished. Survivors and human rights defenders who document ongoing violations are subjected to surveillance, harassment, and intimidation. As the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights observed in his September 2025 report, the structural conditions that led to past violations persist.
The question that must be confronted is whether the international legal and institutional framework is capable of delivering justice for the Tamil people — or whether Sri Lanka represents a definitive case study in the limits of that framework when faced with a state that is geopolitically inconvenient to hold to account.
The ICC has no jurisdiction over Sri Lanka, which is not a State Party to the Rome Statute and has shown no inclination to become one. The Human Rights Council, a political body whose membership includes states with their own accountability deficits, has proven unable to compel compliance with its resolutions. The Security Council, the only body with the authority to refer the situation to the ICC or establish an ad hoc tribunal, is paralysed by the veto interests of permanent members who have cultivated relations with Colombo. Universal jurisdiction — the principle that permits domestic courts to prosecute crimes against humanity and genocide regardless of where they were committed — offers a theoretically available path. A small number of states, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, have imposed targeted sanctions on Sri Lankan military commanders accused of civil war-era crimes. But sanctions without prosecution are a gesture, not an accountability mechanism. They do not give the Tamil dead their names back. They do not answer the questions of the families of the disappeared. And they do not interrupt the ongoing process by which the Tamil homeland is systematically erased.
It has become fashionable, in international human rights discourse, to speak of a ‘justice gap’ — the distance between the aspirations of international law and the reality of its enforcement. Sri Lanka did not fall into that gap by accident. It was placed there. It was placed there by the geopolitical calculations of states that armed, funded, and diplomatically shielded the Sri Lankan government during and after the war. It was placed there by an international institutional architecture that privileges state sovereignty over the rights of the communities those states destroy. And it is kept there by a collective international amnesia that allows some genocides to command the world’s attention while others are consigned to the footnotes of history.
That amnesia has a genealogy. In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces overran the UN-designated safe area of Srebrenica and systematically executed more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys over the course of several days. The International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and subsequently the State Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina have all confirmed that what took place at Srebrenica was genocide. It took years of sustained legal effort, political pressure, and the persistent advocacy of survivors and their families to reach that determination. And yet, even with a formal legal finding of genocide, meaningful accountability remained selective, incomplete, and bitterly contested. Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić were ultimately convicted. The states and international institutions whose failures enabled the massacre — including the United Nations, which had deployed peacekeepers it then prevented from intervening — were never held to comparable account. Srebrenica is remembered. But the lessons of Srebrenica — about the speed with which states can commit atrocities in plain sight, about the complicity of inaction, about the inadequacy of safe zones and diplomatic assurances — appear to have been forgotten almost as quickly as the memorials were built.
The parallels with Gaza need no elaboration for those paying attention. The images from northern Gaza — civilians driven into shrinking designated ‘safe’ corridors that offer no safety; hospitals bombed; aid denied; mass graves; the relentless compression of a civilian population with nowhere to go — bear a structural resemblance to Mullivaikkal that is too precise to be coincidental and too disturbing to be dismissed. The International Court of Justice has issued provisional measures. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants. And yet the killing continues. As it did in Srebrenica, after the warnings. As it did in Sri Lanka, after the resolutions. The architecture of international law has generated paper, and the dying has continued regardless. What connects these episodes is not merely the nature of the violence, but the nature of the international response: urgent concern, institutional activity, and ultimate impunity.
There is, however, a deeper pathology at work — one that goes beyond the structural failures of particular institutions. It is the pathology of serial moral amnesia. Each new atrocity does not merely demand attention in its own right; it actively displaces the one before it. The world’s focus is finite. Its outrage is rationed. When Gaza, Syria, Yemen, Myanmar and Ukraine fills the headlines, Sri Lanka recedes. When Sri Lanka was burning in 2009, the world’s attention had already moved elsewhere. When Srebrenica was happening in 1995, the international community was consumed by the broader Bosnian war while simultaneously managing crises in Rwanda, Somalia, and Haiti. There is always another emergency to absorb the moral energy that a previous atrocity briefly generated. And each time the camera moves on, the communities left behind — the Tamil survivors of Mullivaikkal, the families of the Srebrenica dead, the people of Gaza — find themselves not merely abandoned by history, but actively written out of it. The mechanism by which this happens is not malicious in any coordinated sense. It is structural. A global media ecosystem that cannot sustain attention across multiple simultaneous crises; a political culture in which governments respond to public pressure rather than to principle; an international institutional framework in which accountability is available only to those with the geopolitical leverage to demand it. The result is a hierarchy of victims — not based on the severity of what was done to them, but on the strategic interests of the states that control the levers of international justice. Some genocides are named and prosecuted. Others are euphemised as ‘conflict’ or ‘civil war’ and left to dissolve into the fog of political inconvenience. The Tamil genocide belongs, so far, to the second category. The question is whether it must remain there.
The Tamil people are not a footnote. Mullivaikkal is not a footnote. The enforced disappearance of an estimated 90,000 people is not a footnote. The destruction of a culture, a language, a homeland and a people — pursued over seventy years with the deliberate intent of eliminating Tamil political and demographic existence in Sri Lanka — is not a footnote. It is one of the defining human rights catastrophes of the modern era, and it demands a response commensurate with its scale.
That response must begin with naming what happened. Genocide requires recognition before it can receive redress. It requires states to move beyond the careful diplomatic circumlocutions that protect bilateral relationships at the expense of the truth. It requires the UN to reckon honestly with its own documented failures in 2009. It requires the international legal community to press for the kind of independent, international accountability mechanism — whether before the International Court of Justice, an ad hoc tribunal, or through coordinated universal jurisdiction prosecutions — that the evidence has long since justified.
It has been seventeen years since Mullivaikkal. It has been more than seventy years since the Tamil people first began to be systematically stripped of their rights, their culture, and their lives. The international community has had time enough to find its voice. What it has lacked, and what it must urgently develop, is the political courage to use it.
The forgotten genocide will not remain forgotten forever. The question is only whether the international community will choose to remember it — and act — while those who survived it are still alive to see justice done.
Toby Cadman is a barrister and Head of Outline Chambers. He has extensive experience in international criminal law, human rights, and sanctions. He has previously reported on the Tamil genocide and Sri Lanka's impunity crisis.
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