Masking Terror

How Women Contain Violence in Southern Sri Lanka

Alex Argenti-Pillen

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780812236880, 9780812236880
• eBook ISBN: 9780812201154
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Sri Lanka, staggering numbers of young men were killed fighting in the armed forces against Tamil separatists. The war became one of attrition—year after year waves of young foot soldiers were sent to almost certain death in a war so bloody that the very names of the most famous battle scenes still fill people with horror. Alex Argenti-Pillen describes the social fabric of a rural community that has become a breeding ground and reservoir of soldiers for the Sri Lankan nation-state, arguing that this reservoir has been created on the basis of a culture of poverty and terror.Focusing on the involvement of the pseudonymous village of Udahenagama in the atrocities of the civil war of the late 1980s and the interethnic war against the Tamil guerrillas, Masking Terror describes the response of women in the rural slums of southern Sri Lanka to the further spread of violence. To reconstruct the violent backgrounds of these soldiers, she presents the stories of their mothers, sisters, wives, and grandmothers, providing a perspective on the conflict between Sinhalese and Tamil populations not found elsewhere.In addition to interpreting the impact of high levels of violence on a small community, Argenti-Pillen questions the effects of trauma counseling services brought by the international humanitarian community into war-torn non-Western cultural contexts. Her study shows how Euro-American methods for dealing with traumatized survivors poses a threat to the culture-specific methods local women use to contain violence. Masking Terror provides a sobering introduction to the difficulties and methodological problems field researchers, social scientists, human rights activists, and mental health workers face in working with victims and perpetrators of ethnic and political violence and large-scale civil war. The narratives of the women from Udahenagama provide necessary insight into how survivors of wartime atrocities reconstruct their communicative worlds and disrupt the cycle of violence in ways that may be foreign to Euro-American professionals.

Chapter 1

Introduction

How Women Contain Violence

A great number of young men in Sri Lanka have chosen to join the armed forces and were until recently fighting against Tamil separatists (the Tamil Tigers or LTTE) in the north and east of the country. As the Sri Lankan army suffered heavy casualties in what has become a war of attrition, waves of young foot soldiers were continuously sent to almost certain death at the front. Operation Leap Forward started in July 1995, Operation Riviresa I in December 1995, and Operations Riviresa II and III in April and May 1996. These are but some examples of the violence involving the soldiers of the Sri Lankan army in a conflict that started in 1983.¹ My husband and I worked in Sri Lanka during Operation Sath Jaya (Complete Victory), which started in July 1996, and Operation Jaya Sikurui (Certain Victory), which began in May 1997. In the first hundred days of Operation Jaya Sikurui, the official figures conceded that over 575 soldiers of the Sri Lankan army had been killed in action, while 3400 were reported to have been wounded in action (Situation Report, Sunday Times, August 24 1997). The very utterance of the names of the most infamous battle scenes along the front still fills people with horror. Mullaitivu, the name of a coastal town in the north of the island where over 1000 soldiers of the Sri Lankan army were killed in only two or three days during Operation Sath Jaya, is a case in point.

The island of Sri Lanka, with a majority Sinhalese Buddhist population, is officially a Buddhist state, the armed forces of which are fighting the against the Tamil Tigers, insurrectionists drawn from the Hindu Tamil ethnic and religious minority concentrated in the north and east of the country. According to the international press and the discourse of Sri Lankan politicians alike, the conflict that erupted in 1983 is caused by inter-ethnic strife between Sinhalese Buddhists and Hindu Tamil separatists. This is the rhetoric that has motivated the international military-industrial complex to secure a steady flow of military hardware for the Sri Lankan government. While Western governments support the Sri Lankan national army, international arms dealers have backed both the Sri Lankan army and the LTTE indiscriminately. Allegations circulate, in both the international and the Sri Lankan press, that the “interethnic warfare” is only a front orchestrated by arms dealers and political elites who benefit from the consequent trade in weapons. Rumors periodically appear in the Sri Lankan press alleging that a political solution to the conflict has been opposed by powerful members of the political elite who benefit personally from the ongoing war and the concomitant trade in military hardware. Further critical analysis of such rumors and the potential deconstruction of the political elite’s rhetoric on interethnic warfare have yet to be addressed by a future generation of investigative journalism.

