Centre for South Asian Studies

Description

Following the end of Sri Lanka’s long civil war in 2009, the Government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa and Sinhala Buddhist nationalists constructed the war as a humanitarian operation conducted by heroic soldiers to save Tamil civilians from the most brutal terrorists the world has seen. In this discourse, all allegations of war-related atrocities are categorically denied and dismissed as an insult to the soldiers. While the government erected monuments celebrating the figure of the soldier, Tamil militants and civilians who died and disappeared are considered ungrievable and unmournable lives. Those who dare to demand truth and justice for war-related atrocities are labeled as liars, traitors, and enemies of the state. This is a narrative of the nation, that seeks to erase atrocities, entrench impunity and delimit the public sphere available to pursue justice. Yet the Rajapaksa government was also forced to perform the rule of law in the form of commissions of inquiry, habeas corpus applications, and offers of compensation, which simultaneously opened up the public sphere to make claims relating to atrocities during the war. In this paper, I trace how Tamil family members of those who disappeared during the war—the vast majority of them women, with no prior experience in social movements or political activism— emerge as subaltern, dissident citizen subjects in the context of these contradictory practices. I argue that during the Rajapaksa years, they occupied, re-signified, subverted, and unsettled the existing public sphere available to them and created new and alternative sites of contestation to advance their struggle. More than 13 years after the end of the war, they continue to do so. In so doing, family members are keeping alive the memories of the disappeared, making visible sovereign violence, disrupting the boundaries between the public and private, and turning conventional ideas of political struggle on its head. Moreover, they are posing a radical challenge to the nationalist ideological project itself and the nationalist narrative of identity and belonging in postwar Sri Lanka. 

Chair: Dr Gerhard Anders, Senior Lecturer in African Studies & International Development, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh