Discourses of Victimization in Sri Lanka’s Civil War

The Victim

A concern with the suffering and injury of the victim has become the core of criminal justice, human rights, transitional justice, political theory, psychology, peace and conflict studies and conflict resolution practice (Enns, 2007). The category of the victim attracts a neat category of associated rights in criminal justice proceedings, whether at the local level or in international institutions. Crucially, this victim is expected to be innocent and blameless – a non-participant in conflict or violence, who is perceived as being acted upon and victimized by external forces outside his or her control. Inhabiting the position of the victim, those affected by crime or violence are invited to contribute to proceedings in different ways: to testify to the facts of the event, to describe their experience of the crime and its impact on them personally or to attest to their treatment within the justice system (McEvoy and McConnachie, 2013). Whilst concern with the victim and systemic integration of the voice of victims into proceedings is to be commended, it is also important to recognize that this category is susceptible to politicization and abuse. The political capital of suffering is at the core of public and political considerations and reactive legal and policy endeavours. The victim has risen up in the place of the romanticized category of the ‘hero’ that previously occupied the public international imagination. As Huyse (2009: 19) points out, ‘all attention’ was focused on venerated, triumphant soldiers and resistance fighters in the wake of World War II. Since the 1960s, with the rise of victim-focused non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and a new public desire to ‘recognise and cherish the memory of all that pain’, ‘the Unknown Soldier has been replaced more and more by the Unknown Victim’ (2009: 19). Huyse (2009: 19) argues that the scales have tipped too far in recognition and inclusion of the victim, declaring that the ‘cult of the hero and the victor’ has become the ‘cult of the victim’.

McEvoy and McConnachie (2013) provide a historical overview of the literature on victimhood and victimization in order to transpose relevant comparative issues to the area of transitional justice. They describe how the victim literature, especially since the 1980s, began to challenge the traditional offender-focused preoccupation of criminology. This challenge included analysis of the personal impact of crime victimhood and engagement with ‘feminist, critical and “realist” criminological critiques (i.e. that the “official” knowledge on crime was vitiated by variables such as gender, class and ethnicity)’ (McEvoy and McConnachie, 2013: 492). In turn, policymakers began to understand that the effectiveness and legitimacy of the justice system was intimately bound up with the views and experiences of victims (McEvoy and McConnachie, 2013). The inclusion of victims is similarly considered to be crucial to the legitimacy and success of procedures and institutions of justice and reconciliation in the aftermath of mass violence, atrocity or conflict. Such processes emphasize the centrality of the voice of the victim, and the act of testifying to one’s victimhood is expected to be cathartic. The slogan of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) comes to mind: ‘revealing is healing’ (Hamber, 2009: 65).

McEvoy and McConnachie (2013) interrogate the category of the victim in transitional justice processes, where the term is employed to set in motion processes designed to deal with the consequences of past violence, drawing on the assumed needs of the war-affected population. Transitional justice is a field married to an adaptable ‘toolkit’ of options for those seeking to address a society’s legacy of past violence, including truth-telling, criminal prosecutions, reparations, institutional reform and memorialization (ICTJ, 2009). Within these processes, ‘victims’ are ‘sometimes practical but certainly always symbolic beneficiaries’ (McEvoy and McConnachie, 2013: 490). Mechanisms of transitional justice almost always seek to draw legitimacy from their ‘victim-centredness’, and they can co-opt and overplay those justice claims in the pursuit of larger political or social goals (2013: 490). In this process, the victims themselves are deprived of agency.

This article picks up a thread of this important argument and offer an illustrative account of the sociopolitical process of constructing the victim in Sri Lanka. As McEvoy and McConnachie describe, scholars have traced contests over the authentic voice of victims in the political arena since the 1970s. Political actors have long deployed the discourse of victimhood in order to highlight and frame political arguments, and the victim ought not to be naturalized as a neutral category. On the one hand, political agency can certainly be enabled by discourses of oppression and resistance that draw on a history of victimization. Narratives of victimization are often nested in broader discourses and can contribute to the formation of real political agency. The category of the victim, however, can also be weaponized for political gain in a way that does not necessarily benefit the victims nor reflect their needs or aspirations.

Several studies have contributed to understanding victimhood in discourses of martyrdom in the LTTE (de Silva, 1995; Emmanuel, 2000; Natali, 2008; Roberts, 2008), and studies have touched upon how victim discourses relate to majoritarian Sinhala-Buddhist ideology (de Votta, 2007; Kent, 2010). Schubert’s (2013) analysis of former Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa’s discursive construction of a victim–perpetrator binary in the post-war period argues that the identities of victims and ‘perpetrators’ are necessarily fixed by the victor and power holder, who ‘lays down the parameters of a reconciliation process while at the same time legitimising their control and power within a post-conflict situation’ (Schubert, 2013: 4). His analysis is limited to Rajapaksa’s discursive constructions: the LTTE as perpetrators, the state as victor and ‘the collective body’ as victims, though Rajapaksa framed ‘the Tamils as special victims of the LTTE and the Sinhalese as the “real” victims of the LTTE’ (Schubert, 2013: 11). Schubert engages victim discourses as elite sociopolitical constructions but not as sources of political mobilization or resilience.

No study has traced the diffuse and evolving Tamil and Sinhalese discourses of victimhood in the post-war period, their practical manifestations and implications. The political utility of these discourses has not been analyzed outside of the group in question, as a means of engaging the international community, for example. The available literature recognizes how these discourses operated throughout the war as political strategies to consolidate militant authority and ideological consistency within the LTTE and the Tamil community and within the Sri Lankan army and wider Sinhala-Buddhist population. This article addresses the shifting nature of the content and audience of these discourses, as deployed in the final phase of the war and in the post-war ‘transitional’ environment. It also takes into account the recent change of government in Sri Lanka and offers some initial reflections regarding the place of the victim in the new government’s policies. By engaging with narratives of victimhood and collective memory, this article explores the political utility and agentive potential of these concepts in the context of Sri Lankan conflict discourse and post-war dynamics.

