Mahinda Rajapaksa at a victory day parade, 2010. Demotix/Chamila Karunarathne. All rights reserved.The recently-ended civil war in Sri Lanka could be construed – generously – as a struggle to redefine the nation in ethnic terms. And so Qadri Ismail could maintain, in his 2006 book, Abiding by Sri Lanka: on Peace, Place and Postcoloniality, that as an epistemological object, an object of study, ‘Sri Lanka’ was not a given but a geopolitical category under construction. It had to be constituted in the very act of understanding it. One might call this notion a radical constructionism, and as a theoretical issue it is important. Ismail’s point is worth considering today even if one is not a philosopher or academic.
The ethnic redefinition of a country has a sinister aspect too: for inevitably, in the process, something – some individual or group – is inevitably ethnically ‘cleansed’ out. And history offers many examples, including what happened in Sri Lanka when the majority government quelled a 26-year conflict with Tamil separatists and reconfigured the nation-state. The tragic civil war in Sri Lanka must also be seen from the perspective of those who were vanquished. History should not be allowed to be written only by the victors. This is what the investigative documentary No Fire Zone, directed by Callum Macrae, attempts to do. Macrae’s film is important not only for its political intervention, but also for its presentation of the view from below, particularly through its use of informal, mediated citizen documentation: amateur video footage taken by the victims and others who experienced the ‘killing fields’ where the separatists were decimated and where the Tamil community were subjected to many human rights violations.
In the wake of the 9/11 bombings, the international consensus was increasingly weighted against insurgent forces, guerrilla groups, or any other organizations that could be constructed as ‘terrorist’ organizations. And this had implications for India’s evolving policy with regard to Tamil insurgents against the Sri Lankan state. The tendency to disapprove of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’s strategies and tactics was also in the ascendant in the US, at the UN and among the member states of the EU. The EU, for instance, issued an official ban on the LTTE in May 2006. For its part, the central government in India had been anxious to appear on the ‘right’ side of history – that of the victors – in this and other regional conflicts, as the Sri Lankan Civil War entered its final phase.
