{"id":248839,"date":"2026-09-09T23:43:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T18:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=248839"},"modified":"2026-09-09T23:43:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T18:13:00","slug":"war-memory-the-long-road-to-reconciliation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/war-memory-the-long-road-to-reconciliation\/","title":{"rendered":"War, Memory & The Long Road To Reconciliation"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Ajith Rajapaksa<\/a>\u00a0\u2013<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Ajith Rajapaksa<\/p><\/div>\n

I recently had the opportunity to see The Jungle and the Sea<\/i><\/b>, a play written and directed by S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack, staged at Melbourne\u2019s Southbank Theatre in Australia. I went with particular interest, having previously seen Counting and Cracking<\/i><\/b><\/a><\/span>, which I regarded as an exceptional theatrical achievement, not only for its performances but for the way it illuminated an extraordinarily complex history through the lives of its characters.<\/p>\n

Counting and Cracking<\/i> traced the origins of Sri Lanka\u2019s ethnic conflict, showing how political decisions and the manipulation of identity gradually reshaped a society. It captured the communal violence that followed and the descent into civil war, revealing how political forces tore apart longstanding relationships between Tamil and Sinhalese communities and set the country on a path toward catastrophe.<\/p>\n

The Jungle and the Sea<\/i> picks up the story at a later stage, focusing squarely on the civil war. It depicts the emergence of the LTTE\u2019s armed struggle and the movement\u2019s determination to pursue war as a political strategy. Young Tamil men and women were drawn into the conflict, some willingly, others through coercion.<\/p>\n

The play moves through episodes from different phases of the war, eventually reaching its final and most devastating chapter. Civilians remain at the centre of this journey. They are not protagonists of the conflict but its principal victims, repeatedly displaced as front lines shift and places of supposed safety collapse around them.<\/p>\n

The treatment of the \u201cNo Fire Zones\u201d is especially harrowing. Areas designated by the government as civilian safe zones were nevertheless subjected to bombardment, leaving people trapped in devastation. As these zones changed, civilians were forced to move again and again, increasingly resembling refugees within their own country.<\/p>\n

The play conveys a stark truth: whatever the competing claims of the two sides, neither showed adequate regard for the civilians caught between them. The narrative ultimately arrives at Nandikadal, where the war ended amid enormous loss of life.<\/p>\n

Yet The Jungle and the Sea<\/i> is not simply about how the war ended. Its deeper concern is what happened to the idea of peace afterwards. The guns fell silent in 2009, but the peace that followed was largely imposed through military victory rather than built through reconciliation. Even mourning became politically fraught. Questions about the dead, attempts to remember them, and efforts to commemorate could themselves become contested. Those displaced or those who surrendered spent years in camps, separated from normal life, and the fate of many who surrendered remains unresolved.<\/p>\n

Here the play makes its most powerful turn. Rather than presenting the end of the war as the arrival of peace, it exposes the contradictions of a peace in which memory itself becomes contested territory. The ending becomes an indictment of a postwar settlement that has never fully confronted the conflict\u2019s wounds.<\/p>\n

That unresolved history continues to shape Sri Lanka. Successive governments have failed to make a comprehensive attempt to address the legacy of the war: truthseeking and accountability; missing persons; justice and reparations; demilitarisation; mass graves; political prisoners; political representation and powersharing. Without confronting these questions, the end of armed conflict cannot easily be transformed into a durable peace. The absence of war is not the presence of reconciliation.<\/p>\n

My own experience of the production was inevitably shaped by familiarity with the history. Much of what unfolded on stage was already known to me through years of news coverage and documentary reporting. As a result, the play\u2019s impact lay less in revelation than in recognition. Its structure, moving steadily through the major stages of the conflict, sometimes felt closer to a theatrical chronicle than a conventional drama, a choice that serves audiences encountering this history for the first time more strongly than those already steeped in it.<\/p>\n

Yet the emotional force of the work is unmistakable. The suffering of ordinary people, uprooted from their homes, separated from loved ones, and trapped between two forces pursuing victory, creates a powerful undercurrent. The play succeeds in reminding us that wars are experienced not through communiqu\u00e9s or political speeches but through the lives of people who have little control over the forces that destroy them.<\/p>\n

In the end, The Jungle and the Sea<\/i> remains a deeply affecting work. Its greatest contribution may not be telling Sri Lankans something new, but bringing a painful and complicated history to audiences who may know little about it, and, most importantly, making that history human.<\/p>\n