This article draws on qualitative interviews carried out in Sri Lanka in February and March 2012 and offers accounts of the enduring grievances of the Tamil population in the Northern and Eastern Provinces. ¹ Fifty-two interviews were conducted across the spectrum of political power and opinion. Interviewees in political circles, administrative governmental positions and civil society were identified through the author’s existing networks and by carrying out media discourse analysis, the results of which also supplemented interview findings. Tamil civil society groups, journalists, academics and politicians in the Tamil-dominated areas of Jaffna, Batticaloa and Trincomalee conveyed the accounts of victimization presented here. These accounts reveal how collective memory – importantly, sustained by commemorative practices – relates to post-war justice claims, resistance and political agency.

Discourses of Victimhood in Sri Lanka’s Civil War

The status of the victim has been appropriated by the elites of each war-affected ethnic community in Sri Lanka. It has been claimed with alacrity in state discourse to denounce acts of ‘terrorism’ against the Sinhalese by the LTTE, adopted by the Tamils to condemn state persecution and borne by the Muslims displaced and killed by the LTTE. Since the end of the war in May 2009, major reports by the United Nations (UN) and human rights groups have signalled the need to pursue accountability for war crimes committed by the state forces and the LTTE in the war’s final phase (UN, 2011; UTHR-J, 2009). The LTTE leadership, however, was summarily executed at war’s end and cannot face such charges (UTHR-J, 2009). The state’s post-war commission, the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) (2011) made many progressive recommendations in pursuit of a political solution to the conflict (including post-war demilitarization and institutional reform), whilst glossing over issues of accountability. The so-called ‘international community’ has encouraged Sri Lanka to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), prompting the state to perform its adherence to the framework of liberal transition. Sri Lankan representatives flew to South Africa in 2014 to learn from the ‘success’ of the South African TRC (AP, 2014). In such post-conflict institutions and processes, elite imposition of a national narrative can seek to consolidate memory into a ‘usable past’ in the service of nation building (Nesiah, 2005). As the concept of collective memory is likely to be a central invocation within the Sri Lankan reconciliation process, the field of memory studies can offer some valuable and timely insights. Particularly, the field facilitates examination of how collective memory can serve as a political tool for local and international elites in the post-conflict environment. These actors, whilst vying to speak for the victims, actually produce and define the category of the victim.

The long and devastating war between the Sri Lankan state and the militant separatist LTTE began in July 1983 and continued for nearly three decades. The LTTE sought self-determination for the Tamil minority, a group that was marginalized and discriminated against in postcolonial nation building by the majority Sinhalese population. The LTTE controlled a civil administration in the Northern Province from 1987 (Philipson, 2011). They merged the Northern and Eastern Provinces and enforced their conception of Tamil culture and identity in the area. This represented a formidable challenge to the unitary structure of the state, which is crucial to majoritarian Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist ideology. The war was marked by atrocity on both sides, including torture, disappearances and other forms of violence directed against civilians. The Tamil population of Sri Lanka’s Vanni region suffered catastrophic violence at the end of the war in 2009. In post-war Sri Lanka, the end of the war has taken its place in the historical narrative of Tamil victimization by the majoritarian Sinhala-Buddhist state. This narrative is further confirmed by the post-war experience of continued repression and military occupation and is politically employed post-war to illustrate the systematic and deliberate nature of state persecution, termed a structural genocide by Guruparan and Rajamanoharan (2013). Post-war commemorative practices are distinct from but culturally associated with the rituals of martyrdom and ‘dead body politics’ that supported the political aspirations of the LTTE (Natali, 2008; Roberts, 2008). Since the 1980s, the LTTE forcefully occupied the role of Tamil representatives in the struggle for a separate state of Tamil Eelam. The political hegemony achieved by the LTTE rested on a fluid and unsettled dynamic of coercion and consent (Stokke, 2006). Despite the killing of its leaders at the end of the war, support for the separatist movement led by the organization persists. Trading in the LTTE’s legacy appears to be a successful political strategy. The Tamil National Alliance (TNA), as will be discussed later, relied on LTTE imagery to heighten popular support in the Northern Provincial Council electoral campaign (Daily News, 2013).

Within the field of memory studies, it is recognized that ‘victim survivors’ (de Mel, 2013) and witnesses of atrocity often struggle under the imposition of a narrative by state elites. Preserving one’s own memory and narrative of an event can be difficult in an unreceptive social and political environment. Collective memories provide a context for identity, and they are powerful meaning-making tools for individuals and communities (Pennebaker and Banasik, 1997: 18). The sustenance of a sense of collectivity by political elites is often in the service of self-serving nation building, but memory practices can also reinforce oppositional forms of political agency. In Sri Lanka, the category of the victim was used strategically by the LTTE to further its political and military goals. The state’s categorization of the Sinhalese victim of terrorism legitimized its continuing military assault on the Tamils and operated to simultaneously dismiss and justify allegations of institutionalized torture, extrajudicial killings and disappearances.

The LTTE recognized the Tamil population as victims of state persecution and presented them as such in political discourse. This victim narrative legitimated Tamil separatist ideology and violence and pragmatic advocacy for international intervention and calls for ceasefire at the end of the war. The discourse of Tamil victimization by the Sinhala state was not fashioned by the LTTE, however; it is inseparable from the long post-independence process by which a Tamil national identity was formed and by which a political framework was adopted, based on the principles of national liberation and self-determination. The discourses of victimization and national liberation are inherently interrelated. The Federal Party employed this amalgamated discourse in the immediate post-Independence period, underpinning the acts of civil disobedience that served as displays of political agency (Manogaran, 1987). Tamil politicians, civil society and international actors advocated during the war for a ‘political solution’ based on Tamil liberation from victimhood.

