New mass grave uncovered at Chemmani in northern Sri Lanka

N. Ranges

The exhumation team observing a newly opened grave in Chemmani

In a chilling reminder of the decades-long anti-Tamil racist war, a new mass grave has been discovered at Sittupatthu in Chemmani, on the outskirts of Jaffna town in northern Sri Lanka. This is one of several mass grave sites that have been accidentally found at various places in the North in recent years.

The graves are further evidence of the atrocities committed during the brutal communal war unleashed by successive Colombo governments, which deployed hundreds of thousands of soldiers against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

During the 26-year war, which ended in May 2009 with the LTTE’s defeat, it is estimated that more than 100,000 people—mostly ethnic Tamils in the North and East—were killed. Thousands more were forcibly disappeared. The UN has estimated that about 40,000 civilians were killed during the final months of the war.

These two provinces remain under heavy military control, and the scars of the conflict continue to resurface periodically.

During an excavation for the construction of an electric crematorium at Chemmani’s Sinthupaththi Hindu cremation ground, a new mass grave containing fragments of human bones was discovered on February 20. Acting on a court directive, a team of archaeologists led by Professor Raj Somadeva commenced the formal excavation on May 15.

By last week, about 42 human skeletons had been found. According to news reports, 37 complete skeletal remains have been exhumed and carefully preserved for forensic analysis.

One of the skeletons found in the exhumation of mass graves at Chemmani

The Sunday Times reported that last week excavation workers also found a dress, a bag, slippers and a toy. Earlier, uncovered items included clothing, small glass bangles and a blue cloth school bag, which was identified as aid distributed by an aid organisation to schoolchildren in the North and East. So far, according to reports, three skeletal remains have been classified as those of babies younger than 10 months old.

The report states that the human remains were buried just 1.6 feet beneath the surface—an unusually shallow burial in stark contrast to the typical six-foot burial depth.

These bodies will eventually be analysed by medical experts to try to determine the cause of death. Professor Somadeva will examine artefacts such as dated cellophane wrappers and clothing to estimate the time of burial. He also noted that satellite imagery and drone photography had helped identify a second probable burial site within the cemetery.

However, if one takes into account what happened previously when mass graves have been unearthed in the North and East, it is likely that a thorough investigation will be abandoned and the truth will be buried.

This is the second time that a mass grave has been found at the same Chemmani site. Twenty-five years ago, in 1999, a grave containing 15 skeletal remains was uncovered following a confession by Corporal Somaratna Rajapakse, who had served in northern Sri Lanka during 1995–96.

Rajapakse’s disclosure came after he was convicted and sentenced to death, along with four other Sri Lankan army personnel, for the rape and murder of Tamil schoolgirl Krishanthi Kumaraswamy and members of her family who went in search of the missing girl.

He provided a chilling account of how the military had captured, tortured and summarily executed individuals who had been arrested or abducted as alleged “LTTE suspects.” The incident was extensively reported by the World Socialist Web Site at the time. According to information gathered during the 1995–96 period, over 600 persons “disappeared” in the North.

This was during the time when the government of President Chandrika Kumaratunga resumed the bloody war in April 1995, ending her bogus peace talks with the LTTE.

When the mass grave was found in 1999, relatives of disappeared persons filed cases in the Jaffna courts. According to the Center for Human Rights and Development, the military later complained it could not obtain justice from the Jaffna courts and requested the cases be transferred to Anuradhapura, the capital of North Central Province.

However, after attending several court sessions, the people who filed the cases refused to continue attending, citing harassments from the military, resulting in the dismissal of the cases.

Skeleton, thought to be a child, found in Chemmani mass grave

The graves at Chemmani represent only a fraction of the widespread war crimes committed by the military with impunity, under the patronage of successive Colombo governments.

More mass graves have been uncovered across the North and East provinces, including discoveries in Thiruketheeswaram, Mannar district in 2013; the Co-operative Wholesale Establishment premises in Mannar in 2018; Kokkuthoduvai, Mullaitivu district in 2021; and Kalavanchikudy, Batticaloa district in 2014.

Excavations were conducted at these places but no further investigations subsequently took place.

The discovery of the latest mass grave has intensified concerns over the fate of the disappeared and sparked opposition among the Tamil population. On June 5, the Association for Relatives of the Enforced Disappearances in the Northern and Eastern Provinces (ARED) issued a statement and held a demonstration near the Chemmani mass grave.