From Sri Lanka to Troy<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

A few days later, I went to the cinema to see Christopher Nolan\u2019s The Odyssey<\/i> at the IMAX Theatre in Melbourne. It was a completely different cinematic experience, yet unexpectedly, it brought my thoughts back to Sri Lanka\u2019s civil war.<\/p>\n

The comparison, of course, is not between the historical circumstances of the Trojan War and Sri Lanka\u2019s civil war. They are entirely different conflicts, separated by thousands of years and shaped by vastly different political and cultural circumstances. What connects them, however, is something more universal: what war does to human beings, and what happens after the fighting stops. How difficult it is to achieve peace after a brutal conflict; and what war does to those who fight it, those who survive it, and the societies left behind.<\/p>\n

Nolan\u2019s film suggests that no war is as morally straightforward as the justifications offered for starting it. Once a society enters a prolonged conflict, accepted moral boundaries can become blurred or even destroyed. Combatants can be transformed into killing machines, while civilians become targets, victims and instruments in the struggle to defeat the enemy. Women and children, in particular, can suffer some of the most devastating consequences.<\/p>\n

Odysseus is portrayed as a king, warrior and hero who goes to war to help recover Helen, the queen of Sparta who has been taken to Troy by Paris, the trojan prince. Yet, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the stated justification for the war is only part of the story. Beneath the rhetoric lies a broader struggle for power and control.<\/p>\n

After ten years of war and destruction, Odysseus finds it extraordinarily difficult to reconcile himself with what he has witnessed and what he has done. His men have crossed moral boundaries, and the consequences follow them. The trauma of war does not end when the fighting stops.<\/p>\n

Odysseus returns from the war physically alive but psychologically transformed. His journey home therefore becomes much more than a physical journey. It becomes a journey through guilt, trauma, remorse and the struggle to return to a life that existed before the war.<\/p>\n

This is what particularly resonated with me.<\/p>\n

The film raises a profound question: How does an individual, or an entire society, heal after such a traumatic experience? Can someone simply return home and resume life as if nothing happened? Or does genuine healing require confronting what happened, acknowledging wrongdoing, accepting responsibility and making amends? Can there be reconciliation without truth?<\/p>\n

The Journey from War to Reconciliation<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

This is where The Odyssey<\/i> unexpectedly intersects with The Jungle and the Sea<\/i>.<\/p>\n

True reconciliation cannot simply mean forgetting the past. Nor can it mean asking victims to move on without first answering the questions that continue to haunt them.<\/p>\n

It requires acknowledgement of suffering. It requires truthseeking and credible investigations into serious violations. It requires confronting moral failures and, where appropriate, accepting responsibility. It requires meaningful dialogue between communities and recognition of the experiences of victims on all sides.<\/p>\n

Even in The Odyssey<\/i>, the question remains whether Odysseus can truly redeem himself from the guilt and trauma of war. And there is an important distinction here: feeling guilty and making amends are not necessarily the same thing.<\/p>\n

That distinction is equally relevant to societies emerging from war.<\/p>\n

Sri Lanka\u2019s Unfinished Reconciliation<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

After the war ended in 2009, Sri Lanka established or proposed several domestic mechanisms intended to address reconciliation and the consequences of the conflict. These included the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), the Office on Missing Persons (OMP), the Office for Reparations, the Office for National Unity and Reconciliation (ONUR), and the Consultation Task Force on Reconciliation Mechanisms (CTF).<\/p>\n

Some of these institutions have undoubtedly made useful contributions. But overall progress and implementation have been disappointing.<\/p>\n

There has been considerable postwar reconstruction. Roads, schools, hospitals and other infrastructure have been rebuilt, and many people have returned to ordinary civilian life. But reconstruction is not the same as reconciliation.<\/p>\n

The deeper questions surrounding truth, accountability, missing persons, justice, reparations, demilitarisation, mass graves, political prisoners, political representation and powersharing remain unresolved to varying degrees.<\/p>\n

Seventeen years after the end of the war, Sri Lanka is still trying to build and implement mechanisms intended to deal with the consequences of that conflict. That, perhaps, is the clearest indication of how incomplete the reconciliation process remains.<\/p>\n

The lesson I took from both productions is therefore quite simple. Winning a war is not the same as winning the peace. The guns can fall silent in a day. Rebuilding trust can take generations.<\/p>\n

A society cannot truly heal simply by burying its past. It must be willing to remember it, confront it and learn from it. Reconciliation cannot be imposed by the victor upon the defeated. It has to be built through truth, justice, acknowledgement, remorse, reparations and a willingness by all sides to recognise the humanity and suffering of the other.<\/p>\n

Perhaps that is the real journey home: not merely returning from war, but finding a way for a society to live with its memories without allowing them to become the seeds of another war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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