Archive for the ‘End of war special edition’

Living with the Other in post-war Sri Lanka

I often have to remind myself that I live with a Tamil. My housemate, Vanessa is a Tamil, married to a Sinhalese and I have been living with her and her husband for almost a year and working with her for over two. She is also one of my closest friends. She is Tamil; I am Sinhalese. But even as I write, it’s hard to think of the two of us along those lines, because I can’t figure out what defines our identities. Even if I can define what makes her Tamil, I still can’t define what makes her different from me. Is it colour? She is darker than I am, but we are both brown skinned. Is it accent? She sounds no different than me, except for a tiny, pleasant lilt in her voice. Is language? We both speak English. She speaks better Sinhala than I do, and fluent Tamil, or which I do not know a word. Is…

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Women are not willing to go back to pre-war status quo

By Kumi Samuel and Chulani Kodikara ‘Women are not just victims of war, as some aspects of their experiences are empowering and can be used as a resource for healing and transformation’. War is a gendered process. Post war is no different.   It may be a cliché to say that in Sri Lanka as elsewhere in the world, the most visible and harmful impact of 30 years of war has been on women, but that is the reality.  As men joined militant groups or the armed forces, were arrested, abducted, disappeared, or took flight to safer locations outside the community or the country, women were left behind to cope with fractured families and communities; multiple displacement, transition in alien spaces such as camps for the displaced; or resettlement in distant and unfamiliar regions.  Untold numbers of women, mostly Tamil, (but including a significant number of Muslim and Sinhala women living in conflict affected areas) became de facto and de jure heads…

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Negotiables

I wish to crack a bottle of arrack and kick my legs out on the verandah before the sea at twilight, this mix of liquor, even kisses, pleasure under whirring fans, brought by our soldiers bludgeoning villagers with bombs. They chose war, the Tamils, must now face the music, hopping on one foot to a new master. This is obvious, why write poetry anymore, or even put on a suit or read the classics? The arrack is sweet and limestone, salt and gems, if any , in the North will be harvested to enjoy our southern evenings strolling at Unawatuna hand in hand under the moon; even that Tamil boy who lost his mother and father to a misplaced projectile, says he must move on, learn a trade. There is a new calculus, throw away the abacus, Boys, the dream has been denied. Bend your heads and genuflect, we may yet be kind and give you a bit of land…

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CHALLENGES TODAY: WEEVILS IN THE MIND

Daya Somasundaram was in Jaffna town in late 1995 when the Sri Lankan army advanced south and eastwards from Palaly. As the LTTE decided upon a strategic withdrawal, they insisted that all the Tamil people should move with them. This enforcement was termed an “Exodus” by some Tamils versed in biblical themes. As Somasundaram relates the tale, many people resented this specific LTTE writ. Eventually most of the people moved back to their homes in army-occupied territory. Somasundaram was among the professional classes who engaged in their duties in the Jaffna Peninsula in the late 1990s. Within no time army-rule had generated a “collective amnesia” among the Tamils: it was the army that had created the exodus and the Sinhala state was the principal ogre. The role of the LTTE mostly slipped under their retrospective assessments.[i] Now, in 2010, after the defeat of a LTTE regime that had enforced an exodus on the Tamils residing in the northern Vanni, one…

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What is there to celebrate? Rumblings of a Jaffna Tamil

The question that I have been repeatedly asked by people outside Jaffna is whether we Tamils are not happy that the war is over. An immediate follow up question is whether we are not happy that the LTTE is defeated and the prescription that the defeat of the LTTE should not be considered a defeat of the Tamils, because as they say, clearly both are distinct. The first question is  one that is supposed to ‘trick us over’ (to solicit an affirmative response to the second question) and the second is an obvious political question asked to evaluate whether there are still “tiger sentiments” prevailing among the Tamil populace in Sri Lanka. I always refuse to answer these questions in a paradigm of a yes or a no – people are generally very adamant for a response in either of these solitary words. But like all political questions they just don’t have a one word answer. Let me then get…

