Transitional Justice & Reconciliation In Sri Lanka
Mahendran Thiruvarangan
2005,
the year of the tiger;
bearing down on waves of water
washing ashore
bodies unidentified.
unidentified men,
waving guns in a delirious salute,
dance the masque of death around
a ring of bodies,
riddled with
bullets
of identity:
tamil, traitor[ii]
This submission highlights the importance of looking at the impact of the war on the Tamil communities in the North in all its multiplicity. It is important that the war, both in its final phase and the ethnic conflict, are not seen as a binaristic Sinhala -Tamil conflict, or purely as a Tamil versus Sri Lankan state phenomenon, implying in the end a simple division between victims and perpetrators. For actual justice to be meted out, the historical detail of the ethnic conflict, the procedure of war, the high level militarization of several camps of the parties involved, the deep seated structural inflections of gender, class, caste and other factors, the deep injustices of structural aspects such as the oppressive practices of the state and state like structures, the structures of militant organizations like the LTTE should be taken into account.
Transitional justice is predicated on the idea of truth, telling the truth, accountability and finally a coming to terms with the past in some way, leading to reconciliation, co-existence. This submission aims at complicating the ideas of truth as given and truth would always lead to reconciliation and raising questions such as what we should do as communities, apart from legal measures, to achieve reconciliation and what kind of co-existence is possible at this historical juncture, seven years after the end of the civil war. Asking these questions will help us to be reflexive about the processes that we are part of and situate them in the current historical moment.
Multiplicity of Experiences
The prolonged ethnic strife and the civil war have left us with multiple stories about our past and how we now relate to one another as individuals and communities. Thus there is no single truth about the war. Even within a community the war was experienced by the people differently. These experiences were inflected by class, gender, and caste. Within the Tamil community, a group of people branded as traitors were socially and politically marginalized, physically tortured, killed or forced to leave their areas of residence by the LTTE for voicing their criticism of the movement and its narrow nationalist vision for the people in the North-East including the Tamils. Some activists were killed in places like Chennai and Paris. We cannot narrate The Tamil community’s experience of the war without talking about the torture camps the LTTE ran in the North-East and the children it forcibly recruited especially from underprivileged families in the rural regions in the East and Vanni and to fight the war. Reconciliation thus means not just re-structuring the state and creating the conditions necessary for a future of ethnic co-existence but also a process of self-evaluation that we need to undertake as communities.
While it is important to understand the ethnic dimension of the war, we should simultaneously look at how social divisions such as class, caste and gender pluralize the people’s experiences of the war. Thanges Paramsothy’s work on the IDP camps in the Jaffna district shows that the inmates of 25 of these camps predominantly belong to landless, oppressed caste communities. De-militarization alone would not solve the problems of these communities; the state has to allocate land for these families[iii]. Sivamohan Sumathy’s recent research on gender and violence demonstrate that women in the Vanni operate under the oppressive social gaze of patriarchy which is intensifying under militarization: “The women working on the [army-run] farm have to be attired in a uniform of trousers and shirt. At first there was much ridicule of this wear. The women took to changing their clothes at the farm itself, but as there was no shelter in the farm area, this led to much speculation, scandal and eventual outrage about moral depravity. At present, the women are boldly wearing this uniform to work.”[iv]
If our engagement with the past, the war as a whole and its gory end in Mullivaikal should take us to a violence-free, inclusive and democratic future we should acknowledge the multiple ways in which the people as individuals, communities, dissidents and people marked for caste, class and gender had experienced the civil war and ethnic violence. This multiplicity should encourage us to question what the nation (including the Tamil nation) and the state (including the contemplated Tamil Eelam) mean to their differently constituted, differently positioned peoples within their territories.