The Sri Lankan state, for its part, presented the final military assault on the LTTE as a ‘humanitarian rescue mission’ to save the ‘victimized’ Tamil population from the LTTE. The Sri Lankan government shrewdly crafted a narrative in the final stages of the war that sat comfortably with internationally accepted discourses of counterterrorism and humanitarianism, one that did not fundamentally depart from the ‘war for peace’ policy begun under President Chandrika Kumaratunga in 1995 (Uyangoda, 2007). ² The status of the victim and the categories of rights that correspond to that status in international liberal discourse and human rights law did not prevent the people’s rights being overlooked and obliterated by powerful stakeholders to the conflict, especially at the end of the war. The discussion below begins with a description of Sri Lanka’s post-war political environment and the manner in which advocacy on justice issues is staged in public protest and selectively suppressed by the state. Ethnically defined and polarized protests on missing persons from both the Tamil and Sinhala communities demonstrate ongoing interethnic antagonism and illustrate the role of the state in promoting the visibility of the Sinhalese victim. Recalling the atrocities committed against the Tamil community over the course of the war, the following section describes the historical repository of incidents that sustain a Tamil collective memory of victimization. The most recent atrocity – the final phase of the war – is discussed with respect to the profound rupture experienced by the Vanni Tamils, the LTTE’s instrumentalization of civilian victimhood and the incorporation of that violence into a narrative of victimization that was previously centralized by the commemorative practices of the LTTE.

The article then turns to its primary argument: the struggle over how to remember the war’s final phase has profound implications for Tamil political identity and the future of the Sri Lankan state. The state security apparatus has worked consistently to suppress the Tamil narrative of persecution and victimization at the end of the war in order to consolidate and enforce an official collective memory of victory over terrorism: an exclusionary politico-historical construction that is injurious to the Tamil population. The experience of post-war detention, silencing and violent repression has reinforced a counter-memory of relentless victimization by the state among Tamils. The article ends with an analysis of the Tamil post-war reconfiguration of political agency and the continuing transformation of victim discourses in Sri Lanka.

The Post-war Environment

The rupture of the war’s final phase, the defeat of the LTTE and the sudden lack of a bipolar political world left the Tamil people in the Northeast unmoored from a political and social framework. Post-war, the Tamil narrative has been suppressed, manipulated and appropriated by different stakeholders – the government and state media, politicians, Tamil diaspora groups and international human rights organizations – whilst the people themselves are ‘voiceless’ (Interview with journalist, 2012). In the Northeast, fear is prevalent in a highly militarized environment; military informants mingle perceptibly with the people, and those inhabiting the conquered land interpret the presence of the army, in addition to Sinhalese tourists and corporate infrastructure staff, as Sinhala majority colonization (Interviews, 2012). An astonishing number of army camps are visible along the A9, the major road between Sri Lanka’s capital city, Colombo, and Jaffna, the cultural capital of Tamil Eelam. The Sri Lankan army is involved in all arenas of civilian administration and, increasingly, schooling and employment (Crisis Group, 2012; Interviews, 2012; Satkunanathan, 2013). The army has infiltrated all aspects of social life, employment, education and governance (Satkunanathan, 2013). The official post-war narrative portrays the military as a benevolent force, offering services to the people. Tamil politicians and civil society groups, however, describe a military occupation of the Tamil homeland (Interview with lawyer, journalist, 2012; Wigneswaran, 2014). The conflict has brought about a state of generalized insecurity and a rupture of the social fabric (Interviews with civil society, 2012). The rhetoric of ‘recovery’ and ‘reconciliation’ – put forward by a state appropriating the language of transitional justice – has no pertinence in this context of abjection and political disempowerment. After the end of the war, Tamil politicians could exchange the status of victims for nothing of value, certainly not political gain. ³

The Tamil narrative reaches the outside world in mediated form, through activists, NGOs and politicians. It is appropriated and interpreted by human rights organizations and ‘transitional justice entrepreneurs’ (Madlingozi, 2010), who claim to speak for victims in transitional justice processes, including Sinhalese reconciliation workers and international actors. These actors may, of course, ‘see themselves as genuinely representing the views and interests of victims’ but often contribute to perpetuating victimhood and ‘sometimes fail to sufficiently problematise the power relations at work’ (McEvoy and McConnachie, 2013: 498). The experiences narrated by the Tamil people are arrogated to fit the agenda of those actors, embedded in the modalities of political advocacy, the transitional justice paradigm, geopolitical interests and the human rights framework. In post-war Sri Lanka:

… articulations of transitional justice are closely bound up with the political identity and interests of those who express them, with actors utilizing the language and practices of the paradigm as a means of fulfilling their goals (Gowing, 2013: 6).

Defining Events in Tamil Victimhood Discourse

The experience of victimhood is often at the centre of defining moments in history: moments that shape political trajectories irrevocably. By actively remembering particular incidents as illustrations of victimhood at the hands of the enemy or oppressor, strong narratives of resistance are formed. One example of such a defining moment is the 1948 Palestine Nakba (or ‘Catastrophe’), which saw the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes by the Israeli forces, during which time the Independence of the State of Israel was declared. Another is the British introduction of a policy of internment in Northern Ireland in 1971, which led to mass arbitrary imprisonment without trial and the subsequent politicization of a generation of Irish Republicans. The memory of persecution at specific junctures can sustain a political ideology of victimhood that continually informs and transforms resistance to state violence and repression. Whilst these particular events are ‘remembered’ as the shared basis of peoplehood, Laleh Khalili (2007: 3) reminds us that ‘the construction and reconstruction of these events, the shifting mood of commemorative narratives, and ruptures in commemorative practices surrounding these events’ speak to a fluid and politicized form of social memory. These memories are powerful means of engaging and mobilizing communities, and they summon history to explain and frame current sociopolitical realities.

The victimhood discourse draws on a nourishing history. The self-identification of Tamil as victims of majority Sinhalese rule drove the Tamil secessionist movement that officially began in May 1976. The Vaddukoddai Resolution, adopted by Tamil politicians, declared the goal of a separate state of Tamil Eelam (or Thāmilīlam) (Roberts, 2013: 59). This movement was in response to the ‘Sinhala-Only Act’ implemented under the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lanka Freedom Party in 1956 and associated linguistic–nationalist institutional practices and social changes that facilitated discrimination against the Tamils in education, public service employment and interaction with state institutions and the majority Sinhala community (DeVotta, 2005). A political Buddhism supported the Sinhala-Only movement, declaring the Sinhala-Buddhist responsibility to protect the purely Buddhist nature of the island (Tambiah, 1992). Sinhalese politicians, capturing postcolonial nationalist sentiment, framed the survival and continuance of Sinhala culture, and its ‘divine tryst’ with Buddhism, as being under threat (Radhakrishnan, 2010: 97). The Tamils, perceived to be favoured by the British colonizers and representing a threat to Sinhala-Buddhist ideology, were marginalized and rejected in postcolonial nation building. The emergence of various militant separatist groups in this repressive and exclusionary political environment in the early 1980s – of which the LTTE was the most successful and brutal – confirmed that perception for the Sinhalese. Elite politicians in the south framed separatist violence as Tamil acts of aggression to which they were forced to respond (Derges, 2012).