This book represents an anthropological contribution to this debate, which has thus far been led by Sri Lankan investigative journalists such as Iqbal Atthas and Roy Denish. In the chapters that follow, I attempt to deconstruct the notion of interethnic violence by providing a detailed account of a wider cycle of violence in which the war against the Tamil minority forms just one component. For nearly a year and a half (1996-98) I conducted research in the village of Udahenagama (a pseudonym), a rural community in the Southern Province of Sri Lanka, among the families of the Sinhalese soldiers who were being sent to the front in the north and east of the country. From the perspective of the Tamil minority, I worked with perpetrators of wartime atrocities and their families, not the people who orchestrate and design the war but those who actually participate in committing (virtually genocidal) war crimes against Tamil communities. The families of these young and often chronically violent men have their own story to tell, however. Their perspective on the conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamil populations is commonly absent from existing historical accounts of Sinhala-Tamil warfare. My aim was to conduct research on the social context that provides the breeding ground for the successive waves of young men destined to enroll in the armed forces and to be deployed by the Sri Lankan nation state against its Tamil minority.

Historical or sociological accounts of the willingness of the rural poor to participate in the interethnic war often attribute their motivation to become conscripts in the Sri Lankan national army to poverty. People in the village of Udahenagama eagerly confirmed this to me. Most young soldiers in the national armed forces come from extremely poor backgrounds. Their parents and siblings survive by means of casual labor on the tea plantations or in the rice paddies. Such landless peasants form the majority of the soldiers who fight the LTTE in the north and east of the country. As one elder in the village argued, soldiers work for the army as casual laborers and kill for their daily wage. Their “nationalism” is that of the daily wage laborer, a “coolie nationalism” motivated by poverty rather than sincere nationalist fervor.

The Sri Lankan army, almost exhausted by the long war against the LTTE, depends on the impoverished population to provide its rank-and-file soldiers (Sunday Leader, July 28, 1996). This implies that the sons of the more privileged classes engaging in the nationalist discourses in the press and in Colombo’s elite circles—the discourse that feeds the war—hardly ever join the lower ranks of the army or die for the Sinhalese cause. Meanwhile, ordinary Sinhalese villagers are regularly confronted with rumors about the number of casualties resulting from the latest of the many army debacles of the past five years. Nevertheless, thousands of young men deliberately head for the front and in many cases to their deaths. Poverty-stricken families are caught between succumbing to army recruitment strategies on the one hand or to poverty on the other. The only tangible reality of the war that permeates the civilian population in the villages arrives in the form of the bodies of dead soldiers returned to their kin in the infamous sealed coffins that they are forbidden to open (cf. Perera 1996: 46). More often than not, however, no news from the front is available and the families of soldiers live in extreme insecurity. The press censorship, justified by the need to keep security-related matters secret during army operations, has ensured that the hearts of the public (the wives, mothers, fathers, siblings, and friends of army personnel) have grown bitter from the festering official silence on the war.

The combination of poverty and the greed of an arms-dealing politico-economic elite devoid of social conscience can account for part of the reality of chronic interethnic violence, but many questions are left unanswered in the interpretations noted above of the war in Sri Lanka. During my fieldwork in Udahenagama, I attempted to reconstruct the social background of some of the foot soldiers born in the village. Most young conscripts manage to tolerate high levels of oppression and violence during their initial period of training before going to the front. Many successfully become ferocious fighters. Some carry out atrocities at the front, but many also become deserters. It is estimated that twenty to thirty thousand young men have deserted from the army since 1995. As I describe below, even though the state does everything in its power to prevent it, their communities strive to reintegrate these dangerous and volatile young people when they return home. The Sri Lankan army organizes frequent raids and cordon-and-search operations in rural communities to arrest deserters and send them back to the deadly front. As a result, once they return home, deserters go underground to avoid arrest. They therefore are prevented from taking up any employment or continuing to provide a salary for their families. Moreover, the army and the police regularly threaten their family members as a means of tracking them down.

This book describes the social fabric of a rural community that has become a breeding ground and reservoir of soldiers for the Sri Lankan nation state, one that provides a steady flow of young men to the front without sharing the ethno-nationalist views of the Colombo elite. As the current, massive desertion rate attests, poverty and propaganda are obviously not enough to create such a reservoir, nor can they fully explain why—in the absence of forced conscription—young Sinhalese men continue to go to the front. I argue below that a reservoir of soldiers has been created on the basis of a regime of terror, and not just of poverty. The current participation of the Sinhalese rural poor in the war against the Tamil minority cannot be understood independently from the human rights abuses and war crimes that their communities have suffered, and—as I describe—continue to suffer. It would have been impossible for me to work with the soldiers themselves because the Sri Lankan army wouldn’t issue a research permit for such a study. Nor, however, would a study focused purely on the soldiers have provided me with the contextual information I sought in my search for an explanation for their willingness to kill and be killed. Accordingly, I present the viewpoints of their mothers, wives, sisters and grandmothers on the conflict and how it impinges on their own lives. I record the ways in which they talk about violence in its broadest manifestations, domestic, political, or both. Their eloquent accounts shed light on the violent social contexts in which many of the soldiers of the Sri Lankan army grow up in ways that research among the soldiers themselves would not have revealed.

