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No Figure Has Been Accurately Determined
On 13 May 2009 the United Nations country team in Colombo stopped counting the dead in the Vanni. Not because the dying stopped. It stopped six days before the war ended, in the middle of the worst fortnight of the entire campaign, because the method it had been using had become impossible to apply.
The method was strict. An incident was dismissed unless three sources verified it and it could not have been double-counted. By that standard the country team arrived at 7,721 civilians killed and 18,479 injured between August 2008 and 13 May 2009.
It was the most rigorous count anyone attempted, the UN would not release it, and it is a floor.
The window opens in September
In September 2008 the Sri Lankan government told United Nations agencies it could no longer guarantee their safety in the Vanni, the stretch of northern territory the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had governed as a de facto state, and they withdrew.
The Secretary-General's Panel of Experts, chaired by Marzuki Darusman and reporting in 2011, opened its account at that exact moment. "Between September 2008 and 19 May 2009," it found, "the Sri Lanka Army advanced its military campaign into the Vanni using large-scale and widespread shelling, causing large numbers of civilian deaths."
How many people were inside is disputed by the people trying to help them. Darusman worked from roughly 330,000 civilians trapped. The UN's own internal review the following year said "360,000 or more." Two UN bodies, at least thirty thousand apart.
The zones the army drew itself
On 21 January 2009 the Sri Lankan military declared a No Fire Zone of roughly 35.5 square kilometres, covering Suthanthirapuram, Udayaarkaddu North, Vallipunam and Thevipuram. On 12 February it declared a second, a coastal strip east of the Nanthikadal lagoon. A third followed.
Each zone was smaller than the last and further east, tracking the LTTE's retreat toward the sea. None was agreed with the LTTE. The government announced them unilaterally, and hundreds of thousands of people walked into them because the state shelling them had said they would be safe there.
The International Crisis Group's 2010 investigation named hospital after hospital hit inside or beside those zones: Puthukkudiyiruppu, Ponnambalam Memorial, Putumattalan, and the makeshift wards at Mullivaikkal. Darusman was flat: "All hospitals in the Vanni were hit by mortars and artillery, some of them were hit repeatedly, despite the fact that their locations were well-known to the Government."
Before any of the shelling there was a population figure, and the population figure was a weapon. Crisis Group found the government "knowingly claiming the civilian population was less than one third its actual size" and denying adequate supplies. Darusman found that it "purposefully underestimated the number of civilians who remained in the conflict zone."
Three ways to count
Almost everything written about the Sri Lankan endgame treats the casualty estimates as rival guesses at one quantity, then splits the difference. Two of the three are not rival guesses at all. They measure different things, over different windows, by different methods.
7,721 is a count. Verified deaths, three sources each, August 2008 to 13 May 2009. It excludes doubtful cases by design and it stops before the final assault.
40,000 is a relayed estimate, and the most misused number in the file. The Darusman panel did not find that 40,000 civilians died. It found the opposite of a finding: "By all indications, the death toll was extremely high, although even today no figure has been accurately determined." What it recorded was that "a number of credible sources have estimated that there could have been as many as 40,000 civilian deaths." An estimate the UN passed on has spent fifteen years being reported as a finding the UN made.
Around 146,000 is a subtraction. Bishop Rayappu Joseph of Mannar took local government population records for Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu districts dated 30 September to 1 October 2008, showing 429,059 people, and set them against the 282,380 who had reached government-controlled areas according to a UN update of 10 July 2009. He put the gap to the government's own commission as a question, not as a death toll. The government answered that the local records had been inflated under LTTE pressure to exaggerate humanitarian need. Crisis Group's assessment of that answer was that the inflation "is unlikely to have been large enough to explain all, or even most, of the discrepancies."
When the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights finished its own investigation in 2015 it declined to give a number at all, saying only that thousands, likely tens of thousands, lost their lives. Crisis Group was blunter: these months saw "tens of thousands of Tamil civilian men, women, children and the elderly killed."