Beginning on 23 July 1983, a week-long, countrywide anti-Tamil pogrom was perpetrated. It has become known as Black July. This atrocity saw members of the Sinhalese community turn on their Tamil neighbours in retaliation for the murder of 13 Sri Lankan soldiers by the LTTE, an event that crystallized rising anti-Tamil sentiment brought on by the formation of violent Tamil separatist groups. ⁴ Mob members were furnished with electoral lists to confirm ethnicity, prompting allegations of Sinhalese governmental involvement in the attacks. Casualty estimates range from the official death toll of 380 to 3,000 Tamil citizens. Following the week of violence, 700,000 Tamils are thought to have fled the country (PACT, 2103). President Chandrika Kumaratunga offered an official apology to the victims on the 21st anniversary of Black July, stating that the event ‘radically changed the entire fabric of Sri Lankan society’. This event, she posited, introduced violence as a ‘major tool of sociopolitical behaviour’ in Sri Lanka (Kumaratunga, 2004). It also confirmed victimhood as a defining discourse of the conflict. The LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran saw the pogrom as a pre-orchestrated incident of anti-Tamil racial violence incited by racist elements within the Sinhalese government and a continuation of a pattern of periodic violence against the Tamils (Prabhakaran, 1984).

Exceptional counter-terror legislative measures – the Emergency Regulations and the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1978 – gradually eroded the rule of law in Sri Lanka. The draconian measures combined with institutional racism against the so-called ‘terrorist’ Tamils all over the island (Pinto-Jayawardena, 2010). Ethnicity was the basis for intrusive searches, disruptive prohibitions on movement, disappearances and institutionalized torture that became characteristic of the conflict. ⁵ The greatest force underpinning Tamil solidarity and the fusion of disparate and divided groups in Tamil society was the violence unleashed on the Tamils by the Sri Lankan state. After 1983, Tamils all over the island ‘had become brothers and sisters under the trauma of persecution, arrests, torture and death’ (Daniel, 1996: 170). Although a rare (but not isolated ⁶ ) incident of communal violence, Black July is a powerful, resonant event in the repository of collective victimization available to Tamil leaders. It hardened demands for separatism and defined both the relationship between the Sinhala and Tamil communities and between the Sri Lankan state and the Tamil people. Daily life in the years that followed was marked by violence: the crude justice of the LTTE in Tamil areas, which included the beating and execution of dissenters and criminals, and the fierce and invasive practices of the Sri Lankan police, military forces and various unofficial paramilitaries operating in Tamil-dominated areas (Somasundaram, 2010).

In the arc of identity invoked and appropriated by the LTTE, the Tamils were victims of prejudice and racial hatred, discriminated against by the Sinhalese and safe only in Tamil Eelam under the rule of the LTTE. This victim identity was useful for the LTTE to perpetuate political support and served as a foundation for its separatist ideology. Memories of loss and subjugation were co-opted into separatist discourse and as the LTTE expanded their ideological and physical control over the population, ‘Tamilness’ came to be measured by one’s ‘knowledge’ of the LTTE and the possibility of its rule over you, no matter where you were (Thiranagama, 2011: 26). This knowledge was a reconfiguration of Tamil identity around a ‘cultural ethnic intimacy’ maintained through surveillance and intra-community distrust (2011: 26–27). A collective memory of victimhood was cultivated and instrumentalized by the LTTE in rituals and communal commemorative practices, linking individuals, communities and generations in ‘a chain of memories and identities’ (Smith, 1986). In LTTE-controlled areas, this identity was maintained through ceremonies such as those held on the 27 November Heroes Day, Maaveerer Nal. The commemoration of collective persecution maintained a political coherence for the LTTE and filled the fighting ranks. Martyrdom was a central concept for the LTTE in connecting victimhood, resistance and political agency. The LTTE maintained a distinction between the martyrs – those who fell in battle as part of armed resistance – and the Tamil victims of state persecution, on whose behalf the ‘sacrifice’ was made (Thiranagama, 2011), but the LTTE politicized all of the dead in the struggle for Eelam. In LTTE graveyards, the dead bodies of martyrs were worshipped as ‘seeds’ of the movement (Derges 2012; Natali, 2008), representing the perpetual renewal of resistance to state persecution. With the mass killing of civilians at the end of the war, the nebulous victim–martyr divide collapsed entirely. As Khalili (2007: 141) asserts, with reference to Palestinian narratives, the discourse of martyr as victim shifts the focus to an ‘innocent’ or ‘unintentional’ martyrdom, overshadowing the narrative of willing self-sacrifice. This discourse depoliticizes the act of dying for a cause, whilst highlighting the brutality of an enemy who inflicts death on guiltless parties, thus ‘making a moral judgment against a death emerging out of agential political resistance’ (2007: 142).

In May 2009, the LTTE fell to the state forces. Allegations have been made and substantially evidenced of war crimes committed by both the Sri Lankan state forces and the LTTE, with the final 6 months of the war proving catastrophic in terms of lives lost and human rights abuses, and defined by international humanitarian failures (LLRC, 2011; UN, 2011, 2012). The 300,000 Tamil civilians caught up in this modern defining event were brutalized and betrayed by both groups, who publicly claimed to have their best interests at heart. Hoping to prompt an internationally enforced ceasefire, the LTTE used Tamil civilians as human shields and shot defectors with the hallmark ruthlessness of the organization (LLRC, 2011; UN, 2011). Conceptions of victimhood and definitions of a ‘civilian’ at this passage were complicated by a spike in the well-documented practice of forced conscription and child recruitment by the LTTE (HRW, 2004; UN, 2011). Civilians became militants at the behest of the ‘undisciplined army’, which refused to surrender the Tamil separatist cause (Interview with civil society, 2012). Reports have concluded that the survival of the organization was considered to supersede the lives of the Tamil people (LLRC, 2011; UTRH-J, 2009).

