Violence, Torture and Memory in Sri Lanka

Life after Terror

Dhana Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135038144
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

Drawing on original ethnographic field-research conducted primarily with former guerrilla insurgents in southern and central Sri Lanka, this book analyses the memories and narratives of people who have perpetrated political violence. It explores how violence is negotiated and lived with in the aftermath, and its implications for the self and social relationships from the perspectives of those who have inflicted it.

The book sheds ethnographic light on a largely overlooked and little-understood conflict that took place within the majority Sinhala community in the late 1980s, known locally as the Terror (Bheeshanaya). It illuminates the ways in which the ethical charge carried by violence seeps into the fabric of life in the aftermath, and discusses that for those who have perpetrated violence, the mediation of its memory is ethically tendentious and steeped in the moral, carrying important implications for notions of the self and for the negotiation of sociality in the present.

Providing an important understanding of the motivations, meanings, and consequences of violence, the book is of interest to students and scholars of South Asia, Political Science, Trauma Studies and War Studies.

1 Introduction

Life after terror

I don’t have the words to describe it … it’s like a cup of tea. You get the sweet taste of sugar, you get the creamy taste of milk, and you get the bitter taste of tea. It is a mix of feelings and experiences. It was not just good or bad. It was a mix.

Nikhil, a former guerrilla insurgent, was reflecting on his personal experiences during Sri Lanka’s Terror, which submerged much of the southern and central regions of the country in violence, fear and immense suffering. He was a small, intellectual man with kindly eyes and a reputation for alcohol-fuelled raucous behaviour at the weekends. We were sitting in a remote dank and smoke-filled public house. He had insisted that this was the only place in which he felt comfortable enough to talk to me about his life as an insurgent during the Terror.

Nikhil went on to unfold a convoluted and somewhat contradictory narrative: colourful and positive at certain points, dark and unsettling at others. He recounted the highs of a young man’s youthful energy and optimism directed at transforming an unjust socio-political system into a just one; and the lows of being detained and subjected to horrific torture by the state. He remembered the reinvigorated thirst for reformulating his life and renewed sense of religiosity that accompanied his eventual release. He reflected pensively on the challenges of rebuilding social relationships fractured by violence, while grappling with the memories of his traumatic experiences. Nikhil interrupted his story at points to take a gulp of his beer and a drag of his cigarette. Silence, hesitation, gaps, and at times an apparent difficulty finding the words to articulate his memories of violence, stuttered the flow of our conversation.

How do people who have participated in extensive violence against the state and members of their own community, understand and reflect on their experiences? What meanings and value do they attach to violence and their motivations for it? How do those who have engaged in violence reformulate their lives and deal with the social, material and cultural consequences of their actions in its aftermath? This book, which is centred on stories belonging to those who lived through a time of terror in southern Sri Lanka, addresses these questions.¹

Anchored in a little-known violent period in the late 1980s, known locally simply as ‘the Terror’ (Bheeshanaya), I analyse the memories and narrative representations of people who have perpetrated political violence. Drawing on field research conducted primarily with former insurgents in southern, western and central Sri Lanka, I explore how violence is negotiated and lived with in the aftermath, and its implications for the self and social relationships, from the perspectives of those who have inflicted it. Rather than being an attempt to construct a ‘history’ of the event, this book is an ethnography of the present that is primarily built on the work of memory.

The 1980s opened a new chapter in the turbulent modern history of Sri Lanka. In addition to the dramatic escalation of the well-documented secessionist conflict in the north and east led by Tamil militants, the state was simultaneously grappling with a violent insurrection spearheaded predominantly by young Sinhala Buddhist people in the south of the country. Sinhala people comprise the majority ethnic group in Sri Lanka (forming some 75 per cent of the total population) and are predominantly Buddhists. This bloody insurgency was led by a radical youth movement known as the JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/People’s Liberation Front), which aimed to overthrow the regime and replace it with one based on Marxist-nationalist ideology. Its protracted struggle lasted approximately three years, and involved a campaign of violence that was launched against the state and members of the Sinhala ‘community’. Just as their success seemed imminent, within the space of a few months the insurrection was brutally crushed by state-sponsored counter-insurrectionary violence. Definite numbers of those killed or disappeared during this period are not available, but estimates of those who died vary from the conservative figure of 40,000 to 100,000, while thousands more were ‘disappeared’. It is this era that is commonly known as the Bheeshanaya.

I had experienced the Bheeshanaya from the periphery as a child living in Sri Lanka, largely cocooned from the direct onslaught of violence by my privileged Colombo surrounds. Lengthy school closures, the ‘abnormal’ spectacle of a young soldier awkwardly reading the news on television following a spate of media personality murders by insurgents, and a sense of underlying dread and uncertainty are remnants of my own memories of this period. My young friends and I feared an imminent invasion of our homes and lives by terrifying bearded insurgents from the villages who would kill our parents and divide up our houses into communal living spaces, simply because ‘they didn’t like our way of life’.² Fragments of my childhood memories of the Terror continued to trouble me into adulthood, long after I had left Sri Lanka. The silence and amnesia that shrouded the event, the picture etched in my mind of monstrous insurgents bent on violence, and a nagging curiosity about what they were doing now, prompted my interest in undertaking this study.