Protesters raised five key demands, including an international investigation adhering to global standards and involving the UN.

Since 2011, the so-called Sri Lanka core group in the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), led by the US, UK, Canada and France, has sponsored resolutions on human rights violations during the conflict in Sri Lanka.

However, far from being concerned about war crimes, the US in particular exploited the resolutions to pressure Sri Lankan governments to distance themselves from Beijing and to align with Washington-led military preparations against China.

Under Trump, the US withdrew from the UN human rights body, accusing it of bias against Israel. The UK now heads the so-called core group.

Since 2017, ARED has been active in protests, making appeals to these international powers.

The Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF), the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK) and various other Tamil nationalist groups and diaspora organisations are responsible for cultivating the myth that these imperialist powers are interested in justice.

This is politically criminal. These same imperialist powers are all responsible for war crimes and currently are fully backing Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.

The Tamil parties are appealing to this “international community” not to address human rights, but to put pressure on Colombo to concede greater powers and privileges to the Tamil elites in the North and East.

The current Sri Lankan government is led by the Sinhala chauvinist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which supported the communal war against the LTTE from its inception. It remains firmly opposed to any genuine investigation into military-perpetrated war crimes.

In October 2024, the JVP-led government reaffirmed its opposition to any international investigation into war crimes by rejecting a UNHRC resolution calling for such an inquiry.

The JVP won office for the first time last year by capitalising on widespread opposition to traditional capitalist parties and promises to protect democratic rights, including those of the Tamil population. It has since abandoned its commitments, along with its other empty election promises.

Job cuts spread and deepen at Australian universities

Mike Head

Charles Sturt University (CSU), one of Australia’s largest regional universities, last month became the latest of the country’s 39 public universities to announce or foreshadow damaging job losses.

Without specifying the numbers of retrenchments, CSU vice-chancellor Renée Leon said the “distressing” cuts flowed from the Albanese Labor government’s policies to restrict the number of international students.

Charles Sturt University [Photo: Charles Sturt University]

Leon cited a sharp drop in the number of overseas students, whose fees had previously been used to subsidise students from regional, rural and remote locations. “In 2019 Charles Sturt had 8,460 international students. In 2024, we had approximately 10 percent of that number.”

For more than six months, despite outraged protests by staff and students at many individual universities, managements have continued to unveil the destruction of academic and professional staff jobs—now over 3,000 nationally.

These retrenchments are mostly a direct result of the Albanese government’s reactionary cuts to enrolments by overseas students, on whose exorbitant fees the chronically-underfunded universities have increasingly relied for the past decade and a half.

By cutting the enrolments, the Labor government is deliberately applying financial pressure to the universities, in order to restructure them to align with “national priorities” set out in last year’s Universities Accord report.

The plunge in numbers at CSU indicates that the government’s measures—setting enrolment caps, more than doubling visa fees and rejecting thousands of visa applications—are having a particularly severe impact on regional universities and communities.

The CSU cuts will hit hard in areas where there is little alternative employment, especially in the education sector. CSU has campuses in regional centres across the state of New South Wales, in Bathurst, Wagga Wagga, Albury-Wodonga, Dubbo, Orange and Port Macquarie.

Even deeper and wider cuts are to come. Education Minister Jason Clare has boasted of slashing the number of new international students by 30 percent this year, but the government has vowed to halve them, to 270,000 a year, from the level of 548,000 in 2023. That means greater job losses for 2026 and 2027.

Other regional universities are among those suffering the most. At the University of Southern Queensland, a proposed restructure would eliminate 150 full-time positions, after an earlier round of cuts in late 2024 terminated 109 roles, including 85 redundancies and 24 pre-retirement arrangements.

This would mean major course cuts and bring the total loss of jobs since the start of 2024 to just under 20 percent of the university’s workforce.

At Federation University, which has campuses across Victoria, management is moving to cut 200 full-time equivalent positions, despite spirited protests by staff and students. The number of international students attending Federation fell by 49 percent between 2019 and 2023.

Job destruction is also intensifying at major city universities, including most recently at Western Sydney University and Sydney’s Macquarie University.

At the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, the management last month formally launched the first of several rounds of job cuts.

It issued “change proposals” under its enterprise agreement with the trade unions to eliminate 37 jobs in Information Technology Services, the Information Security Office and the Planning and Service Performance division. That represents a reduction of between 9 and 14 percent of staff in each of those three areas.