Reservoirs of Violence

The regime of terror that pervades the villages of the rural south of Sri Lanka is not only constituted by the fallout of the war against the Tamil separatists in the north and east. A much less well-known and publicized civil war has contributed substantially to the violence and terror that reign in communities like Udahenagama. In 1971 and again in 1989, left-wing Sinhalese activists operating under the banner of the People’s Liberation Front or Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) organized an insurgency that resulted in a large-scale civil war. The JVP has been wavering since the mid-1960s between mainstream politics and guerrilla warfare. This youth movement grew out of the Peking wing of the Ceylon Communist Party as a political party but quickly resorted to guerrilla warfare during the 1971 insurgency in which they almost managed to topple the government. After their first military defeat they reappeared as a political party in the early 1980s but were quickly banned from political participation due to their alleged role in the anti-Tamil riots in 1983.

In 1988-90, however, they reappeared in an even more violent form, deploying a regime of terror that was in turn confronted with an equally violent reaction from state security forces and other paramilitary bodies (including most notably the Special Task Force, a counter-insurgency force). A staggering number of people—about 40,000 according to some sources (Chandraprema 1991)—were extrajudicially killed or disappeared (Amnesty International 1993, 1995).² Civilians on either side of the conflict were abducted and brutally killed by both the JVP and the counter-insurgency forces combating them. In areas like Udahenagama, those supporting the Sri Lankan Army or the JVP were often neighbors, as were victims and perpetrators of violence. Neighbors also denounced one another to the JVP or the government’s counter-insurgency forces, thus becoming responsible for each other’s disappearances. In the aftermath of the civil war, victims and perpetrators continue to live together at close quarters in crowded neighborhoods.

There were a number of historical discontinuities in the composition of the popular bases of the 1971 and 1988-90 insurgencies. In 1971 the vanguard of the revolutionary movement were drawn from the rural educated youth who had gone through higher education but were nevertheless unemployed (see Obeyesekere 1974). They were essentially “village boys,” who had attended rural schools, then gone to university, and now lived among the landless peasants. While their education made it less attractive and more difficult for them to follow in the footsteps of their parents and take up traditional occupations (Alles 1990: 254, 341), they were despite their education still debarred from access to the close-knit English-speaking ruling elite in Colombo—a legacy of the colonial administration that still monopolizes the white-collar job market.

During the 1988-90 insurgency, however, the popular basis of the JVP was very different from what it had been in 1971. Members from the criminal underworld were now recruited into the movement, and a more dangerous group of semi-educated youth from remote villages joined the organization (Alles 1990: 286, 301). Within the discourse of Sri Lankan political analysts, the nucleus of the military wing of the JVP is said to have consisted of army deserters, thugs, criminal elements, people of low intellectual caliber, “psychopaths,” or “sadists” (301); and more often than in 1971 armed gangs were involved in the insurrection that had no political affiliation with the JVP but used it as a convenient cover for their criminal activities (291).

