Let us imagine a stone simple and unmarked by politics placed at the heart of this island. Not in the North. Not in the South. No flag. No rifle. Only these words carved deep into the granite:
“They were all ours.”
Because they truly were.
We’ve long wished for a leader untouched by dynasties, uncorrupted by power, and unfettered by division. A voice untainted by allegiance to tribe or flag.
Not a ruler, but a mirror.
Not someone to conquer or to be feared, but someone to help us remember, to grieve, to wake.
What you’re about to hear was never delivered from a podium dressed in national pride. It rises instead from the earth itself from its bloodstained roots, from grieving mothers, from the voices of a generation scattered across oceans.
It is not a speech of triumph, but a confession.
A beginning that never was.
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My fellow Sri Lankans, children, elders, dreamers, forgotten ones
I am not your President. I am not your Prime Minister.
I am the voice you buried to stay comfortable. The truth you exiled in 2009.
I speak now not to be followed, but to be felt.
On this May 19th, sixteen years after the war was declared over, I do not speak to celebrate.
I speak to disturb.
I speak to question the delusion that we ever truly won.
What was our victory?
We purged insurgents, perhaps.
But we also buried the future our youth, our ideas, our unity.
We were taught we defeated terror.
But no one told us that terror can take new shapes
One dies in the jungle. Another is elected to Parliament.
One lays landmines. Another destroys livelihoods.
What we called peace might only be the silence of cemeteries.
What we call unity perhaps only trauma partitioned across ethnic lines.
The ground of Mullivaikkal is still damp with grief.
The northern seas still whisper names we dared not remember.
Those who survived carry shame.
Those who died were denied even dignity.
History here is broadcast by the loudest voices and the most photogenic faces.
Heroes are made on stages.
But the wounded the widowed, the motherless are silenced.
There were “architects of peace” on TV,
while real mothers crossed minefields barefoot, looking for the bones of their children.
Those who fought bled in bunkers.
Those who cheered held remotes.
Pericles once said that courage leads to freedom, and freedom to happiness.
We had courage in battle.
But not the courage to be truthful.
We dressed up our shame in patriotism,
as though grief were a uniform to wear on special occasions.
Let me be plain:
There is nothing noble in a child without legs.
There is no glory in a mass grave.
And yet, those who sent young men to die live in mansions.
Their wealth stored safely abroad.
Their children inherit chairs in ministries, not trauma in their bones.
When the war ended, the corruption anthem began.
Nepotism waved a flag.
And the crowd applauded the spectacle of our own forgetting.
True leadership is not about building monuments.
It is about kneeling beside a mother who lost her child.
It is about saying:
“We were wrong. We failed you.”
But did we ever say it?
No
We built statues on graves.
We renamed roads, but erased truths.
The Tamil mourns in silence.
The Sinhalese cheers in parade.
And the Marxist dreamer? Forgotten buried beneath bureaucracy.
60,000 southern youth killed. No TV coverage. No speeches. Just silence.
No flag waved for them.
They died for a vision, not a government.
And in this country, visions are met with bullets.
We are a nation that has mastered the art of killing rebels
but never learned how to speak to them.
Victory is not the death of the enemy.
It is the survival of your humanity.
Lincoln, in another broken land, once said:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all… let us bind the nation’s wounds.”
We chose the opposite.
We wrote our peace with vengeance.
We calculated it in ethnic arithmetic.
So, who do we trust now?
The rebels?
Some were mad, others martyred.
The soldiers?
Some died for duty, others for a paycheck.
The leaders?
They rose on stolen gold and promised salvation then rewrote history in their image.
And the rest of us?
We picked up the shattered pieces of a republic already mortgaged to pride and lies.
Our thinkers escaped.
Our artists surrendered.
The honest were mocked.
And now we stand alone proud, but teetering.
Sri Lanka, once a beacon for the Global South,
is now a warning scribbled on the edge of the IMF’s clipboard.
We are not only broke in money.
We are bankrupt in morality.
There are no common monuments, because we fear shared sorrow.
Our grief is tribal.
Our history segregated.
One man’s villain is another’s hero.
One mother’s wailing is another community’s silence.
Peace cannot bloom in soil divided by bloodlines.
Let me say what no leader ever did:
The war did not end in 2009. It changed costume.
Now, our weapons are inflation and disillusionment.
Our minefields are media narratives.
Our youth don’t carry guns
They carry apathy, hopelessness, exile tickets.
They flee to Canada, Australia, the Gulf.
Our brightest serve coffee in cold cities.
They write poetry we never read.
Because this nation did not lose a war it lost its soul.
And what do we tell the children?
That we were once great?
That we won a war, but forgot to build peace?
That we defeated one terror and gave birth to another this time in suits, in silence, in spreadsheets?
Don’t applaud me.
I am not your savior.
I am your conscience.
I am the speech you should have demanded.
I am the reckoning you still can call for.
Raise no statues for generals.
But plant a tree for each child who vanished.
Let our children learn not how we conquered,
but how we collapsed.
Teach them names not of battles, but of forgotten villages.
Teach them dreams not of war, but of what we lost when we waged it.
The war’s end was not a triumph.
It was a missed chance to become something greater.
So let there be that stone in the island’s centre.
One sentence.
“They were all ours.”
Because they were.
The Tamil boy who wrote poems in Kilinochchi.
The Sinhala girl who danced in Anuradhapura.
The JVP rebel who asked for a trial.
The Muslim fisherman who drowned in wire.
They were all ours.
And we failed them.
The Gospel tells us:
“What you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me.
Let this verse ring from Nandikadal to Hambantota.
From upcountry estates to parliament corridors.
Do not believe in me.
Believe in the silence that comes after this.
Believe in your discomfort.
Because from it will grow truth.
Water it.
Let it bloom.
May this bruised and burdened land remember
what it means to be human.
Let the oceans bring back the blood to the soil,
not as curse, but as call.
Let this V-day not be another celebration of flags,
but the first day of mourning together.
And maybe, just maybe
the first step toward becoming something together.
Thank you.
Not as a leader. Not as a victor.
But as a ghost who speaks the words you still dare not.
SOURCE :- SRI LANKA GUARDIAN