ANU management this week unveiled 59 more academic and professional job cuts in the College of Science and Medicine, the College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Research and Innovation Portfolio.

ANU is expected to announce hundreds more job losses by the end of September, also to be executed via “change proposals.” ANU’s staffing levels already have been reduced by 635 full-time equivalent positions since March 2024, mostly through misnamed “voluntary” redundancies.

Nevertheless, the leaders of the main campus unions, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), are continuing to oppose any unified fight by university workers and students against the flood of job destruction and accompanying course closures.

Instead, the union apparatuses have sought to blame individual vice-chancellors for the job destruction, blatantly trying to politically shield the Labor government.

At ANU, the NTEU Australian Capital Territory division secretary Lachlan Clohesy even urged Education Minister Clare, the chief enforcer of Labor’s cuts, to intervene under federal legislation to sack Vice-Chancellor Genevieve Bell. Clohesy accused her of “single-handedly destroying one of the world’s great universities.”

At the same time, the NTEU is offering to assist the managements to achieve the required cost-cutting by other means, including “voluntary redundancies,” just as the NTEU did at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and in response to each previous attack on jobs and conditions.

In fact, the unions have lined up behind the Labor government on every front. They have refused to oppose the overseas student cuts. The Labor government is vying to outdo the opposition Liberal-National Coalition in blaming students, along with migrant workers, for the housing affordability and cost-of-living crisis that is still devastating working-class households.

The unions have remained silent on another significant contributor to the government’s financial pressure on the universities. The number of commencing domestic undergraduate students also fell to 262,396 in 2023, down by 8.9 percent since 2017.

That is largely due to the punishing fees of nearly $17,000 a year inflicted on arts, humanities, business and law students. Labor has maintained the previous Coalition government’s “job ready graduates” program to push students into “priority” and “skills” courses such as maths, science, teaching and nursing.

The Albanese government’s promise to introduce legislation this year to cut ex-students’ outstanding HECS fee repayment debts by 20 percent will do little to offset this burden.

Without any opposition by the unions, the Labor government also advised universities and researchers to comply with a questionnaire sent by the fascistic Trump administration threatening to cut off joint funding for research unless their projects served the needs of US foreign policy and military objectives. At least 11 universities have suffered research funding cuts as a result, which will mean deeper job losses.

This assault is set to accelerate. July 1 saw the inauguration of an interim government-appointed Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC). As of January 1, each university’s funding will be tied to a “mission-based compact” with ATEC, setting out how the university must contribute to Labor’s “national priorities.”

These priorities were outlined in last year’s Universities Accord report. They include servicing the narrow “skills” requirements of employers and meeting the needs of the AUKUS military pact and military-related industries in preparation for a US-led war against China.

While starving the universities of funds, the government is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into military spending, while backing the Gaza genocide, the criminal attacks on Iran and the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.

China the target in US-Vietnam trade deal

Nick Beams

The agreement reached by the US and Vietnam on “reciprocal tariffs” announced on Wednesday underscores the nature of Trump’s economic war against the world. It is aimed at establishing a global economic dictatorship directed against China, whose rise the US regards as an existential threat.

Under the deal, goods deemed to be of Vietnamese origin will receive a tariff of 20 percent while those designated to have been “transhipped”—that is primarily originating from China—be taxed at 40 percent, just below the initial 46 percent reciprocal tariff threatened against Vietnam on April 2.

Containers are loaded on a ship at the Saigon port in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam on May 3, 2020. [AP Photo/Hau Dinh]

This stipulation sets up an economic minefield for Vietnam and other countries whose economies are part of global supply chains. Items may have components and raw materials originating in China, but are then manufactured or assembled for export to the US and other markets.

How exactly the distinction between a primarily Vietnamese-made item and one that is being “transhipped” has not been spelt out. But it will be largely, if not entirely, determined by the US.

Responding to the US-Vietnam agreement, the Chinese commerce ministry said it was “conducting an assessment” of the deal.

“We firmly oppose any party striking a deal at the expense of China’s interests. If such a situation arises, China will take resolute countermeasures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests,” it said.

Others have already pointed to the essential content of the deal. In comments to the Financial Times, Julien Chaisse, an international law academic in Hong Kong said: “The new US-Vietnam deal is not just about trade; it is clearly aimed at China… it’s meant to block the flow of Chinese goods that often move through Vietnam to dodge existing US duties.

