COMMENT The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting is a gathering of leaders from 53 nations largely made up of former territories of the British Empire. They meet to promote common values including equitable growth, democracy, accountability, rule of law and human rights.

Sri Lanka, which will host the next meeting on Nov 15-17, has a tumultuous and tragic history. For three decades, it was wracked by violent rebellions. Tens of thousands lost their lives, families were torn apart, and many people suffered arbitrary arrest, torture and enforced disappearance.

The uprising in the southern part of the country by an extremist faction of the Sinhala- majority community was ruthlessly crushed in the 1980s but the skeletons, literally, still emerge from mass graves where the bodies of the disappeared were dumped after executions