So the honest sentence is not "somewhere between 7,000 and 40,000." It is this: a verified minimum that stops six days before the end, an estimate the UN passed on without adopting, and a population gap nobody has closed.
The government's own count
Between June and August 2011 Sri Lanka's Department of Census and Statistics ran the Enumeration of Vital Events across the Northern Province, a result cited ever since as the settled answer.
Crisis Group summarised it as under 7,000 dead plus another 2,500 missing. The cut covering January to May 2009 gives 8,998 deaths: 1,067 attributed to age or sickness, 35 to natural disaster, 454 to accident, homicide or suicide, 584 to a cause not stated, and 6,858 to a category recorded as "Other."
The exercise did not distinguish civilians from combatants. It assigned responsibility for no death at all. It was conducted in territory under the effective administration of the army accused of the killings. And it was not the independent household survey the government's own Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission asked for in November.
The arithmetic that almost works
The Ministry of Defence made its case in a documentary called Lies Agreed Upon, released on 1 August 2011, and its central argument is arithmetic. If roughly 300,000 people were in the pocket, and 293,800 displaced people were registered coming out, and about 4,600 LTTE combatants were killed, then 99.46 per cent of the population is accounted for and there is no room in the ledger for 40,000 dead.
That deserves a real answer. The 293,800 were individually registered; the 300,000 was never counted. The UN's own panels put the trapped population at 330,000 and 360,000 or more, and local records from late 2008 showed about 429,000. This is the same government that, during the fighting, said roughly 70,000 remained. A government cannot claim 70,000 to justify sending in less rice, then invoke 300,000 to prove nobody died.
The Ministry's other official document is more useful still. Humanitarian Operation, Factual Analysis asserts that a "Zero Civilian casualty" policy was conveyed to all troops, and then says this: "Despite the clear intent of the Government of Sri Lanka and the numerous precautions taken, it was impossible in a battle of this magnitude, against a ruthless opponent actively endangering civilians, for civilian casualties to be avoided." Read whole, that is not an own goal. It is the government's best paragraph. The Lessons Learnt commission did the same thing at greater length: it accepted that "considerable civilian casualties had in fact occurred during the final phase of the conflict" and that "shells had in fact fallen on hospitals causing damage and resulting in casualties," then concluded that "the security forces had not deliberately targeted the civilians in the NFZs."
The half of this file that is not about the army
The Darusman report found credible allegations against both sides. Against the LTTE it listed six: using civilians as a human buffer, killing civilians attempting to flee LTTE control, using military equipment in the proximity of civilians, forced recruitment of children, forced labour, and killing of civilians through suicide attacks.
The hostage situation was built on purpose. Somewhere above 330,000 people were held inside a shrinking strip of coast by an organisation that shot them when they ran, because by 2009 they were the only shield it had left. Any army fighting into that faces a problem with no clean solution.
Nor was its record against civilians a wartime improvisation: 168 suicide attacks by 2000 on Rohan Gunaratna's count, the Colombo Central Bank bombing of 31 January 1996 that killed at least 91 people and injured roughly 1,400, the assassination of a former Indian prime minister in 1991 and of a sitting Sri Lankan president in 1993.
The war ended in May 2009 and it has not resumed. For a great many Sri Lankans of every community that is not an abstraction, and no honest account of the endgame gets to skip past it.
What survives the argument about numbers
The allegations that damage the Sri Lankan state most are not statistical. They concern people who had already stopped fighting, and they do not move when the toll moves.
Surrender plans for the LTTE's political leadership were set in train on 14 May 2009, through the ICRC and the governments of Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States. Asked whether he would witness it himself, the UN's chief of staff Vijay Nambiar said the president's assurances were enough. The government rejected an offer from intermediaries to go to the area. On 17 May, between six and half past six in the morning, Basil Rajapaksa told Balasingham Nadesan that the cadres should walk a specific route to the forward defence lines holding a white flag.
