{"id":249202,"date":"2026-10-04T04:48:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-03T23:18:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=249202"},"modified":"2026-10-04T04:48:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T23:18:13","slug":"memory-after-victory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/memory-after-victory\/","title":{"rendered":"Memory After Victory"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Mahil Dole<\/a>\u00a0\u2013<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Mahil Dole<\/p><\/div>\n

Commemoration must teach the nation \u2014 not recruit the next generation<\/i><\/b><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>The Sinhala political establishment says it has completely destroyed the Tigers. Why, seventeen years later, does it still seek to prevent people from speaking, writing and singing about them, and from remembering them?\u201d That question, posed by Parani Krishnarajani, has been given a public face by events in Nallur. A bronze bust of Rasaiah Parthipan, Thileepan, was installed for the thirty-ninth anniversary of the hunger strike that ended in his death on 26 September 1987. Police removed it in the early hours of 27 September, a day after the commemorations closed. Tamil parties have traded blame. The government has spoken of law and public order. Mourners have returned with flowers to an empty plinth.\"\"<\/p>\n

I do not write as a spectator. I served in the North in uniform and later as an intelligence officer engaged in national security for more than four decades, including as head of the Counter Terrorism Division of the State Intelligence Service, and through the southern insurrection of 1986\u201390. I was part of the mechanism that prevented and combated those menaces. I will not criticise or undermine the law-enforcement services or the three armed forces. I stand by what we did. We will not forget the services rendered or the sacrifices made. Those sacrifices paved the way for policymakers to find political solutions. That last task is the one the country has still not completed, and it is why a statue taken down at dawn can reopen a war the battlefield had already closed.<\/span><\/p>\n

What a monument does after the guns fall silent<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

War leaves monuments newly built to inspire, debris preserved as witness, and rituals that keep both alive. They are like scars on a healed body. A scar is not the wound. It tells you how the wound was made, and how it closed. Touched as a warning, it can stop the next injury. Displayed as a banner, it recruits. Peaceful struggles for freedom are not the same as campaigns pursued through the bombing of civilians, the assassination of elected leaders, the conscription of children and the expulsion of neighbours. Persons who made the utmost sacrifice can be remembered as lessons, so that such issues do not happen again. They can also be remembered as unfinished orders. A responsible state must know the difference and say it in public, in both languages, before the next anniversary.<\/p>\n

Three factors decide whether a struggle survives the destruction of its camps: Motivation, Men, and Material, including money. After an organisation is dismantled, Motivation is what remains cheapest to manufacture. A statue, a lyric, a date on the calendar or a speech from overseas can do in peacetime what a camp and a weapon did in wartime. That is why removal, by itself, is not a strategy. The Nallur site has been destroyed and rebuilt before. Each removal becomes another anniversary. Officers who take an unauthorised object down are doing a job they are lawfully ordered to do. The failure, when there is one, sits above them: the failure to decide what remembrance is for. Destroying a symbol does not drain Motivation if the questions that produced it remain unanswered. It can refill it. That is not an argument for a shrine to a proscribed army in a public square. It is an argument against mistaking a lorry at four in the morning for a political settlement.<\/p>\n

Victory, defeat, and the youth of the same society<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Wars end as win\u2013win, win\u2013lose, or lose\u2013lose. May 2009 was a win\u2013lose against the LTTE as an armed organisation. Measured across communities, the national outcome has too often looked like lose\u2013lose: victory without a settlement ordinary people can inhabit. We have lived this more than once, and always with our own youth. The JVP insurrections of 1971 and 1987\u201389 were home-grown. The LTTE war lasted three decades and left, in parts of the North and East, a de facto administration some still remember as the nearest thing they had to a state. Easter Sunday 2019 showed that a new ideology can recruit inside the same unresolved field. The motives named, again and again, were poverty, injustice, discrimination, disparity and ethnicity. The fighting ended. The issues did not. Agreements were made and not honoured. Some campaigns moved overseas, where Motivation and Material are harder for a police station to reach. The losers were the country as a whole.<\/p>\n