In 2007 I set out in search of those surviving ‘youth’ who had participated in this insurrection by engaging in guerrilla-style warfare against the state. I travelled through several villages and towns spanning the southern, central and western regions of Sri Lanka, speaking to numerous people – mostly former insurgents – about their memories of the Bheeshanaya. I knew that many people in these regions had suffered through the worst of the Bheeshanaya, and that in these picturesque villages and towns there were those who had taken up arms against the state and, apparently, against Sinhala Buddhist society itself.

At sunset when the skies above the clear turquoise ocean and emerald paddy-fields were a mixture of purple, orange and gold, I could scarcely believe that I was really there. The setting was breathtaking, with seemingly endless golden beaches, gently sloping mountains, coconut trees that swayed sleepily in the breeze, and thickets of lush jungle to the interior. However, I had heard whispers, and found it difficult to imagine, that there was a time when corpses littered these golden beaches, when sinister and shadowy gangs would stalk their human prey in these jungles, and when the hospitable people who lived in these areas apparently violently ‘turned on each other’, or went into hiding in fear for their lives. It was a jarring contrast, and one that hounded me throughout my time in the field.

The seeming peaceful normality of people’s daily lives seemed oddly juxtaposed with the ‘abnormality’ of the Bheeshanaya. I found it difficult to reconcile the narratives of intense suffering and terror with the surrounding visual landscape. People seemed to be going about their lives as normal and the atmosphere was tranquil on the surface. If I was reading them correctly, the Terror that had convulsed their social worlds was now long forgotten and relegated to the ‘dustbin’ of history. The Bheeshanaya was not mentioned, and nothing in the landscape indicated that the people living in these areas had, less than 20 years ago, lived through southern Sri Lanka’s most harrowing period of terror in recent history. The more my cautious conversations about this subject progressed over time, however, the more I came to realise that people in fact lived with the Bheeshanaya in the present and that its memory continued to shape their everyday in powerful ways. I came to find that these places were pregnant with the hidden memories of its people; the fearful and ugly memories of a generation, and of a nation. I wanted to dig beneath this veneer of ‘paradise’ and apparent amnesia, and find out why people were so silent about it. I wanted to know what life was like for those who had lived through the Terror, what it meant to them, and how people had come to terms (if at all) with the colossal violence that had ravaged their lives and communities just two decades earlier. I wanted to learn about it from the very people whose lives were inextricably entangled in it. What I unearthed fills the pages of this book.

Key arguments

This book explores how the ethical charge carried by violence seeps into the fabric of life in the aftermath. The key arguments proposed are that for those who have perpetrated violence, the mediation of its memory is ethically tendentious and steeped in the moral, and so carries important implications for notions of the self and the negotiation of sociality in the present.³ Memory does not entail an abstract recording of the past, but is informed by the socio-political context of recall. This means that people who have engaged in violence remember and give meaning to their experiences in ways that allow them to continue living with themselves, with their violent pasts, and with others, in the aftermath.

Life after terror involves efforts to find an ethical framework to contend with past violence (Mueggler 2001), and entails continuous moral evaluations of a violence that is situated uncomfortably ‘close to home’. While the memory of violence is kept alive in the present as an ethical issue, the allocation of moral responsibility for it remains in a constant state of flux. Living in the wake of violence can involve the production of moral claims about what it means to be good, who is responsible, and what this means in practical terms for everyday relationships. Living an ethical life after violence involves shifting judgements and attitudes that link events in the past to relationships in the present, and aspirations for the future. Ethical responses to violence cannot be reduced to those of blame, reconciliation or absolution. The moral charge of violence is not given once and for all, and is seldom settled, but is contested, ambiguous and fragmented. This book, then, is about the fragmented nature of ethical responses to violence.

Life after the Bheeshanaya, for those who have participated in violence, involves findings ways of living with the past and its un-reconciled ethical implications in the present, as opposed to ‘moving on’ or ‘being healed’ from violence (Scheper-Hughes 2004). This book builds on compelling arguments put forward by scholars concerning the practice of memory and its moral entailments along with its implications for constructions of self-identity and relationships with others (Antze and Lambek 1996).

Through the accounts of former insurgents, which were supplemented by interviews with their own families, with counter-insurgency officers and the families of those killed or disappeared, there emerges a wider story of the effects of violence and mutual betrayal on kinship and community ties. The Bheeshanaya unleashed a violence that seeped into the very heart of intimate relationships, and the implications of terror for intimate sociality constitute a thread that runs through this book. In a situation of terror where neighbours denounced each other and exploited the climate of terror to settle personal scores, we also come across instances where family and community ties transcended the acute binaries created by violence. This book, then, sheds light on how communities wracked by violence and mistrust function in its aftermath. Importantly, I highlight the flawed nature of one-dimensional ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ binaries, and emphasise instead the ambiguity and multiple subject positions that often mark people’s experiences of violence. Through telling the story of how people who have participated in violence mediate and articulate their discomforting memories, this study engages with issues of violence, memory, intimacy, culpability and ethics.