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Post War Sri Lanka: Thoughts of University Students

Last May Sri Lanka ended its long drawn war, fought for over three decades with the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam (LTTE). This month Sri Lanka is commemorating the first year after war. This piece reflects the ideas of a cross section of students from the University of Sri Jayawardanapura on how they perceive post war Sri Lanka. The students of the University of Sri Jayawardanpura had been supportive of the war, since the inception of its final phase in 2006 under the patronage of President Mahinda Rajapaksa. On May 18 2009 the students of Sri Jayawardanapura enthusiastically celebrated the end of war, lighting crackers, hoisting the national flag and organizing “kiri-bath dansals”. At the same time they collected dry rations and aid for the displaced civilians in the North. A year has passed since most Sri Lankans (except for the very few like this writer) celebrated the victory of the government. Has anything changed since then? What needs to…

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Articulating the Concerns of Ethnic Minorities in Relation to Constitutional Proposals

It may be useful to begin by going back over 80 years to the time when , in the mid – nineteen twenties, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, newly returned from Oxford University, vigorously promoted Federalism in Public lectures as well as in a  series of newspaper articles. Curiously, the reported responses to his lecture in July 1926 in Jaffna on Federalism were not very positive. That lecture was on the invitation of the Jaffna Students Congress, later re-constituted as the Jaffna Youth Congress. It was the Kandyans who backed Federalism at that time. If the Tamils too had backed Federalism then, we would surely have had a Federal Constitution in1946. Those interested in the subject may consult the monumental publication of C.P.A. titled Power Sharing in Sri Lanka: Constitutional and Political Documents, 1926 – 2008, edited by Rohan Edrisinha, Mario Gomez, V.T.Thamilmaran and Asanga  Welikala  (2008). The Donoughmore Commission, which was far in advance of the local political leaders as well as…

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The end of war and Sri Lanka’s future: Videos from Vikalpa in Sinhala and English

Vikalpa, the sister site of Groundviews with citizen journalism in Sinhala, produced this mini-documentary on Jaffna a year after the war ended. Vikalpa also produced a series of interviews in Tamil, Sinhala and English on the end of war, that will be progressively made available on its YouTube channel, embedded below. Please leave your comments on Vikalpa’s post යුද්ධය අවසන් – ලංකාවේ අනාගතය (The war is over: Sri Lanka’s future). Repost This Article

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The Thirty Year Old Boy

End of War Special Edition

I would like to believe we have been forgiven, that the end justifies means, that prejudice has been copy-edited out of the nursery reader, that the black man with roving eyes and moneyed breath is not after all Tamil, a dirty devil come to spook our children at night who wish only to dream of sweets and cricket, and how they pumped the minority during the tea-break in front of the tuck shop in a public hazing, not approved but allowed by the benign authority, the Principal of laissez-faire– oh let our boys steam off, better now than grown up and angry with wives or trying to get a job in the Tamil-run Public Works Department, or the Civil Service, or even the thosai kaddai. Of course that is history now, the Thirty Year War has been won, and Tamil shopkeepers must hide their newspapers under lungis, and speak Sinhala at checkpoints, or while seeking entry into government buildings. Their…

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The untold story of a child

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This war has taken the lives of tens of thousands of men, women and children. Hundreds of thousands more are displaced, and the abnormality of the war and post war situation is fast and painfully becoming normalcy to most people, some don’t and didn’t even live to see that. Hundreds of children are being born into such conditions, by virtue of the fact that the Muslim IDP’s displaced in the early part of the conflict are still languishing in Puttalam, I won’t be surprised if a decent amount of these children born would die (possibly as adults) in the same conditions to which they were born to. Studies suggest that post war trauma is conceivably more painful than the emotional stress suffered during war. During periods of war and despite the aggressive conditions that ensue, people subjected to these live in pain and indescribable stress. However, the hope that these abnormalities will diminish and normalcy would resume lingers on and…