Instrumentalized by the LTTE, and shelled by the state forces, the Tamil community’s sense of political security was destroyed by the war’s final phase. The Tamil population displaced from their homes in the Vanni region – the site of the worst violence – repeatedly fled to official state-instituted and quickly shrinking ‘safe zones’, only to be attacked in these spaces by government shells (UN, 2011). Both the state and the LTTE utilized the victimhood of Tamil civilians to justify their actions and seek solidarity and assistance from the international community at the end of the war. The Sri Lankan government pledged to rescue the Tamils from the LTTE, whilst the LTTE implored the international community to intervene, enforce a ceasefire and protect the Tamils from a persecutory state. The LTTE failed to secure a ceasefire on the basis of Tamil victimhood, prompting distrust of the international community among the Tamils (Interviews, 2012). The official state narrative fused projections of the conflict as a ‘humanitarian’ ‘civilian rescue mission’ with majoritarian Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist rhetoric, ensuring the support of the Sinhalese-Buddhist community. Crucially, this state discourse – portraying Tamils as victims of the LTTE – was tightly woven with that of territorial integrity, defeating terrorism and the ultimate goal of majority rule. The victim narrative employed by the state was loaded with the principles of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism.

The final phase of the war was mythologized as it unfolded for majority Sinhalese-Buddhist consumption. Every strategic move by the armed forces was detailed on the Ministry of Defence website and echoed by the nationalist media, with repetitive reference to the bravery of the soldiers, harnessed for the protection of the ‘motherland’. The focus was on the final, predestined triumph that would result in eventual national unity (Dag Tjaden, 2012). The triumph over the LTTE was presented as the heroic and almost pre-written conclusion to an epic saga, one reframed from a war based on minority grievances to the replay of an ancient battle between the Sinhalese King Dutugemunu and Tamil ‘invading’ forces from India – the final scene in the Sinhala mytho-history beginning with the Buddhist Chronicles the Mahavamsa and spanning centuries between the ethnic groups (Rampton, 2010). President Rajapaksa benefited politically from comparisons with the celebrated Sinhala king: posters highlighting their similarities were posted on billboards in Colombo and comment pieces argued that ‘Mahinda Rajapaksa has repeated all over again the history of Dutugemunu’ in more difficult circumstances (Mahindapala, 2010).

The End of the War: Rupture, Victimhood and Domination

The war’s final phase, a moment of extreme rupture for the Tamil community, caused a crisis in political allegiance. Tamil survivors rushed from the spit of land on which the final weeks of war were waged to areas controlled by the state. Government photographers were on hand to photograph soldiers helping vulnerable Tamils to complete the journey, providing photographic evidence to support the narrative of a civilian rescue mission. The experiences of the Tamils at the end of the war can be considered to have caused a ‘profound sense of cultural disruption across the members of the community’, fitting the criteria of what Gray and Oliver (2004: 7) term a ‘catastrophe’. This damage was compounded by the post-war screening and detention process, which kept 300,000 people in poorly serviced camps and ‘rehabilitation centres’ for up to 3 years (AI, 2009; IRIN News, 2012). Catastrophes are often structured by the presence of memory (Gray and Oliver, 2004: 8); a history of victimization informs contemporary events just as meaning is imparted on the past by contemporary needs and desires. A number of interviewees believed that this rupture could have been a point of departure, heralding a new political future for the Tamils without the LTTE: a future based on equal rights as Sri Lankan citizens, jettisoning the status and identity of victims and adopting real political agency for the first time in a generation (Interview with academic, journalist, 2012). Atrocities perpetrated by the state forces against the civilian population might have been incorporated into a narrative of warfare and political change for the Tamils. However, the experiences of detention, subjugation, surveillance, colonization and the denial of state-perpetrated atrocity in the years since the end of the war have sustained the narrative of victimization, reproducing the political order with the Tamil population dispossessed and oppressed at the base of the newly reconfigured ‘architecture of domination’ (Tripp, 2013).

Symbolic insults, such as the destruction of LTTE graveyards and memorials and the publication of near-naked photographs of LTTE leader Prabhakaran – demonstrating the total defeat of the LTTE – have been perceived as a performance of Sinhala domination over the Tamil people and their nationalist ideology (Interviews, 2012). Place names and signs have been changed to the Sinhalese language and Buddhist stupas and military monuments have been erected: an inscription of Sinhala-Buddhist identity on the physical space (Interviews, 2012). ‘Before’, a Tamil lawyer and civil society activist stated, ‘the A9 was dotted with physical manifestations of LTTE presence. Now there are army monuments’. The war was ‘not just about the LTTE, it was about expanding the horizons of the Sinhala-Buddhist state’ (Interview, 2012). The perceived cultural pollution by Sinhalese soldiers and building contractors fits the narrative of cultural genocide symbolized by the incineration of the Jaffna library in 1981 (Interviews with academic, journalists, 2012). The end of the war has fostered an urge to remember that arises directly from hostility towards the government and a determination to reveal the crimes committed by the state forces against the Tamils.

In the wake of the LTTE’s defeat, graveyards where the maaveerer lay were destroyed and an army camp was built on land that was previously a large LTTE graveyard in Kopai, near Jaffna. A government acutely aware of the LTTE’s techniques of ideological coercion immediately erased the organization’s displays of symbolism. Tamil people, in order to preserve memory, took stones from the rubble of the graveyards after they were destroyed (Interviews with civil society, 2012). The identity of persecution and victimhood persists and is manifest in these acts as a desire to commemorate the dead in the face of state erasure. There is concern that without the sociopolitical space to commemorate and mourn, memory will fade and the traces of war will become non-existent, and the history of the struggle for Eelam will be erased and misrepresented. A Tamil lawyer and civil rights activist claimed that the ‘right to memory’ is being denied (Interview, 2012). Interviewees in 2012 were attuned to the absence of the communal rituals performed by the LTTE and political space to seek the missing and mourn the dead. In this situation of militarization and repression, the victim identity nurtured by the LTTE is compounded by the struggle to survive in poor socio-economic conditions. Interviewees expressed the view that the Tamils, as a people, are defeated. Some interviewees equated this mode of being to a state of ‘bare life’: existence on the edges of society, reduced to daily struggle and denied political rights (Agamben, 1998; Interviews with lawyer, journalist, 2012). A Tamil civil society activist explained:

[the war] has reduced the Tamil people…our political goals to be near-existential ones. Now we are struggling to exist. Existence is the thing we are grappling with, not high ideals and goals of self-determination (Interview, 2012).

