(Ed. Note: In an effort to improve its human rights image, the Sri Lankan government agreed to evacuate Jaffna about 10 months after a soldier, Somarantne Rajapakse told the court that there were 10 sites of mass graves in Chemmani, 4 kms north of Jaffna. The long-awaited exhumation of the alleged mass graves at began in the presence of international monitors and families of the disappeared. Representatives of Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights observed the exhumation.)

Wailing mothers and sobbing fathers filed past scraps of clothing and two human skeletons displayed on wooden tables in a police station on 16 June 1999 to determine if the remains belonged to some 300 people who disappeared while in military custody.

In the presence of Western observers including the Amnesty International forensic experts began exhumation of reported mass graves in Chemmani. The skeletons -- one blindfolded and bound -- were exhumed at one of the graves.

The remains were sent to experts in Galle, 68 miles south of the capital, Colombo, for further examination. The District Magistrate M. Elamchelian ruled that digging for more bodies can resume only after the experts submit their reports. Relatives of the missing Tamils have to wait, probably months from now, to find out what had happened to their love ones.

The skeletons were identified as R.S. Kumar, 29, and Mahendran Babu, 23, both car mechanics in Jaffna. They disappeared after being picked up by the army in 1996 at the garage where they worked. Kumar's wife, Shalini, identified his skeleton by the clothes and tobacco-stained teeth.

The garage owner identified Babu by his silver pendant and his khaki clothes.

The relatives of the missing people, who call themselves Members of the Guardian Association for Persons Arrested and Disappeared started assembling at the police station at dawn.

"We have documented 270 cases of our children who have disappeared after they were picked up by the army since 1996," said the organisation's secretary, S. Satkuman.

About 600 Tamils disappeared from military custody after government troops captured the peninsula in early 1996. Jaffna, an area where Tamils form a majority, was a rebel stronghold of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who have been fighting for a separate homeland.

More than 50,000 people are estimated to have died in this lingering 16 year ethnic conflict, in which tens of thousands of Sri Lankans have become refugees or been displaced. Civil war has scattered families, while many await news of a missing son, husband or daughter.

A recent report of the U.N Commission on Human Rights put Sri Lanka second after Iraq on a list of countries where people have ''disappeared'' in armed conflict. While Iraq cannot account for 16,348 citizens, Sri Lanka has 12,108 missing people.

The vast majority of the cases, the reports states ''occurred during 1996 in Jaffna, Batticaloa and Mannar districts, frequently in the context of so-called round-up operations by military personnel. The number of disappearances increased steeply following the resumption of hostilities in 1995.''

Now relatives and friends of some of the missing people are likely to know what happened, though as Ingrid Massage of Amnesty International said here, ''happiness will not come out of it (knowing).''

Sreskeran Pathmini, 27, who watched her husband being taken away by Sri Lankan soldiers in uniform in 1996, grieves openly.

''They destroyed my life when they took him. I can never be happy if they find him at Chemmani,'' she said outside a Jaffna courtroom where the exhumation process officially began.

She was among a group of some 30 women who had arrived for the reopening of graves. They were either mothers or wives of teenage boys and young adults who had 'disappeared' in 1996.

Many Sri Lankans have been missing since before that, among them majority Sinhalese from the island's south, detained during a violent crack-down on so-called radical left student revolt against the government in the late-1980s.

Most of the victims were unconnected to the extremist People's Liberation Front, better known by its Sinhala acronym JVP, and the ruling Chandrika Kumaratunga government came to power in 1995 promising to order a probe.

Three presidential commissions have received more than 30,000 petitions from relatives of those missing. Many of the cases have been investigated and the guilty identified, but the government has been slow to punish the guilty.

Instead Sri Lanka's government-appointed Human Rights Commission has doled out compensation, in some cases of up to 50,000 rupees (roughly 700 dollars)

Jaffna's only psychiatrist, Dr Daya Somasunderam believes families need to know the truth about their missing members. Having treated some of the affected, he says it will help them complete ''the normal ritual of death and mourning''.

Dr William Haguland of Physicians for Human Rights, among the international observers at the exhumation here, is convinced the process cannot be rushed.

The doctor who has participated in similar exercises in Bosnia and Rwanda, among others, said: ''If done in a hurry, another crime can be perpetrated, evidence will be destroyed, and the families denied the chance of identifying their relatives.''
(Source: This article was compiled from reports by AP and ISP on 17 and 21, June, 1999)