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FROM VICTORY TO NORMALISATION IN SRI LANKA

No war is fought sans atrocity. It destroys everything. Even when a war is fought with the best adherence to internationally accepted laws of warfare; it still breeds hatred, enmity and many a horrific sentiment that violates human decency. This may be why Union General of the American Civil War, William T. Sherman, said “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.” Glory of victory sometimes overtakes humanity and humility. Hence normalization immediately after war is tedious. Aftermath of war Was it only the LTTE that was defeated militarily? Wasn’t it also the political, economic, social decision making fascist monopoly held at gunpoint? Hence, forgetting triumphal, cannot one look at the opportunities open for Sri Lanka? This could be one way to profit from war…

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Soldier: Hero, villain or both?

Each time I see a soldier, my mind shifts into ‘mode chaos’. When I was a kid, things were black and white. They were my heroes; the guys who were taking the bullet for me, so I could get about with my life as I know it. They were the brave guys who would safeguard our beloved motherland from all that was evil. I would always return their smiles if I ever caught their eye. I’d even quite willingly stop for a chat sometimes, if they initiated conversation. It was the very least I could do to show my gratitude to the guys who had ‘given up their today, for our tomorrow’ right? Everything was so simple then. As I grew up though, it was not so much that I stopped being grateful to them, but I became aware of many more dimensions to these ‘brave men in cami’s’ than I had known or been exposed to as a kid….

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Was I wrong to oppose the war?

I used to think non-violence would win in the end. Even with a murderous megalomaniac for an opponent (I mean Prabhakaran, not Mahinda), I believed the offer of an open hand would prevail over the closed fist. Three bloody Eelam wars, each fought with more combatants and fiercer weaponry than the last, was proof to me that this fight could not be won on the battlefield. So when Eelam War Four began with the promise of a final victory, this time using a bold new strategy (more combatants and fiercer weaponry), I assumed it would end as it did the last three times–without an end. I was wrong. When the remnants of the LTTE were cornered, I assumed they would go underground, the hit and run insurgency of the early eighties would begin anew, and Colombo would shudder as Tigers and Tigresses blew themselves up in the middle of our streets, buses, and marketplaces. I was wrong again. It’s been…

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We Regret To Inform You That Your Condolences Cannot Be Accepted At This Time

We regret to inform you that your condolences cannot be accepted at this time. At present, both our pain and our hope defy that word, which has been offered and denied us, which we need and do not need, and which in any case we cannot accept, because they (your condolences) will not reach from what has happened to what will come. We find the word condolences stunning in its insufficiency for past and future. We evacuated our homes in the light; we vanished from our homes in the dark; we walked away from our families, toward the weapons, and wished that we could turn around. Our bodies entered the earth in places we cannot now identify, and so we are everywhere, blown to dust. By both dying in and surviving this place, we will live here long after your condolences become a ghost in your throat. We joined others’ battles, willingly and unwillingly; we walked forward on paths not…

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Madness

Colombo, Nov 2: A mentally challenged man, who jumped into the Indian ocean to escape arrest, drowned after being badly beaten up by Sri Lankan police in the water in front of a large crowd, police said. (news item) wonder was horror-edged and pity was guilt-edged flotsam on our conscience as we watched the boy thrown into a senseless sea swirling with violence and as shocking anger beat him to death and forced him to drown we who had watched worse and said nothing gazed in silence and a mobile phone video-recorded footage of folly that moment of hideous history prevailed to bear witness to a country whose war was just over to a people now at peace. the waters whirl and the foam is still froth-white the sun glistens still on the golden sand but the boy we call mad is retreating into the ocean still trying to hold off the blows with batons and sticks the last vestiges…

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About Groundviews

Located at the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Groundviews is a citizen journalism website that uses a range of genres and media to highlight critical perspectives on governance, reconciliation, human rights, the arts and literature, democracy and other issues. The site has won two international awards, including the prestigious Manthan Award South Asia in 2009. The grand jury's evaluation of the site noted, "What no media dares to report, Groundviews publicly exposes. It's a new age media for a new Sri Lanka... Free media at it's very best!"

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