Sri Lanka, emerald isle and home to diversities has hurtled into an abyss of civil war again. The delicate ceasefire agreement brokered tenuously by the Norwegians is over. For some it was barely in place. Why has this ethnic diversity turned on itself? And what are the implications of this long civil war on daily life and practices? Neloufer de Mel takes a deep and insightful look at cultural sites to analyse how militarization intersects with ethnic identity; impacts people’s memory, narratives and cultural productions. Militarization is viewed as the ascendancy (hegemony) of militarist ideas in ideational systems that includes the press, media, advertisement, film, political and public policy, institutions etc. It infuses production, labour and capital. Militarization intertwines with gender, race and ethnicity and the nation is sustained by its material and ideological manifestations. Neloufer shows the multiple roots of war and how ethnicity, neo-liberal economic policies and religious nationalism have intertwined with militarization to provide a base for the war.
She believes that the ethnic identities in Sri Lanka overdetermine the policies and strategies of ethnic groups and in the process of this assertion are militarized, providing the spiral for the war. The central Sinhala ethnic identity she argues is pitted against the Tamil community in mutually exclusive ways. The Tamil militancy and the LTTE strategy and practices against the state and their ethnic cleansing of the Muslims from the north east have moulded the counter-ethnic militancy. The exclusion of the Burgher and Malay communities from the discussions on ethnicity and power reveal how these polarities constitute the ethno-nationalist militancy that has become the base of the Sri Lankan conflicts. Further, the confluence of ethnic and religious nationalism in the South has reshaped Buddhism into a militant form as it serves the state and the war effort.
Neloufer looks at film, media, local tales, discourse and testimonies to reveal the intersection of militarization, patriarchy, nationalism and capitalism in six chapters that are almost like complete essays on these specific themes. The constitutive element of militarization which is martial virtue is not an inherent category but brought into being by the processes that define the socio-political order. In a system which is militarized this martial virtue is not just self sustaining, neither is it just restricted to combatants, but is encouraged in the populace as a whole. This wholeness as writers like Foucault showed, have the capacity to produce effects. But Neloufer goes beyond the cause and effect thesis and views militarization as a dynamic on-going process that has become embedded in memory and popular culture. This then is one reason for its constant reproduction and re-invention.
The subliminal control of the public space by messages of militarism are explained by Neloufer by analysing how war was marketed in Sri Lanka since the 1980s. Like elsewhere in the world, war was glorified and made an invitation to the youth and showcased manliness with bravery, combat, robust health and masculine power. These myths and constructions nullify the horrors of war as much as they sustain the nationalism, which is necessary to override the miseries that war brings. The war effort is understood as necessary for both national and individual regeneration. Neloufer explains this through the description of military advertisements meant for recruitment that display sliced images of the massacre of Sinhala villages by the LTTE; Buddhist monks praying for peace; and thus combine militarism with the motive overtones of Sinhala nationalism and religious sanction, a combination that is difficult to challenge. A combination that homogenizes communities, gender and race while simultaneously destroying autonomy, individual freedom and curbing dissent.
The interlinkages of the corporate sector, their acceptance and existence and indeed profiteering during the conflict is well shown up in this book. The use of militarist advertisement even during times of peace during the ‘in between’ periods in a way that normalizes conflict and substitutes it for negotiation, in fact valorizing it as a method of negotiation. The consequence is that peace itself is militarized, and as Neloufer shows, the everyday language (even by peace groups) accepts militarized terminology. The daily practice of culture and tradition is reshaped to accept militarized forms as the only forms. Neloufer takes from the rich traditions of literature and postmodernism and combines these with interviews and case studies to look into the phenomenon of pain/loss, how it is masked and camouflaged and the silence surrounding it. She examines several theatre productions to show how pain is dealt with at the popular level and contrasts it with the militarist discourse. The role of children in armed conflict has been examined in Sri Lanka more so in the context of the use of children in the war. Neloufer goes deeper than this and looks at how the multiple factors of ethnicity, militarization and globalization shapes and intervenes in the psyche of children as they grow and interact with others. The hardships that came from the globalized and structurally adjusted economy on children, in terms of the neglect they have faced as the state withdrew from the social sectors and more women joined the informal work force; the impact of the war as hundreds of thousands of children displaced; saw broken homes, missing parents; women headed households, etc. Neloufer narrates instances from the Butterfly Peace Garden to explain evocatively what children go through both in this space and the conflict beyond this protected space.
Much has been written about the LTTE women suicide bombers. Secrecy and mystery surrounds their persona since their presence is felt only after their final act of death. Neloufer looks at these female suicide bombers through the silence and the speech that surrounds the act of terrorism. Neloufer’s point in this section is that the conjecture, that is produced at the site of the death of a female suicide bomber generally talks of reclaiming lost honour and revenge for a sexual violation, a discourse that does not accrue around a male bomber. So the issue here is not only lack of authenticity, but how the speech act is itself constructed.
The chapter on ‘The promise of the Archive’ takes it cue from writers like Agamben and Derrida and then sums up the writing of many Sri Lankan feminists on women’s positions in the conflict. Neloufer’s conclusion appears to be that the Sri Lankan woman in conflict emerges only when she is needed in the space of cultural production. There is no separate concluding chapter, perhaps because there is no conclusion either to the war, to militarization or the subjectivity of women in Sri Lanka. Yet Niloufer in this last chapter looks at women’s interventions and debates on peace, from the perspective of human rights and with the conviction of women’s rights as human rights.
In times of war, as in Sri Lanka, the state becomes all pervasive. The choices offered to individuals get limited to ‘with us or against us’. Dissent and even analysis is looked at with suspicion. It takes an extraordinary individual to challenge the dominant militarized nationalist core of the state. Sri Lanka has produced some of these extraordinary and courageous intellectuals. Neloufer is one of them. This book is a testimony to and an intervention in this tragedy.
Anuradha Chenoy is Professor at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.