{"id":65354,"date":"2012-12-19T00:15:26","date_gmt":"2012-12-19T00:15:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=65354"},"modified":"2012-12-22T10:03:21","modified_gmt":"2012-12-22T10:03:21","slug":"the-politics-of-commemoration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/the-politics-of-commemoration\/","title":{"rendered":"The Politics Of Commemoration"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Malinda Seneviratne<\/a><\/span> –<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Malinda Seneviratne<\/p><\/div>\n

Sometime in the mid 1980s, the students of Peradeniya University<\/a><\/span> put up a statue, a memorial of sorts.\u00a0 It was of a young man, book in hand and his foot on a gun.\u00a0 I am not sure if the statue resembled him in any way, but it meant to commemorate a Medical Faculty student, Padmasiri, who was shot dead on June 19, 1984 in the course of an altercation between officers manning the Police Station that was at the time located on campus and some medical students returning to Marcus Fernando Hall after celebrating the end of examinations.<\/p>\n

The \u2018memorial\u2019 was a crude construct and lacked the sobriety and aesthetic elegance evident in an older monument in memory of another student who was shot dead, Weerasooriya, in 1976.\u00a0 Other undergraduates who were unceremoniously and in secret killed during the 1971 were not commemorated in like manner. \u00a0The comrades\u2019 who died in the 1988-89 insurgency were not similarly honored in Peradeniya, although I believe both the University of Sri Jayawardenapura and University of Moratuwa \u2018monumentalized\u2019 of a fashion.<\/p>\n

The \u2018Padmasiri Statue\u2019 disappeared during the bheeshanaya<\/em>.\u00a0 \u2018Weerasooriya\u2019 was left intact, perhaps because he was shot dead during a different regime.\u00a0 I believe the other monuments mentioned above were vandalized recently.<\/p>\n

Way back in 2006, \u2018The Nation\u2019 devoted the center-spread of a section then called \u2018Eye\u2019 for a feature on heroes and commemoration.\u00a0 It contained photographs of memorials for the war dead.\u00a0 Included on the page was a photograph of an LTTE<\/a><\/span> cemetery, accompanied by the following caption: \u2018These birthday-less stones represent citizens of this country who too fought and died, misguided and tragic and yet no different from other children elsewhere. They deserve to be mourned<\/em>\u2019. \u00a0That cemetery was bulldozed immediately after the LTTE was vanquished, possible following a logic that objected to \u2018trace of terrorism\u2019s glorification\u2019. \u00a0A blank square was also scripted into the layout.\u00a0 It was for the JVP<\/a><\/span> dead, from 1971 and also 1988-89.\u00a0 This was the caption:<\/p>\n

\u2018The white space represents the unhonoured and unsung, the 60,000 plus who died between 1988 and 1990.\u00a0 Many were JVPers who, perhaps misguided and foolhardy, nevertheless fought for a land, a way of life.\u00a0 Heroes in their own right. <\/em>\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The dead are remembered by loved ones.\u00a0 Some corpses, however, are useful as political exhibits Weerasooriya\u2019s being one of the early examples.\u00a0 Shed of all the spirituality of the moment, prophesy claimed and so on, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ also made for politicking of a kind. In Weerasooriya\u2019s case, the United National Party, then in the Opposition, carried that corpse, so to speak, to every electorate.\u00a0 Vijaya Kumaratunga<\/a><\/span> had a politicized funeral , not surprisingly since it was a political assassination, largely believed to have been \u2018authorized\u2019 and \u2018ordered\u2019 by the late JVP leader, Rohana Wijeweera<\/a><\/span>.\u00a0 When Wijeweera himself was killed (a summary execution that not surprisingly did not disturb the sleep of any human rights advocate, here or elsewhere) the time had passed for a politicized funeral.<\/p>\n

The dead are not remembered by only the loved ones.\u00a0 The collective dead, especially, can be used to market this or that political position or organization, more often than not without the consent of the individually dead.\u00a0 That\u2019s politics.\u00a0 Hardly anyone among those who shed tears at these political funerals and subsequent memorial services of one kind or another can claim to have known the dead personally or if they did actually cared deeply enough to deserve the tag \u2018loved ones\u2019.<\/p>\n

There is, then, a thing called the politics of commemoration which unfolds within structures of power that determine what is allowed and what is not.\u00a0 A political street-drawing commemorating the war dead (without distinction) in Colombo was, for example, tarred over unceremoniously.\u00a0 The \u2018artists\u2019 were of course not value-neutral; the movers and shakers of this \u2018remembrance\u2019 did take sides during the war.<\/p>\n

Does this mean that the political logic of commemorating permissibility is something we have to live with?\u00a0 Does it mean that power decides and these decisions should go uncommented on, forget the fact that the selectivity and erasure could be detrimental to the political objectives of the selector and eraser?<\/p>\n

There was an incident in the Jaffna University recently.\u00a0 A \u2018happy coincidence\u2019 of the infamous \u2018Maaveerar Day<\/span>\u2019<\/a> announced and commemorated by the LTTE before that organization was militarily vanquished and a religious ceremony naturally made for multiple (mis)interpretation as well as mischief-making.\u00a0 The authorities intervened.\u00a0\u00a0 There was violence. There were protests. There were arrests.<\/p>\n