After the Terror

There has been a recent shift in anthropological scholarship on violence towards considering the transformative impact of violence on subjectivity and the everyday (Das 2000, 2007; Nordstrom 1995; Green 1999), and some of the most important work has come from research on Sri Lanka’s ‘ethnic conflict’ (Daniel 1996; Lawrence 2000; Thiranagama 2011; Walker, forthcoming). These studies, many of which focus on the experiences of ‘victims/survivors’ of violence, have shown violence to be ‘world making’, with a capacity to create meaning, transform subjectivity, individualise experiences and powerfully alter the everyday, which people strive to recreate.

Recent research on Sri Lanka has predominantly focused on the well-publicised ‘ethnic conflict’ in the north and east of the country between the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) and the Sri Lankan state, which ended in 2009. In comparison, intra-group violence in the south of the country has received little attention. Common approaches to understanding violence overwhelmingly focus on violence against the ethnic or religious ‘other’. One must, however, be cautious of the dangers of reducing violence to the inevitable outcome of ethnic or religious difference, given the frequent occurrence of political violence in our world between those who appear to be the same; as Siegel puts it, the type of violence in which ‘one kills those in one’s own image’ (Siegel 1998: 1).

The Bheeshanaya occupies an awkward position in the modern history of Sri Lanka and in the contemporary lives of its people. It has been little studied, and is an event that continues to be shrouded in fear, ‘amnesia’ and silence. The discomforting nature of the violence, which took place between members of the same community, often involving neighbours and even friends, has rendered it incomprehensible and a shameful blot on the modern history of Sri Lanka. Many of those who engaged in atrocities during the Terror continue to hold positions of power, and the post-Terror ‘reality’ is one in which ‘perpetrators’, ‘victims’ and ‘witnesses’ must live in close proximity to each other, in the absence of justice and reconciliation.

Obeyesekere states that ‘Unlike the ethnic conflict, virtually nothing of significance has been written on the … JVP youth-based insurgency’ (Obeyesekere 2011: xii). This book hopes to make a valuable contribution here. It is set apart from many other studies of violence and Sri Lanka through its focus on the southern Terror and its analysis of the dynamics and implications of violence perpetrated between ‘the same’ (Siegel 1998). Importantly, this study centres on former JVP insurgents who participated in violence during the Terror, whose voices are noticeably absent in the sparse literature that is available on this topic.⁴ It thereby builds on the emerging global literature on ‘perpetrators’ (see Mahmood 1996; Browning 2001; Foster et al. 2005; Payne 2008; Hinton 2004a; Hatzfeld 2005).

‘Perpetrators’ vs ‘victims’

This book fundamentally highlights the flawed nature of commonly assumed one-dimensional ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’ categories. These binary constructions differentiate between ‘perpetrators’ as active subjects, and ‘victims’ (or survivors) as passive objects (Foster et al. 2005). The stories of those who have participated in violence that run through the following chapters illustrate that the lived ‘reality’ of violence on the ground is ambiguous. Such simplistic labels further run the risk of pathologising violence, and with it entire groups of individuals, as either ‘perpetrators’ or ‘victims’, and can encourage naive interpretations of the world in terms of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’.

This book is about people who have perpetrated violence, and who are also themselves both ‘victims’ of and ‘witnesses’ to violence, having experienced violence from multiple and overlapping subject positions. People often live with the duality of complicity in violence as well as suffering its effects. For instance, former insurgents told stories of being subjected to torture (see Chapter 4), and of being witness to violence enacted by others. Moreover, having come through the experience of terror, they could also be considered ‘survivors’ of violence. As such, I use the term ‘perpetrators’ (in inverted commas) with caution. Violence during the Bheeshanaya operated at multiple levels, with various avenues for direct and indirect involvement opening up, potentially leaving many people with various amounts of ‘blood on their hands’. This renders the application of absolute ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ categories often unworkable on the ground.⁵

The former insurgents who participated in this research were by no means one-dimensional characters. Their narratives epitomised the contradictions, diversity and ambiguities that characterise human life and behaviour. Moreover, former insurgents categorically refused to accept the label of ‘perpetrator’, mainly due to the negative moral weight it carried. Rather than being straightforward labels, ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ are themselves ethical subject ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge/Edinburgh South Asian Studies Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Transliteration
• 1 Introduction: Life after terror
• 2 The violence of youth
• 3 'Opportunistic' violence and the impossibility of intimacy
• 4 Talking about torture: Stories of torture survivors
• 5 Talking about torture: Stories of former counter-insurgency officers
• 6 Possibilities of intimacy in times of terror
• 7 Recreating life after terror and the mundane
• 8 Buddhism and reformulating life after terror
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index