At the end of the day we were not fighting a foreign army. We were fighting young people drawn from the society that produced them, North and South, who believed the path they chose was the way to freedom. That does not excuse terrorism, or the cruelty inflicted on civilians, on other communities, on dissenters, or on the men and women in uniform. It does mean a military victory never answers the question those young people thought they were answering. In the South, the JVP drew in the children of the villages the state was sworn to protect. Their dead are now part of the political ancestry of a party at the centre of government. In the North and East, the LTTE built an organisation of discipline and ruthlessness. Thileepan was twenty-three when he began a fast at Nallur on 15 September 1987, directed at India after the Indo-Lanka Accord. He died on 26 September with his demands unmet. Many Tamils remember a non-violent sacrifice. It is also the death of an LTTE political-wing leader inside an organisation that assassinated elected leaders, pioneered suicide bombing, recruited children and expelled Muslims from the North. Both can be true. A nation that can hold only one will keep refighting the war in stone and song.<\/p>\n

Memory after victory, and memory after defeat<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Krishnarajani argues that \u201cremoving the Tiger\u201d erases three decades of political life and a claim to nationhood and justice. Memory of a period cannot be abolished by gazette. That point is real. So is the evasion. To treat the LTTE solely as the symbol of a de facto state erases the Tamil democrats it murdered, the Muslims it drove out, the civilians it used as a shield, and the armed veto it imposed on every alternative. Motivation does not require every mourner to mean revival. It requires only that a new listener hear a story in which the war is unfinished.<\/p>\n

The other half of that story was told this July by Dr Baheerathan Amirthalingam, thirty-seven years after the killing of his father. On the evening of 13 July 1989, at a house on Bullers Road in Colombo, LTTE gunmen shot Appapillai Amirthalingam, secretary-general of the Tamil United Liberation Front, during a meeting called to discuss Tamil unity. V. Yogeswaran was killed with him. M. Sivasithamparam was wounded. The assassins were shot by Amirthalingam\u2019s police bodyguards. The organisation denied the act, then admitted it. Amirthalingam was not a soldier of the state. After 1977 he was Leader of the Opposition, the democratically chosen voice of the Tamil electorate, a man who had helped frame the Vaddukoddai resolution and later moved toward a negotiated settlement. The Tigers branded him a traitor because they wanted sole leadership.<\/p>\n

His son has said they did not merely take his father\u2019s life. They eliminated rival groups, killed fighters and civilians, alienated governments that had once listened to the Tamil case, and in the end destroyed the organisation and the aspirations it claimed to defend. He has called rejection of the Indo-Lanka Accord the movement\u2019s greatest political mistake. Nallur remembers a hunger strike. Bullers Road remembers an elected leader shot at his own table by the movement that said it was fighting for his people. One memory is policed. The other was worked at by those who needed the dead man to remain a traitor. Some justified the killing. Some who knew it was wrong stayed silent. Silence was also a politics of memory. A country that discusses only the bust removed in Jaffna, and not the moderate removed so that no moderate could bargain, is telling half the story.<\/p>\n

These memories do not sit in the mind as files. They sit as feelings with a story attached, and the feeling is what moves trust, confidence, hate and resentment. Victory raises confidence in the uniform, which is legitimate, and then often hardens into the belief that winning settled the argument. Later grief is heard as ingratitude. Resentment grows on the winning side too: we paid in blood, and they are still remembering the men who killed us. Defeat works harder. Humiliation is a stronger political emotion than pride. Trust in the state drops if grief needs permission and no settlement follows. Trust in one\u2019s own former leaders drops if they are remembered only as traitors. Into that gap moves the simpler memory, the martyr, the sole representative, the unfinished order. For a soldier\u2019s family, Thileepan\u2019s rank confirms the ban. For a family that lost civilians, the empty plinth confirms that their dead do not count. For Amirthalingam\u2019s son, the loss of trust is in the armed story that called his father a traitor. For a young person born after 2009 this is not memory. It is inheritance. A rite hands them an emotion they did not earn. That is how Motivation is manufactured after the camps are gone. Hate rises when our dead are used to cancel yours. Trust recovers only when one mind is allowed to hold more than one truth.<\/p>\n

