Emma, thank you very much for writing and also sharing details of your work. The work sounds very meaningful, and reminds me of a similar process about a decade ago (revolving around Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed approaches) that brought together people from different parts of Sri Lanka (and of different political persuasions) to engage with one another. It was often challenging and not always successful, but also resulted in some remarkably important friendships and shifts in perspective. I wish you and the groups you work with well, and hope to hear more about the process as it goes forward. Thanks again. TA

This is a profound article and one that really resonates with me. In January of 2012 myself and 4 others from Australia and Chennai, India travelled to Jaffna to undertake some playback theatre training with a small group of young people. I am not sure if you have heard of playback theatre but perhaps you might like to look it up. It is basically a form of improvisational theatre in which audience members are invited to share stories which the actors then perform back to them. As such the form has cathartic properties that help individuals and groups process their stories either personal or collective. Playback is practiced widely across more than 50 countries and has a strong and robust network / community of international practitioners.

The team heading to Jaffna was part of 4 teams working across Sri Lanka, 3 other trainings took place in Colombo, Unawatuna and Hatton. At the end of a week in which these four groups worked simultaneously but separately, all four came together in Kandy for the first ever Sri Lankan national playback gathering where they started to share stories with one another.

It was an ambitious thing to do and of course many experiences of the war were spoken about and shared. Young people from completely different backgrounds in Sri Lanka came to know and understand something of one another when previously they didn’t. Not everything ran smoothly, and I particularly remember one story that left everyone in shock and not knowing what to do or say. However, it was a beginning and it was the type of beginning that you articulate so clearly in your article.

I am not sure what else to say here but I wanted to draw your attention to playback theatre as a form and also to the Theatre of Friendship project as there are plans to develop it further over the coming 5 years. If you would like to talk to me more about it then please get in touch. I have worked in Sri Lanka as an arts practitioner on 3 different occasions, once for 6 months after the Tsunami in 2005 and then again in 2007 and 2012, as such I am developing an ongoing relationship with the country that I am looking to continue in the future. The people I met in Jaffna, Kandy and Colombo were so beautiful and the youth themselves particularly willing to engage in the process of peace and understanding that I am committed to facilitating this in any way I can. I am now undertaking a playback theatre performance in London that will be a fundraising event for the Jaffna group that I met in January. I will be using some of the things you say here in my opening talk on the night.

Yours
Emma

“I asked you questions and you answered with counter questions!”

That is because your questions were either loaded or did not make sense. See below:

“1. Do you still believe that MR won the war by killing 8,000 civilians (GOSL estimation) just to save the Tamil civilians being used as human shields and child soldiers?”

Loaded question: your question assumes that every single civilian was killed by the SLA and that the LTTE did not kill a single person. Is that what you believe?

“2. How about if the real death toll amounts to 40,000 +, would you still stand by your above statement?”

Which statement?

“3. Have you ever wondered as to what had happened to the bodies of the 8,000 that MR has accepted perished?”

I assume they were buried or more likely cremated. Do you know what had happened to the bodies?

“The previous leaders surely wanted to consolidate power but they had other means of doing it.”

And as a result, the war dragged on without end, with people continuing to get killed and other people such as yourself remaining silent about it. Do you wish the war would have never ended? What was MR supposed to do?

“Well I gather that your utmost priority is for Sri Lanka to remain a unitary state;”

Actually my utmost priority is for everyone to become trilingual and for the ethnic identities to disappear. I don’t see how that is possible with a devolved system that emphasises differences rather than similarities.

“MR offers that at a cost, that you can live with though you do not approve of.”

That is not true. MR has not repealed the 13th Amendment and so he is not offering anything.

“Land grapping, military siege, armed militias, social and law & order decline you can live with for time being until the Sinhala society is educated!”

First I would recommend reading the following article by Dr Rajasingham Narendran:
http://dbsjeyaraj.com/dbsj/archives/5101

Second I would point out that social/law and order decline is the result of MR/GR, not the unitary state.

Dear Wijayapala,

I asked you questions and you answered with counter questions! Please answer the following:

1. Do you still believe that MR won the war by killing 8,000 civilians (GOSL estimation) just to save the Tamil civilians being used as human shields and child soldiers?
2. How about if the real death toll amounts to 40,000 +, would you still stand by your above statement?
3. Have you ever wondered as to what had happened to the bodies of the 8,000 that MR has accepted perished?

“So you are saying that all the previous leaders had failed to end the war because they were not interested in consolidating power?????”

Well; as you know that MR was an outsider and alien in terms of the ruling class of Sri Lanka; hence he needed to build a dynasty in same the mould as the Banda family. The previous leaders surely wanted to consolidate power but they had other means of doing it. They were not unscrupulous like the MR regime. They would not have set up no-fire zones and fired on them; they would not have knowingly fired on the hospitals; they would have massacred most of the surrendering LTTE personnel!

“Why would I want to educate Sinhala people if I support “absolute Sinhala Buddhist hegemony”?????”

Well I gather that your utmost priority is for Sri Lanka to remain a unitary state; MR offers that at a cost, that you can live with though you do not approve of. Land grapping, military siege, armed militias, social and law & order decline you can live with for time being until the Sinhala society is educated! This is what I gather as to what you are about. If I have misconstrued, I take back what I said, but I cannot fathom any other way!