“This fits a much wider trend: the US is lining up bilateral deals with countries near China to tighten economic co-operation and, at the same time, [make] it harder for Beijing to strengthen its supply chain influence.”

Vietnam’s official state media reported that the head of the country’s ruling Communist Party, President To Lam, had a phone call with Trump on Tuesday. The two sides had reached a consensus in a “fair and balanced reciprocal trade agreement framework.”

It was anything but that. Vietnam had a gun held at its head, with the threat that a 46 percent tariff if it did not capitulate would devastate its economy. Bloomberg economists have estimated that even the lower 20 percent tariff could lead to a 25 percent fall in Vietnamese exports to the US, and a possible 2 percent cut in its growth rate.

The US market comprises 30 percent of Vietnam’s exports. Since 2018, Vietnam’s exports to the US have increased from under $50 billion to $137 billion in 2024. Much of this increase was a result of the tariffs against China during the first Trump administration as companies moved operations to Vietnam.

Over the same period US exports to Vietnam have risen from less than $10 billion to just over $13 billion. This has led to a widening trade gap, resulting in it having the third largest trade deficit with the US—more than $123 billion last year.

In typical fashion, Trump used Orwellian language—where words have their opposite meaning—to describe the deal.

“It will be a Great Deal of Cooperation between our two Countries,” he wrote on his social media.

Having imposed major tariffs on the US side, Trump secured agreement from Vietnam that all American goods entering the country would be duty free.

Hailing this decision in a delusional manner, Trump declared: “It is my opinion that the SUV or, as it is sometimes referred to, Large Engine Vehicle, which does so well in the United States, will be a wonderful addition to the various product lines within Vietnam.”

A government survey in Vietnam earlier this year found that only 9 percent of Vietnamese households own a car with most people using motorcycles and motorbikes as their mode of transportation.

The Vietnamese News Agency reported that the president had asked Trump that the US recognise Vietnam as a market economy, which would remove restrictions on its import of high-tech products. This has been a longstanding demand of Hanoi which Washington has consistently dismissed , with no sign of movement on this occasion.

The so-called “deal” has more the character of the unequal treaties imposed on colonies in the heyday of imperialist rule in the late 19th and early 20th centuries than any genuine trade negotiation. Its implications go far beyond Vietnam.

It will be the template for the agreements that the US attempts to impose on other countries, whether they be advanced or less developed economies, above all to disrupt supply lines originating in China.

India, which is reported to be close to securing a framework deal with the US, has been in discussion over what “rules of origin” will apply. According to a report on Bloomberg, Washington has stipulated that to qualify as “Made in India” at least 60 percent of the value added must be locally based. India has pushed for this level to be 35 percent.

The issue is certain to be at the centre of US negotiations with other countries.

In a recent report cited by Bloomberg, Alicia Garcia Herrero, Asia-Pacific chief economist at the financial firms Natixis, said: “Asia’s dilemma when it comes to Trump’s trade war is all about dependence on US final demand while relying on China’s value-added in domestic production.” Vietnam, Cambodia and Taiwan are among the most exposed.

The trade war has a significant military component. It is aimed at forcing those countries, particularly in Asia, which have been seeking to strategically balance between Washington and Beijing, to get off the fence and more directly align themselves with the US preparations for war against China.

This is clearly recognised in Beijing, and it may well respond.

Bloomberg economist Rana Sajedi noted: “The looming question now is how China will respond. Beijing has made clear that it would respond to deals that come at the expense of Chinese interests and the decision to agree to higher tariffs on goods deemed to be ‘transhipped’ through Vietnam may fall in that category.”

On the other hand, it may decide to stay its hand, not wishing to upset the delicate strategical balance in southeast Asia. In any case, the issue is going to arise again because the US is pushing for anti-China measures to be included in any agreements with the European powers.

Such measures were part of the agreement with the UK in May. It included supply chain security requirements that sectors such as steel, pharmaceutical and aerospace are not sourced from or reliant on Chinese inputs.

The deal committed the UK and the US to enhanced cooperation on investment security and export controls. It stipulated that there be coordinated action to address “non-market policies of third countries”—a code phrase for China.

It also made clear that tariff reductions in UK exports such as cars and metals were conditional on compliance with US national security requirements. Such stipulations will not stop at the UK.