Post-war Politics and the International Accountability Movement

The struggle over how to remember the war’s final phase has profound implications for Tamil political identity and the future of the Sri Lankan state. In Daniel’s (1996: 50) words, it is a ‘nourishing ground’ for Tamil nationalist thought, based on Tamil victimization and state persecution. Multiple accounts have entered national and international discourse in media reports, documentary films, human rights reports and narratives of refugee survivors, but the majority Sinhalese community – Sinhala-speaking, rural-based and the government’s primary electoral base – are dependent on the uncritically nationalistic Sinhala language media. ⁷ The official state narrative of a ‘humanitarian rescue mission’ to ‘liberate’ the Tamil civilians from the LTTE is doggedly defended by the state media apparatus (Ministry of Defence and Urban Development, 2013). Mahinda Samarasinghe, the then-Minister for Disaster Management and Human Rights, publicly declared at war’s end that the ‘soldiers saved all Tamil civilians trapped inside the war zone without shedding a drop of blood’ (Samarasinghe, 2009). Senior military personnel have adhered exactly to the language adopted to depict the event, claiming that they literally ‘maintained a zero civilian casualty rate at all times’ (Ministry of Defence and Urban Development, 2010). With the release of the Enumeration of Vital Events report by the Department of Census and Statistics, the government quietly accepted a casualty figure of 8000 deaths but continues to contest the civilian status of those killed (EVE, 2011).

The Rajapaksa government actively fostered distrust of organizations associated with the international accountability movement, such as International Crisis Group, Amnesty International and various state lobbies within the UN who have voiced concern for Tamil victims of war, claiming that they are funded and influenced by the diaspora-based LTTE. ⁸ This enabled the Rajapaksa government to present itself to the majority Sinhalese electorate as the only legitimate source of information. The then-Secretary of Defence (who is also the former President’s brother) stated that the LTTE ‘rump’ in the international community ‘misled’ and offered donations to international human rights organizations in order to drag Sri Lanka back to war (Rajapaksa, 2013). The motherland herself is framed as the victim of unjust attack by international forces. This discourse feeds on Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism, which highlights the isolated position of the Sinhalese people in the region, as opposed to the Tamil presence in India and the numerical strength of Muslims (Sri Lanka’s second largest minority) in the Muslim world. The state narrative constructed under the Rajapaksa government and its predecessors was one of a land and people under siege by a terrorist separatist group, intent on the destruction of the unitary state of Sri Lanka and, by extension, the security, destiny and existence of the Sinhalese people. State discourse surrounding the international drive to launch accountability measures contributed to the impunity and popularity of the Rajapaksa regime: vocal Sinhalese-Buddhists declared the government as war heroes and rejected the ‘Western imperialism’ motivating the accountability movement (Interviews, 2012).

A March 2014 UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolution on Sri Lanka mandated an international investigation into war crimes committed by both the state and the LTTE in the war’s final phase. The appointed investigators carried out their work, despite the Rajapaksa government’s refusal to cooperate with the investigation. ‘We will not allow them into the country’, President Rajapaksa told foreign correspondents in August 2014 (Dnalndia, 2014). The TNA, international and domestic human rights organizations and Tamil diaspora groups hope that the proceedings will lead to retributive justice against the Rajapaksa brothers and the military leaders of their regime. This prospect has increased in probability since the shock democratic overthrow of the Rajapaksa regime in January 2015. An unexpected mass defection from Rajapaksa’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party and a presidential election campaign premised on good governance saw Maithripala Sirisena – Rajapaksa’s former health minister – claim the presidency at the polls. Rajapaksa no longer has immunity from prosecution as head of state and neither is he in a position to shield his brother, Gotabhaya, the former Secretary of Defence, from prosecution.

The new Sri Lankan government is largely constituted of defectors from Rajapaksa’s cabinet, prompting critics to claim that the substantive ideology of the government is inevitably unchanged. As Tamil lawyer Guruparan (2015) argues, ‘Sirisena was an integral part of the Rajapaksa regime that unleashed a horrendous war, a war that was waged not just against the LTTE, but also against the Tamil citizens of Sri Lanka’. In fact, President Sirisena performed as acting Defence Minister (in the physical absence of President Rajapaksa) five times, including the final days of the war. This position ensured his complicity in atrocity. He made a popular election promise: ‘I will not allow President Mahinda Rajapaksa, Gotabaya Rajapaksa or any member of our armed forces who fought to eradicate LTTE terrorism from our country to be taken before any international war crimes tribunal by the Tamil diaspora…I must say clearly that I will protect them all’ (Sirisena, 2014).

In February 2015, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, made the ‘difficult’ decision to defer the release of the UN investigators’ report by 6 months, given ‘the changing context in Sri Lanka, and the possibility that important new information may emerge which will strengthen the report’ (al-Hussein, 2015). Sri Lanka requested this delay as an act of good faith, offering al-Hussein commitments to cooperate ‘on a whole range of important human rights issues – which the previous government had absolutely refused to do’, prompting him to ‘engage with them to ensure those commitments translate into reality’ (al-Hussein, 2015). The UN figurehead addressed the concerns of the victims of war, stating that he is ‘acutely aware that many victims…might see this is as the first step towards shelving, or diluting, a report they have long feared they would never see’. Sirisena’s success in delaying the UN’s report should be understood as a fulfilment, if temporary, of his election promise to protect Sri Lankan state war criminals.

