Seven Years After The End Of Sri Lanka’s Civil War
By Mahendran Thiruvarangan –May 19, 2016
Mahendran Thiruvarangan
When the civil war came to an end in May 2009 I was still a final year undergraduate at the University of Peradeniya. Peradeniya was miles away from the war zone. The only venues that supplied us with details about the happenings in the war theatre were the television channels stationed in the South, self-censoring the civilian casualties incurred and feeding to the Sinhala nationalist jubilation of the times. And on the other side were websites like Tamilnet and Puthinam run by parties sympathetic to the LTTE releasing carefully filtered out reports singularly focusing on the deaths of civilians caused by the military leaving no trace about how the top leadership of the LTTE was recruiting children and adults, despite knowing so well they had already lost the battle or how the civilians who were trying to flee the war zone were shot down by the militants.
One had to work around these competing narratives to get at least a partial sense of the nature of the violence that the people ensnared in the No Fire Zone were exposed to. Some of us had friends whose relatives had been in the LTTE-controlled areas. When the guns breathed their last in Mullivaikal, some of them had already moved to hospitals and camps in Trincomalee and Vavuniya with their loved ones injured during the war. It was from these wounded men and women and their families that the harrowing experiences of the thousands of people inside the narrow battlefield trickled down to us in May 2009. The South erupted into celebrations when the re-unification of the island was announced via the media. As the former president in his televised address from Parliament was busy instructing the people of the country to annul the notions of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ from their political discourses, fire crackers celebrating the military victory started to deafen the ears of those of us who were seated under the senate building of the University of Peradeniya—Tamils, Sinhalese, Muslims and Malays—pondering in groups what was awaiting us and the country in the days and years to come.
I revisit these dark and frustrating days now not just to reflect upon how the people in the Vanni were subalternized by the state, the liberation movement, representatives of their own community, the media and the international community seven years ago during the height of the war but also as a way of understanding the difficulties that we outsiders who were not present in Mullivaikal, whether we were Tamils or Sinhalese, encountered in making sense of violence and truth. Being cognizant of these difficulties is necessary to understand the plurality of the responses to the war’s end that emerged seven years ago. No doubt, the end of the war would have meant relief to many in the Sinhala community who had to protect themselves on a daily basis from suicide bombers masquerading as passengers in buses and trains and the families of the soldiers who were fighting the war for a living. The war had created uncertainties for them and placed them, especially the ones who lived in the border villages around the Northern and Eastern provinces, in a precarious position. Many Tamil dissident activists who had fled Sri Lanka or the North-East of the country because of the threats they faced from the LTTE also expressed a sense of relief at the demise of the Tigers.