Nadesan and Seevaratnam Puleedevan, head of the LTTE peace secretariat, were dead the following morning. The 2015 OHCHR investigation found reasonable grounds to believe that they and Nadesan's wife Vineetha may have been executed by the security forces some time after six on 18 May. Reasonable grounds to believe is an investigative threshold, not a judicial finding, and who gave the order has never been established.
The government denies the allegation outright. So, within days, did Sarath Fonseka, the former army commander whose newspaper interview started the affair. Campaigning for the presidency in December 2009, he said the paper had taken him out of context and that there had been no surrender attempt on 17, 18 or 19 May.
In August 2009 Channel 4 News broadcast mobile phone footage, said to be from January 2009, of bound and blindfolded Tamil men shot at point-blank range. The Sri Lankan government said it was fabricated. Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, commissioned three independent forensic experts in firearms evidence, pathology and video analysis, and reported on 7 January 2010. They found muzzle gases and recoil consistent with live ammunition rather than blanks, body reactions consistent with such shootings, and no evidence of image manipulation. Alston's conclusion was carefully worded: "Together, the reports by these experts strongly suggest that the video is authentic."
Strongly suggest. Not proved. A precision the UN's own headline dropped.
The 2015 investigation added the part that is hardest to answer at all: that a large number of individuals who surrendered during the final phase of the war were disappeared.
Geneva, twice
In November 2012 the UN published an internal review of its own conduct in Sri Lanka, chaired by Charles Petrie. It found "a grave failure of the UN to adequately respond to early warning and the evolving events during the final stages of the conflict and its aftermath, to the detriment of hundreds of thousands of civilians." The organisation holding the most defensible count in the country had not released it while the shelling was going on.
On 27 May 2009, eight days after the war ended, the Human Rights Council held a special session and passed resolution S-11/1 by 29 votes to 12 with 6 abstentions. It commended the measures the government had taken and welcomed its commitment to human rights.
On 1 October 2015 the same Council adopted resolution 30/1 by consensus, co-sponsored by Sri Lanka itself. On 16 September, releasing his office's investigation, High Commissioner Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein had said that "a purely domestic court procedure will have no chance of overcoming widespread and justifiable suspicions fuelled by decades of violations, malpractice and broken promises."
In February 2020 Sri Lanka's foreign minister announced withdrawal from that co-sponsorship. On 23 March 2021 the Council voted 22 to 11, with 14 abstentions, to have the High Commissioner's office "collect, consolidate, analyse and preserve information and evidence" for future prosecutions.
Twelve years from a resolution that read as congratulation to a standing evidence locker, with a consensus won and lost in between.
The column nobody has closed
The Office on Missing Persons, created by Act No. 14 of 2016 and operational from 2018, is an investigative and truth-seeking body rather than a prosecuting one, and its own statute provides that its findings "shall not give rise to any criminal or civil liability." As of 2021 Sri Lanka had 6,259 cases outstanding before the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, second in the world only to Iraq.
The count stopped on 13 May 2009 at 7,721. Nobody has restarted it since to anyone's satisfaction, and the reason is not that the arithmetic is hard.
Sources consulted
UN Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka (Darusman report), 31 March 2011
Internal Review Panel on UN Action in Sri Lanka (Petrie report), November 2012
OHCHR Investigation on Sri Lanka, A/HRC/30/CRP.2, 16 September 2015
International Crisis Group, War Crimes in Sri Lanka, Asia Report N°191, 17 May 2010
International Crisis Group, Sri Lanka's Dead and Missing, and its LLRC statement, 2011
Report of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission, November 2011
Sri Lanka Ministry of Defence, Humanitarian Operation, Factual Analysis and Lies Agreed Upon, 2011
Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur, on the Channel 4 video, 7 January 2010
UN Human Rights Council resolutions S-11/1, 30/1 and 46/1
ICMP and Amnesty International on enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka
Next in Cold Files: the refugee columns of eastern Zaire, 1996 to 1997, and the UN Mapping Report that took thirteen years to arrive.
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