By Uditha Devapriya
The response in Sri Lanka to the unveiling of a genocide monument in Brampton, Canada is predictable, but troubling. For its part the response of the government, led by a left-radical outfit which prided itself, before elections last year, on doing things differently, has opted for continuity from previous regimes. While there hasn’t been a display of the sort of chauvinist, chest-thumping rhetoric which marked out its predecessors, particularly before 2015, the government remains adamant that there was no genocide and that any remarks, statements, or monuments to the contrary will harm reconciliation.
All this boils down, of course, to the question of memory. As I wrote to Factum two years ago, in Sri Lanka remembrance, and memorialization, have become hotly contested. The debates it has given rise to may never be completely resolved or reconciled with each other. Notwithstanding the aragalaya, which promised a rupture from the politics of the past, those debates remain, with commentators and politicians taking sides and doing their best to demean each other. In that sense, if 2022 signaled a moment of rupture, when it comes to the politics of commemoration hardly nothing seems to have changed at all.
In responding to the unveiling of the monument, the Sri Lankan government did what the Sri Lankan State has always done: summon the Canadian High Commissioner, presumably to read the riot act on national reconciliation to him, and issue a statement which points out that “the allegation of genocide during the final phase of the conflict in Sri Lanka is unsubstantiated by any credible authority, either nationally or internationally, and is based on misleading information.” The government maintains this as a “false narrative” and calls the monument a propaganda tool for “electoral gains” in Canada.
There is much to contemplate in these remarks. It is true that no authority, local or foreign, has extended the genocide label to what happened in Sri Lanka. Such attempts have been limited to discussions and documentaries, the most important of which would be the Channel Four film. Yet the issue remains pertinent and refuses to go away. It is an elephant in the room that points to another dilemma: the refusal of the Sri Lankan government to acknowledge the right to memorialize in the context of the 30-year war. While previous governments, specifically the yahapalana regime (2015 – 2019), did away with the chest-thumping décor of Victory Day parades and turned May 18 into a Day of Remembrance, this still seems to be limited to one perspective, that of the Sri Lankan military.
There are those who refute allegations of both genocide and war crimes. A few voices, mostly among the liberal commentariat, do contend that while no genocide happened, the “fog of war” and the difficulty to distinguish between civilians, human shields, and terrorists made civilian casualties inevitable. Those who fall into the second category maintain the need for a tribunal but do not go so far as to recommend an international tribunal, mainly for pragmatic reasons: if implemented, it will provoke a nationalist backlash, and as with the yahapalana regime, will be ultimately reversed.
Yet these debates, important as they are, overlook the more fundamental question of what must be celebrated and remembered on May 18. Over the last few years, under both nationalist and supposedly reformist-liberal administrations, the State has suppressed all forms of protest and commemoration, in particular in the North. This does not, of course, excuse the extremist stances taken in the North, as witness the University of Jaffna’s cancellation of a lecture by a Tamil activist who dared to describe the LTTE as a fascist outfit. But it does beg one to question the wisdom of bulldozing monuments to the ground just because they commemorate the fallen from the other side of the war.
There is a geopolitical dimension to all this as well. Countries like Canada and the UK, which served as a haven for thousands of Tamil refugees after the 1983 riots, have always made statements as well as symbolic gestures such as the recent monument. Without denying the legitimacy of their arguments, it ought to be noted that successive Sri Lankan governments failed to take meaningful steps towards reconciliation and this has, in the long run, given the Tamil lobby in these countries the moral high ground to appeal to and to be heard by their representatives. The State’s approach has been to deny war crimes altogether. If it did even vaguely consider the possibility of such crimes – as the yahapalana regime did, under the stewardship of then Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera – nationalist elements always struck back and ensured policy reversals later.
The response of Canadian authorities is also disturbing. In response to calls to take the monument down, Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown asked his critics to “go back to Colombo” if they wanted to. While such statements are colorful and can win favor among certain constituencies, they contribute to the culture of polarization which dangles over this issue. There is also a hint of hypocrisy in the moral stances taken by such politicians: a perusal of Brampton’s X feed over the last two years reveals that while being ever-ready to paste the genocide label on the last stages of the war in Sri Lanka, he has been as ready to invoke support for Israel and to ignore its military activities in Gaza while condemning Hamas as a terrorist outfit. Such selectivity reinforces the view of the Sri Lankan government that the monument is a propaganda tool for “electoral gains.”
This is a can of worms, considering that some commentators compare the final stages of the Sri Lankan Civil War to Israel’s activities in Gaza and the West Bank. There have been counterarguments to this. Again, these debates belie the real questions of reconciliation that should be raised, addressed, and resolved. The Mullivaikkal Remembrance, for instance, should not be reduced either to a symbol of support for the “other side” of the war – which is how Sinhala nationalists frame it – or an excuse to lay aside the crimes committed by armed militants from that other side. As for comparisons with Israel’s bombardment of Palestine, the question can be asked – as it has been, even by Tamil writers – how Tamil militants, for all their radical-liberationist tendencies, idealized Zionist visions.
None of this is to belittle the sorrow of bereavement, and the loss of loved ones regardless of political preferences and ideological positions. The right to remember has been enshrined in international law, and it is a right open to everyone. We can have arguments about the motives of Western politicians, harp on about conspiracy theories, and still come to terms with the realities of those who have lost their children and spouses to war. We can also debate about the processes that Sri Lanka can and must follow to ensure reconciliation and silence international critics. All of this must reinforce the right to remembrance and the right to memorialize. There is politics embedded in both. But that is a price the Sri Lankan State must be willing to pay and to balance against other considerations.
In that sense, the biggest lesson from the Brampton monument is not that it should not have been unveiled but that we should not have let things get so bad that it had to be unveiled. The Sri Lankan State is responsible for its citizens, and citizens are a part of a nation’s sovereignty. If the people are sovereign, the government has an obligation to find out what happened to those who died in the fog of war and what must be done with those accused of war crimes, regardless of whether they constituted a genocide. The State has a right to defend itself, but it also has to be accountable to its citizens. It is from this standpoint that we must start to confront the past, and resolve it on our own.
Uditha Devapriya is the Chief Analyst – International Relations at Factum and can be reached at uditha@factum.lk.
Factum is an Asia Pacific-focused think tank on International Relations, Tech Cooperation, and Strategic Communications accessible via www.factum.lk.