The line, and the work still undone<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

If commemorations are to have a public place, they must be framed as lessons: the grievance that made a young person available to a recruiter, the method that recruiter chose, and the price paid by people who chose neither side. Families have a right to grief. A banned organisation does not have a right to a civic shrine that restores its ranks and its claim to unfinished war. Private mourning, remembrance of civilian dead, and the public restoration of a terrorist command symbol are not the same act. If the line is applied only in the North, it will be read as humiliation. If every private mourning is treated as terrorism, the law loses authority. If the governing coalition\u2019s own violent past may be remembered as political ancestry while another community\u2019s dead may not be named, the lesson is that memory is a privilege of the winner. I say this as a man who spent his working life on the winning side of a necessary war. Victory does not exempt us from consistency. Law enforcement must act when the law is broken. Those who give the orders owe the officer the legal basis before the act, not a silence afterwards, and the same rule for every community\u2019s armed past.<\/p>\n

The services created the condition without which no political solution is possible: the end of armed veto. I will not have that record rewritten by people who never walked the ground. Where the country went wrong was in treating that condition as the solution. Before the guns, majoritarian policy and the failure to make Tamil-speaking citizens feel the state was theirs gave oxygen to armed groups. Black July 1983 turned a political problem into a civil war. During the war the LTTE rejected every alternative that threatened its monopoly. After 2009 a winner\u2019s narrative left too little room for Tamil civilian dead, for the disappeared, and for a settlement a southern electorate would also own. We policed granite more consistently than we settled land, language, livelihood and truth.<\/p>\n

Political will is a policy still standing at the next anniversary. Publish the difference between mourning the dead and restoring a proscribed command symbol. Hold the dead of the services, civilian massacres, the disappeared, and the crimes of the JVP and the LTTE on one page. Teach that history. Keep intelligence on finance and overseas direction, not on a mother\u2019s grief. Stop farming the dead for votes. A state that only polices bronze in Jaffna is fighting the statue, not the system.<\/p>\n

Live another day<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

I honour the fallen of the services. I do not ask the nation to honour the project that killed them. I do ask that we recognise the society that produced both them and the young people we faced. The scars of those years taught something to those willing to learn. The losses hardened the people who remained, but only where that hardness was put to use and not left as bitterness. Betrayal, in uniform, in politics and in the communities the war divided, showed who was real and who was using the dead. None of that experience was wasted if it keeps the same wound from being opened again.<\/p>\n

A statue can be lifted onto a truck. A political question cannot. Memory after victory, if it only honours the uniform and polices every other grief, becomes another recruiting story. Memory after defeat, if it only restores the command symbol and forgets the elected man shot for standing in its way, becomes the same story from the other side. If we want the military chapter to remain closed, we must open the political one, fully and in public, without pretending that either side\u2019s dead are the only dead that count. That is not a retreat from what we did in uniform. It is the reason we did it. The work that remains is to keep building a country in which the next generation does not have to learn the same lesson with a weapon in its hand.<\/p>\n

(This analysis is offered in the interest of nationa<\/i>l security, institutional reform, and public safety)<\/i><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

*The writer is a Senior Superintendent of Police (Retd.), former Deputy Director in charge of the Counter Terrorism Desk of the State Intelligence Service, and author of Security Beyond Enforcement: Practical Approaches for a Safer Nation. <\/i>Emai-mahildole54@gmail.com<\/i><\/span><\/strong><\/span> <\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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