1. Introduction
The late 1980s opened a new chapter in the turbulent modern history of Sri Lanka. This period witnessed the dramatic escalation of the well-documented civil war in the north and east between the state and minority Tamil militants of the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), which violently ended in 2009.
At the same time, the state was locked in a violent conflict with insurgents from the majority Sinhala Buddhist “community” in the southern and central regions of the country, which is little known outside Sri Lanka. This entailed a bloody insurgency launched in 1987 by a radical youth movement called the JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/ People’s Liberation Front) whose guerrilla cadres were largely vernacular-state educated, unemployed, rural youth from economically and socially marginalized backgrounds. The JVP adopted a strategy of guerrilla warfare aimed at overthrowing the center-right UNP (United National Party) government, and replacing it with a Marxist-nationalist state. It relied on the utilization of terror to bring about state paralysis, launching attacks on military bases and police stations, and destroying public institutions and infrastructure (Samaranayake 1997). The targets of JVP violence were wide-ranging - from members of the government, numerous other political opponents, civil servants, and military personnel to academics, media personalities, trade union leaders, and those civilians who dared to defy the orders issued by the self-fashioned “patriots.” The violence here took place within the majority Sinhala “community,” and was not “inter-ethnic” like the conflict in the north and the east between the state and minority Tamil militants of the LTTE. However, both conflicts were underpinned by grievances around state power and politics, discrimination and exclusion, resource distribution, and concerns about education and employment.The turning point of the insurgency came in 1989 when the JVP, which seemed to be on the brink of success, issued an ultimatum to the state security forces demanding that all military personnel desert their posts and “join the revolutionaries.” The JVP ominously warned that failure to do so would result in the families of military personnel “paying the ultimate price.” There soon followed spate of murders targeting family members of military personnel. The enraged security forces responded by directing their own public threat at the JVP: “give up or your families will be killed” (Moore 1993, p. 638). There ensued a bloody battle between the security forces and the JVP that led to what has been described as “one of the most horrifying counter-insurgency operations in South Asia”. Within the space of a few months the insurrection was ruthlessly crushed by state counterinsurgency violence. Estimates of those who died vary from around 40,000 to 100,000, while thousands more “disappeared.” This period is locally remembered simply as “the Terror” (Bheeshanaya).
This chapter explores how those who have perpetrated violence use cultural conceptualizations of “youth” and “youthfulness” to remember, express, and give meaning to violence. It does this through an analysis of the memories and narratives of JVP insurgents. The chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with former JVP insurgents who had participated in the 1980s insurgency. Semistructured interviews and informal conversations were carried out with 32 ex-insurgents, some 20 years after the Bheeshanaya. Their ages ranged from approximately 35 years to 65 years. The fieldwork was multisited, covering several towns and villages in Sri Lanka’s southern and central regions.
The chapter explores the ways in which many former insurgents draw on the idiom of “youth” to rationalize their violent pasts and to grapple with issues of accountability. It is argued that their narrative “manipulation” of “youth” enabled former insurgents to reconstruct their violent pasts, and to project a particular representation of themselves, grounded in the moral.
Moreover, by negotiating their memories through the idiom of “youth,” and by selectively drawing on positive and negative understandings attached to this cultural construction, former insurgents engaged in a form of disassociation from violence and a deflection of moral culpability for it. In other words, while not denying outright their involvement in violence, former insurgents at the same time refused to acknowledge moral responsibility for it. They refashioned notions of the self in relation to their unsettling pasts through the idiom of “youth,” in a manner that allowed them to continue living with their memories of violence in the aftermath. This narrative strategy functioned as a coping mechanism, and provided former insurgents with a means of dealing with the consequences of their actions in a post-terror environment where reconciliation and justice were not forthcoming.The “youthful” character of the JVP guerrillas featured consistently in people’s stories of the Bheeshanaya (Terror) during the course of this research. Former insurgents said that they were taruna (youth) at the time of the Bheeshanaya, and commonly attributed their motivations for participating in the insurgency to what they called tarunakama (youthfulness). In present-day Sri Lanka, the JVP insurrection is popularly remembered as a “youth rebellion” fueled by “youth unrest” (taruna asahanaya). This “problem” of “youth unrest” featured in a brief flurry of popular and academic debates that took place in the aftermath of the JVP insurgency. In 1989 a “Presidential Commission on Youth” was established to investigate the causes of youth discontent that had led to the 1980s JVP insurgency. Its somewhat hurried report was published in 1990, with recommendations for reforms in education and employment, for democratization of the state, and to address the abuse of political power. Its findings remain relevant but continue to be largely ignored, due to a lack of political will.
Social Scientists have emphasized the pivotal role of youth in social transformation, and have shown that youth is culturally constructed, socially contingent, and relational, a social category that often attracts much ambivalence from those who fall outside it (Durham 2000, 2004; West 2000).
Valentine’s (1996) important work on the construction of childhood in the UK shows how understandings of what it means to be a child changes over space and time. This resonates with the varying and contested understandings of youth and childhood in other global contexts, including Sri Lanka. Valentine goes on to illustrate how the dominant Western construction of childhood has teetered between simplistic negative and positive representations of children as either “devils” or “angels,” in spite of the convoluted and multiple realities of children’s lives (Valentine 1996).The Sinhala term taruna (youth) may be understood as “young hopeful” or “one with potential,” but it is also often regarded with disdain and associated with immaturity, dependence, and lacking responsibilities (Hettige 1992). In a post-terror climate of silence, fear, and amnesia, the idiom of “youth” and the varying and often oppositional meanings attached to this cultural construction appeared to function as a relatively safe repository for memories of violence for many of the people who participated in this research. Memory is commonly invoked to heal, blame, and legitimize the past, and it plays a significant role in the construction of identity (Antze and Lambek 1996).
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