Protests on Missing Persons

Post-war, competing groups of protestors – Tamil and Sinhalese – vie for public space and media coverage to draw attention to the fact that their loved ones remain missing after the war. They each claim the position of the authentic or worthy victim. The missing are victims of war who have never been found or who remain disappeared within the murky organs of the security apparatus. As stated by Simon Robins (2011), the missing occupy a ‘ghostly role’ in societies transitioning from violence. The lack of a body and confirmation of death means that the missing, in their absence, play a central role in the discourse on justice, reparations and practical resolutions for a society’s recovery from conflict. Their unexplained absence is a significant factor in the daily experience of uncertainty with respect to political security, conceptions and perceptions of equal rights and the state’s willingness to pursue a meaningful path of political engagement.

The shared experience of the families of missing persons has not opened a space for solidarity between ethnic groups in Sri Lanka. Instead, advocacy on this issue is politicized along ethnic lines and configured as a politics of victimhood and blame. Tamil groups have been mobilized alongside and in support of the international accountability movement. Led by human rights groups and civil society leaders, they focus on the state’s responsibility to account for the missing and are designed for international consumption. For example, they held protests during the media frenzy of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in 2013 (Channel 4 News, 2013). Outside of the media glare, grass-roots Tamil protests in the Northern Province have been violently suppressed by the police and military. Activists responsible for organizing protests have themselves disappeared in the post-conflict period. Kugan Muruganandan and Lalith Kumar Weeraraj, for example, disappeared in mid-December 2011, days before travelling to the Northern Province to participate in an International Human Rights Day press conference to raise awareness of disappearances (Forum-Asia, 2011). Back in Colombo, pro-state, Sinhalese groups have, in turn, sought to highlight the responsibility of the LTTE for disappearances and atrocity.

Tamil and Sinhalese groups have harnessed the political value of victimhood in support of very different agendas, directing their protests outwards towards the international community. Since the end of the war, formalized movements on the missing have been strategically organized. On 5 March 2013, the week prior to the UNHRC resolution vote on Sri Lanka, the Families of the Disappeared staged a protest in Colombo to demand justice for their missing relatives. The group represents primarily Tamil families, with a focus on the alleged involvement of the state in disappearances and killings over the course of the war, particularly those unaccounted for since the atrocities of 2009. The protest sought the attention of the international community and was timed for maximum publicity to coincide with lobbying in the corridors of the UNHRC. Great publicity was attained for the movement when the police prevented busloads of protestors, amounting to 1,000 people, from travelling to Colombo from the Northern Province town of Vavuniya (Watchdog, 2013). Many families in and around Vavuniya lost relatives in the final stages of the war. The UN embassy in Colombo – the end point of the proposed and disbanded protest – released a statement expressing concern over the freedom of movement denied to this group (BBC News, 2013).

A strategic counter-protest, however, was allowed to proceed to Colombo, illustrating the state’s promotion of one category of victim: a group comprised of mostly Sinhalese families who lost loved ones as a result of LTTE attacks. These protestors, the newly formed ‘Dead and Missing Persons Parents’ Front’ (MPPF), handed over a letter to the UN requesting that the UNHRC recognize the LTTE’s responsibility for atrocity during the war (Watchdog, 2013). The group criticized the then-UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, for ‘siding with the Tamil Diaspora and Tamil National Alliance (TNA), who should be held accountable for the loss of their loved ones from 1987 to 2009, numbering as many as 12,000 civilians comprising Tamils, Sinhalese and Muslims’ (quoted in Ranwala, 2013). The MPPF declared that ‘they could no longer bear the injustice happening at every UNHRC session with only Sri Lanka getting a one sided battering, whereas the actual culprit was the TNA’ (Ranwala, 2013). The MPPF also seek information on missing persons, but they hold the LTTE, TNA and pro-LTTE groups accountable in the place of the state. Protests on the missing have become micro-performances of post-war political positions, where the Sinhalese and Tamils claim primacy in the hierarchy of victimhood, operating in a polarized environment defined by drastically opposed conflict discourses.

Reconfiguring Victimhood, Reclaiming Agency

Impunity surrounds perpetrators of violence against Tamils. Daily life in Tamil-dominated areas is pursued under military control. Land grabs displace Tamils in favour of Sinhalese soldiers and entrepreneurs in tourism and construction. These cumulative injustices demonstrate that the Tamils continue to be structurally predefined as victims. Under the LTTE, and since the Vaddukoddai Resolution, the Tamils identified as a colonized people in a postcolonial state. The Tamils view the Sinhalese political elite as their current colonial masters, and their victimhood is therefore structurally determined. In this analysis, a separate state was deemed to be the only possible route to justice. An identity of victimhood can be ‘necessary, sufficient and compelling’ but can equally serve to ‘subjugate and immobilize victims in the very act of recognizing their suffering’ (Antze and Lambek, 1996). In the post-war environment, militarized repression means that the ‘people’s minds are not free’ to remember, to mourn and to construct meaning out of catastrophe (Interview with journalist, 2012). However, acts of resistance and political agency have begun to arise organically, as a shift has occurred from reliance on victimhood: a realization that justice claims must come from a reformulation of Tamil political agency.

This shift recognizes the underlying reason for the state’s policy of ‘securitized development’ in the Tamil-dominated areas (Goodhand et al., 2011). The end of the war represents, Mamdani (2001: 10) might suggest, the violence of colonial pacification taking on extreme proportions. The fact that the Sri Lankan military regularly plunges Tamils into dust and destruction is the clearest sign that it has failed at transforming them into a docile population. ⁹ The haste to recolonize Tamil land; to sustain fear in the Tamil population; and to dispossess, malnourish and economically deprive the people: might this be a signifier of insecurity on the part of the state? Tamil resistance has been the primary threat to the Sinhala-Buddhist nation-building project for three decades. The Tamils continue to resist erasure, including the erasure of conflict memory and a strong Tamil nationalist narrative. Tamil dissent is resurfacing in the public space, bolder than ever (Varatharajah, 2015). Protests calling for information on the missing, the release of political prisoners, protesting unemployment and calling for the return of seized and occupied land have occurred with regularity in recent months (Colombopage, 2015; Tamilnet, 2015). In a situation of repression and in the face of new forms of victimization, justice claims continue to be made. By engaging with institutional structures, also, Tamil women in particular have demanded status as victim survivors, ensuring that the state reconciliation mechanism – the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) – became a vehicle of memory and a stage to perform their agency rather than another in a long line of fruitless commissions (Amnesty International, 2009; Thiranagama, 2013). ¹⁰

