Discourses of Victimization in Sri Lanka’s Civil War

Abstract

This article explores the availability of discourses of victimhood to political actors who aim to justify violence and mass atrocity in the name of those victims. Arguing that the label of the 'victim' is equally available for distortion and political capitalization as the label of the 'criminal' or the 'terrorist', this article reflects on the role of the victim in violence and processes of criminalization. Examining the rhetorical tendencies and strategies of both the state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the Sri Lankan civil war, this article describes how the victim was categorized by both sides. This article argues that these categorizations, which simultaneously draw on respective collective memories of victimization are crucial to the manner in which the state's purported process of post-war 'reconciliation' is created and politicized and how victims are included in such a process. Interrogating the post-war landscape of militarization and repression in the country's Tamil-dominated Northeast, this article also examines new configurations of Tamil victim discourses and their potential as a tool of political agency.

End Impunity! Reducing Conflict-Related Sexual Violence to a Problem of Law

“…The title refers to an imagery of helpless victims on the one hand—and the cause of and solution to their misery on the other, reiterating the diagnostic frame's emphasis on the lack of legal order. There is a wealth of studies on how social movements identify and construct the victims of a given injustice and convert their victimization into a call for action (e.g., Lemaitre and Sandvik ; Seoighe ). This humanitarian mobilization frame is based on the assumption that knowing about suffering induces action (Wilson and Brown ).…”

Diasporic mobilization and post-war uplift: an inquiry into the global Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora's influence in post-war Sri Lanka

“…During the brief period I spent in Sri Lanka, the dominance of militarization within the North-East was quite apparent to the foreigner's gaze. As I was reading Seoighe's (2016a) article, titled Discourses of victimization in Sri Lanka's civil war: Collective memory, legitimacy and agency, while travelling down the A9, a 321-kilometer-long highway, from the capital city of Colombo to Jaffna -one of the assumed spaces of Tamil Eelam -I noticed the abundance of army camps that stretched for yards. While spending most of my time in Jaffna, the presence of the military occupying civilian spaces was very visible, whether that be at church festivities such as their involvement in the St. Anthony's festival, where jets flew above and released petals across the church facility, or amongst civilian administrative arenas.…”

Problematising Symbolic Reparation: ‘Complex Political Victims’, ‘Dead Body Politics’ and the Right to Remember

“…Likewise, Sabine Marschall (2009) noted that in South Africa the commemoration of 'struggle heroes' has seen their symbolic lives supersede their real lives. Dead members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have similarly been portrayed in Tamil collective memory as the personification of righteous resistance to Sinhalese domination (Seoighe 2016). When seen from the perspective of those within the communities that they came from, martyrs boast impeccable 'resumés'.…”

“…The potential for overreach can be seen in approaches taken by other states determined to impose their own framing of the past via public remembrance. In Sri Lanka, for example, the state has combined victims discourse with legislative prohibition of LTTE commemoration in order to suppress any public remembrance of state violence (Seoighe, 2016). A similar self-interested dynamic lies behind the use of the ‘divisionism’ offence in post-genocide Rwanda to repress any public remembrance of revenge violence that supporters of the incumbent Kagame regime have been implicated in (Waldorf, 2009).…”