Dear Burning_Issue

“All evidences point to MR won the war to consolidate his power and dynasty building.”

So you are saying that all the previous leaders had failed to end the war because they were not interested in consolidating power?????

“I know you will support MR as he is the only entity that promotes a unitary state with absolute Sinhala Buddhist hegemony. You will accept this in order to maintain the unitary status of the nation while your so called educating the Sinhala is in progress!”

Why would I want to educate Sinhala people if I support “absolute Sinhala Buddhist hegemony”?????

Dear Wijayapala,

“To end a war where innocent people were being used by diaspora-funded LTTE as human shields and child soldiers?”

Do you still believe that MR won the war by killing 8,000 civilians (GOSL estimation) just to save the Tamil civilians being used as human shields and child soldiers? All evidences point to MR won the war to consolidate his power and dynasty building. I know you will support MR as he is the only entity that promotes a unitary state with absolute Sinhala Buddhist hegemony. You will accept this in order to maintain the unitary status of the nation while your so called educating the Sinhala is in progress!

How about if the real death toll amounts to 40,000 +, would you still stand by your above statement? Have you ever wondered as to what had happened to the bodies of the 8,000 that MR has accepted perished?

Dear Ananda

“Why Rajapaksa killed so many innocent people to achieve this hollow victory ? What for ?”

To end a war where innocent people were being used by diaspora-funded LTTE as human shields and child soldiers?

Marty, I agree with you that I haven’t addressed the shifts in the tactices, forms and intensity of violence used by the parties to the conflict over the duration of 30 years – nor the specifics of the insurgent and counter-insurgent violence of the late 1980s. I’m not really equipped to do that sort of analysis. Nor, if I am to be honest with you, am I sure that this is something that makes much sense to me. You may disagree – but to me, the question of reckoning whose tactics were less humane than the other; whose cause or approach was more righteous or justified, seems to lead us inevitably into a sort of downward spiral of argument that is often impossible to resolve. Even in the case of people who were held as human shields, they do not all seem to agree whom they hate more or feel more betrayed by – those who shot at them when they tried to escape or those whose shells/rockets came down on them. Amongst the ranks of both the former members of the LTTE and the SL armed forces there are likely to be similar divergent feelings of justification or responsibility/guilt in relation to civillians who died or were maimed as a result of their side’s or their own actions. When I look at the effects of deaths and serious injury, even those of combatants – whose own histories themselves are often marked with great pain – these are so devastating that they seem to be the only thing that’s truly real or important. At the level of the individual life lost, to those left behind the issue of whether a death was by the rules or not doesn’t seem to make much difference. Faced with suffering that is still evident in some families even 20 years after a loss, political ideology, nations, homelands, security all seem pretty poor justification for what they’ve been put through. I just can’t get past that – and I feel we all bear some degree of resposibility for this, whether we like it or not..

While it is conceivable that war crimes took place to varying degrees by the SL Armed Forces in the final phases of the war, I seriously doubt the scale and scope of these allegations as there is simply no comparison between Eelam War 4 and the two JVP Uprisings and the way they were fought.

No one can doubt that the SL Government at the time resorted to brutal measures to suppress the JVP and killed thousands of their fighters to defeat them. But in the 1980s, international humanitarian law and formal rules of engagement in warfare had not penetrated the military. It had very limited rules of engagement and no doctrine that took into account humanitarian considerations in combat. There was also almost no international media coverage, or what was covered was minimal, unlike in Eelam War 4, which had global publicity.

By the mid-1990s onwards, during Chandrika’s reign, the military had been gradually subjected to humanitarian law and human rights and this resulted in the creation of a directorate within the Army especially to adddress this matter. A major development without a doubt. In the military operations of Eelam War 3 there was much greater focus on humanitarian considerations, law and rules of engagement than ever before.

As time passsed, the military in Eelam War 4 was much more discliplined and was an efficient organisation, quite different to the way it was led and the way in which it operated against the JVP. While there is limited evidence that the military killed Tamil ‘civilians’deliberately, in wanton acts of homicide, there is more evidence that points to its fire discipline in combat and the fact the line troops took great risks to help save large numbers of Tamil civilians who were caught in the crossfire.

The author’s critique also does not take into consideration LTTE tactics, the use of human shields and the use of civialians for military purposes, which massively raised the stakes and complicated the nature of the fighting and even slowed the military advance. This tactic ensured that civilians would be caught in the crossfire throughout the last 5 months of the war on a scale not probably seen since either Vietnam or the Second World War. It is interesting that the final No Fire Zone operation took four weeks to capture a territory only 13 kilometres long and about 3 or 4 wide. I reckon the author, who is well intentioned, should consider reexamining his argument on this point and try to understand the key factual turning points in the SL military’s culture which was different from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. But it is a good article and I enjoyed reading it.

“A retired friend of mine in Colombo, having viewed the government’s alternative version of the Channel 4 ‘Killing Fields’ documentary asked me if I really thought that the army could have treated people ‘like that’. It was hard to imagine, he said, that they could have behaved like such beasts. I had gently to remind him that from where we were standing talking on his balcony we could see the spots where the tortured bodies of suspected JVP members had been burned and hung from a lamppost during the terror of 1989. He nodded slowly. The truth of what the armed forces (and armed insurgents) were capable of was already available to him as a Sri Lankan who had lived through an insurrection in his own town.”