The newly established Northern Provincial Council (NPC) passed a resolution in January 2014 calling for an international investigation into the end of the war. This was a performance of political agency by the TNA-dominated institution, despite the restrictions on the NPC’s limited powers in a highly militarized and politically centralized state structure. The NPC has become a powerful advocate for Tamil rights on the global stage. The powers of the NPC are enormously restricted by the central government and by the presence of a Governor – a state representative who attempts to control the NPC. The replacement of Major General GA Chandrasiri (‘the military Governor’) with HMGS Palihakkara, a prominent Sri Lankan diplomat and civil servant, is one of several progressive steps made by the new president, steps that have met with cautious and sceptical praise. Where political agency is precarious, and where there is a risk that the NPC might represent only tokenism and a performance of political engagement on the part of the state, the TNA leans on the international community as leverage against an overbearing state. ¹¹ The issues addressed in the TNA NPC election manifesto in 2013 followed strong nationalist lines. The TNA reasserted the Tamil right to self-determination and emphasized the prerogatives of demilitarization, expeditious resettlement of displaced person and receiving information on the missing and disappeared. With the overwhelming success of TNA candidates at the NPC elections, and the establishment of this Tamil-dominated administrative body, the spectrum of ‘realizable justice’ has expanded (de Mel, 2012). ¹² The call for an international investigation represents growing confidence in the prospect of real justice and political agency for the Tamil population, one that perpetuates the narrative of Tamil victimization by the state in the service of its own empowerment.

The NPC intends to navigate the post-war political environment by claiming the Tamil conflict memory associated with the LTTE as a history of resistance. This approach continues to rely on the status of victims of war crimes to challenge the Sri Lankan state (by appealing to the international community) but is also marked by a cultivation of an identity of resistance in the face of victimization. A January 2015 resolution in the NPC alleged the genocide of Tamils by the Sri Lankan state and formally requested an appropriate investigation by the UN. Undeterred by the progressive potential of the governmental restructuring (unlike the UN, which has chosen to offer the new government some political space), the NPC’s resolution declared the state’s failure to provide truth, justice and accountability to the Tamils without waiting for President Sirisena’s government to articulate its reconciliation policies (Varatharajah, 2015). The Tamils’ historical experiences of consistent victimization at the hands of the state have made faith in yet another Sinhalese-dominated government impossible.

The Tamil Victim in International Perspective

A perception persists in Northeast Sri Lanka that the international community bears responsibility for securing post-conflict justice, as the Tamil people were victims of the UN’s ineptitude at the end of the war (Interviews, 2012). This perception was reinforced in November 2012, when the UN released a self-critical Internal Review of its own role and operations in Sri Lanka in 2009 (UN, 2012). The report recognized the UN’s failure to protect the civilians in the region by succumbing to intimidation by the government, prioritizing humanitarian access over protection needs and leaving the war-torn areas precisely when their aid and monitoring capacities were most needed (UN, 2012). The UN did not report civilian casualty data, and it was reluctant to prejudice humanitarian access by criticizing the Government, during and after the war, even when access was ‘almost non-existent’ (UN, 2012: 12). The UN appears to have prioritized its staff’s access to the surviving victims over the act of speaking out against the victimizers and offering active protection. As Walklate (2007: 110) has argued, the ideal victim is ‘blameless’ in a reductive binary between the faultless innocent and the wicked perpetrator. Where this binary is complicated, by the existence of LTTE cadres in the midst of innocent civilians for example, many of those who have previously acted in solidarity shy away. McEvoy and McConnachie (2013) note that the voice and agency of victims is often both publicly and legally bound to the innocence of the victim and the capacity to blame the perpetrator. The UN could not pronounce the innocence of the entirety of the victims (though perpetrators of political violence often see themselves as victims of structural oppression) or publicly condemn the actions of the state forces, in the interest of maintaining humanitarian access to the victims after the event. The label of terrorist and the rhetoric of security overwhelmed the discourse of victimhood and public empathy and institutional action deferred to state-authored political categories. The hierarchy of victimhood established here invites reflection on what kind of victim is a worthy recipient of solidarity, support and protection. It is worth noting, as Khalili (2014) does, that the ‘habit of attacking civilians so as to force them to abandon their support for militants or fighters among them is a longstanding tactic of counterinsurgency’. Civilians are not, as defenders of the liberal way of doing war would assert, ‘collateral damage’ or accidental casualties of war between combatants. In Sri Lanka, they were the very object of the violence, both structural and in its final devastating form.

For the so-called international community, defeating the LTTE was seen as a necessary precondition to peace. Embracing counter-terrorism discourse, it accepted the depoliticization of the LTTE and a bright-line distinction between the victims and the terrorists. Offering material and political support to the state over the ‘terrorist’ group was expected to bring about a democratic peace (Keen, 2013). Post-war, the existence of a large and politically organized Tamil diaspora has enabled the struggle for justice to take place internationally. Vocal political sections of the diaspora continue to frame the Tamil struggle as one resisting genocide and state erasure: a dynamic in which the Tamils are always the victims and international action is necessary to restore their rights as an independent nation of Eelam (See BTF, 2013; TAG, 2014). The United States and the United Kingdom have been at the forefront of calls for the now-established independent investigations into war crimes. However, these same actors supported the Sri Lankan state during the war, not least through the weapons trade and the legitimizing discourse and practical measures associated with the ‘war on terror’ (Gowing, 2013; Kleinfield, 2010). In the aftermath of the violence of 2009, those states have expected to shape Sri Lanka’s transitional justice responses, with a view to re-establishing their own moral standing, through a series of UNHRC resolutions on Sri Lanka in 2012, 2013 and 2014. This endeavour is also geopolitical, in the sense that Sri Lanka has defied the conflict resolution methods associated with the ‘liberal peace’ framework, which purports to privilege democratic values and universal understandings of human rights over the state’s monopoly on security (Lewis, 2010). Western powers championing political reform and accountability are seeking obedience from Sri Lanka, asking for demonstrations of commitment to the global liberal order.