It is widely recognized that the factors that underpinned the 1971 and 1988-90 JVP uprisings have not been sufficiently dealt with; nor has the frustration and anger of the unemployed youth in economically backward areas dissipated. On the contrary, the youth’s confidence in traditional political formations and coalition politics seems to be waning again. In the southern rural areas there are indications of a reemergence of the politics of extreme violence of the JVP (cf. Perera 1996: 47). Despite the atrocities of the government’s counter-insurgency forces, the JVP was never eradicated and it was predicted that, in view of its widespread network at the grassroots level, sporadic outbursts of violence from pockets of JVP supporters were bound to continue for a long time (Alles 1990: 304). The majority of the people killed by the state counter-insurgency forces were local level activists, national leaders, or—all too often—innocent bystanders. Meanwhile, the hard-core cadres at the regional level remain in position (Perera 1996: 47), and the future of the JVP depends on these regional leaders as well as on the popular support for their cause. The impoverished communities of the rural south have been mired during the last two decades in extreme violence. During the civil war, Sinhalese rural communities have undergone large-scale cordon-and-search operations in the course of which many people were interned and disappeared. Nowadays, with victims and perpetrators living in close proximity to one another, a cycle of low-intensity violence has followed on the cycle of violence triggered by the civil war. While deserters who return to the village add an additional element of instability to this already strained community life, the raids organized by the army to arrest them resemble in their violence the raids of the counter-insurgency forces during the civil war. As I argue here, the Sinhalese soldiers manning the front lines in the war against the LTTE in the north and east are inevitably a product of this primary regime of violence and the wider history of insurgency and counter-insurgency from which it stems. The combination of piecemeal information about casualties and the heavy-handed recruitment strategies deployed by the army are directed at people who are still grieving about the disappeared of previous upheavals. The violent oppression of the Sinhalese rural poor by the Sri Lankan nation state has thus ironically been a sine qua non for the state to be able to wage a protracted war against its Tamil minority. The Sri Lankan government has thus constructed what may be conceived of as a reservoir of violence: a seemingly bottomless pit of bitterness from which it is now able to draw its coolie soldiers at will. By recording in the chapters that follow the discourses on violence of people from Udahenagama, I construct an image of the social organization of this reservoir of violence.

The Dominant Western Interpretation of the
Cycle of Violence: The Discourse on Trauma

The link between the reservoir of violence and the interethnic war can readily be explained by using the increasingly popular notion of trauma, or post-traumatic stress disorder. According to this model, youths growing up within a context of extreme violence are traumatized: a condition that predisposes them to violent behavior. Traumatized victims of domestic violence are known to be at risk to become perpetrators of child abuse themselves. Likewise, Sinhalese youths who have undergone the insurgency and counter-insurgency violence of the civil war in turn become violent soldiers who fight against Tamil separatists and commit wartime atrocities in Tamil communities. This is the perspective propagated by Western mental health professionals and humanitarian aid workers, but it represents only one way of understanding the cycle of violence in Sri Lanka.

Western trauma specialists draw on a long tradition going back to the treatment of military casualties in World War I, the rehabilitation of concentration camp survivors, and the attempts at reintegration of Vietnam veterans into North American society. Through these experts, the discourse on trauma and PTSD has now spread to various non-Western war-torn societies. One of the underlying assumptions of the discourse on trauma is the link posited between ongoing cycles of violence and “PTSD epidemics” (e.g., ISTSS 1996: A43). Predictions about future conflicts and wars worldwide are thus often based on estimates of “untreated” or “unresolved” trauma (Summerfield 1996: 22). Chronic PTSD and problems with the modulation of aggression and violent behavior are depicted as the main contributing factors to group processes leading to further violent upheavals (e.g., ISTSS 1996: A84).

Critics of the discourse on trauma³ challenge the way war is handled as a mental health emergency and allege that trauma work has become the contemporary fashion of Western donors (Summerfield 1996: 11), who channel large flows of capital to war-torn societies citing the treatment of PTSD epidemics as their justification. However critical one may be of the trauma discourse, one has to recognize that the implementation of trauma counseling programs in non-Western societies as an effort to interrupt a cycle of violence has become a reality worthy of ethnographic investigation.

For my description of the implementation of psychosocial projects based on the trauma paradigm in Southern Sri Lanka or the global stream of knowledge on PTSD, I make use of Lyotard’s (1979) terminology and conceptualization of flows of knowledge. I distinguish several nodal points in this global communication circuit; intersections where messages converge and are redistributed (15, 90). The knowledge about trauma moves from the academic context of trauma research, through the professional organizations of trauma specialists such as the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, to the people who practice in the donor countries and organize training programs for professionals from war-torn societies. The professional elites working for national mental health NGOs in the target countries then transfer this knowledge to rural health workers trained by these local NGOs, who work with survivors. In the case of Sri Lanka, survivors in rural communities are sometimes trained as counselors for trauma victims.

I do not intend to impose an essentialistic logic onto the trauma discourse by presenting a fixed hierarchy of nodal points, in which the notion of trauma operative within the subculture of Western trauma research becomes the measuring stick for all other possible indigenized or creóle interpretations (Bhabha 1994: 27). The discourse within the nodal points based in non-Western societies and the discourses of Sri Lankan mental health professionals who work for national mental health NGOs, rural health workers, and counselors at the village level form a crucial aspect of a truly international trauma culture. In other words, “trauma” has beco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• A Note on Transliteration
• 1. Introduction: How Women Contain Violence
• Part I: The Wild in Udahenagama
• Part II: Cautious Discourses About the Wild
• Part III: Agents of Discursive Change
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index