This was followed by howls of protests by political groups, NGO operators and some commentators, including the Inter University Student Federation.\u00a0 I have little sympathy for objectors who are primarily motivated by regime-hatred and petty political ambition.\u00a0 The Inter University Student Federation, a known but unofficial affiliate of the JVP has a considerable track record of intolerance which has often involved thuggery in the universities.<\/p>\n

As for other objectors, there are among them those who bent over backwards to confer parity of status to the LTTE vis-\u00e0-vis the Government and operated according to the principle, \u2018My enemy\u2019s enemy is my friend\u2019 throughout the first decade of the millennium.\u00a0 It is typical for such objectors, after all, to drag in other miseries, real and imagined, to frill objection.\u00a0\u00a0 Many who talk of what the Tamils suffered, let us not forget, find it embarrassing to state that their suffering was largely an outcome of choices made by the so-called Tamil representatives and indeed the direct harassment by the LTTE.\u00a0 They would find it difficult to whisper the fact that the LTTE terrorized without distinction, that they killed Tamils in their thousands and held some 300,000 Tamils hostage.<\/p>\n

But does this mean the objection itself is illegal or wrong?\u00a0 Is commemoration wrong, politically motivated or otherwise?\u00a0 The question was asked, \u2018If the JVP can commemorate those who died during an armed insurrection, what is wrong with commemorating others who died in another armed insurrection?\u2019\u00a0 A related question: \u2018If the JVP commemoration is allowed and this is not, assuming of course it was an LTTE-remembering event, does it mean that the authorities don\u2019t mind terrorists being remembered as long as they are Sinhala?\u2019<\/p>\n

When someone decides to lament, only a clairvoyant can even pretend to claim what or who it is all about.\u00a0 Even a terrorist\u2019s death can be lamented for reasons that have nothing to do with the choices that the particular terrorist made.\u00a0 Prabhakaran<\/a><\/span>\u2019s death, for example, could have been lamented by his parents because he was their son and not because they identified with his political, military and whatever other pernicious designs and practices associated with him.\u00a0 Even if they identified with his larger politico-military-terrorist persona, no one can tell if the tears shed were on that account and not the blood-relationship.<\/p>\n

Terrorism is illegal.\u00a0 Grief is neither illegal nor amenable to prohibition through legal writ.\u00a0 Prabhakaran was a terrorist.\u00a0 The LTTE was a terrorist organization.\u00a0 This does not mean that those who identified with the cause and\/or the methodology employed were terrorists.\u00a0 They are complicit in some way, but this does not mean that they should be shot or even tried.\u00a0 Authorities in a country that has suffered for three decades at the hands of terrorists cannot be blamed for being alert to resurrection moves and erring on the side of caution.\u00a0 On the other hand, being circumspect does not give right to put out a lamp lit for a dead person.\u00a0 It is not only illegal, but also uncivilized and moreover rebels against the culture of the land, a way of life and living heavily influenced by Buddhism, almost to the exclusion of other religions and philosophies.<\/p>\n

Prabhakaran was no Elara, let us be clear on that.\u00a0\u00a0 King Dutugemunu issued a directive to the effect that Elara should be accorded the highest respect, requiring those passing to descend from chariot or horse and the observation of silence.\u00a0 Elara was a usurper, a land-grabber, true, but he was recognized as a wise and just ruler.\u00a0 Prabhakaran was a land-grabber of sorts, but he was no Elara.\u00a0 He is dead though.\u00a0 One respects the dead.\u00a0 That\u2019s cultural.\u00a0 There can be a security concern in someone showing loyalty to a terrorist.\u00a0 There can be none in expressing grief over a dead terrorist.\u00a0 Indeed, one cannot legislate to prohibit emotion.\u00a0 One cannot make it illegal not to agree with the Government or anyone else when someone or some organization is called \u2018Terrorist\u2019.<\/p>\n

Space for commemoration by anyone of anyone is part of reconciliation.\u00a0 The political objectives and the strategic choices of the dead are irrelevant here.\u00a0 The Sinhalese hold that whatever differences one may have with someone else, in times of celebration and lamentation, one puts them aside.\u00a0 It is possible to recognize the need to grieve without having to agree with the politics of the person or organization whose demise is being grieved over or the politics of the grieving.\u00a0 That\u2019s where humanity is tested.\u00a0 And it is in the affirmation of that humanity that Governments stand taller, commonalities are recognized and communities are forged.\u00a0 Erasure wrecks all that.<\/p>\n

*Malinda Seneviratne is the Chief Editor of \u2018The Nation<\/a>\u00a0and his articles can be found at\u00a0www.malindawords.blogspot.com<\/a>\u00a0.<\/em><\/p>\n

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The\u00a0first article said ”\u00a0Medical Faculty student, Padmasiri, who was shot dead on June 19, 1994″. The correct year is 1984.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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