Reconciliation work is happening in Sri Lanka. Simple roads and economic reconcilation are one thing, and not negligible. My main contact in Jaffna is thru a friends soccer club, those contacts are real. What up Vicky. Touch and feely recon work is also going on. Here’s a few examples from just Saturday thru Monday.

Three years after, Sri Lanka is still defined by the war. To a lesser extend, so is this blog. As much as I try to write about penguins and India and swimsuit calendars, it’s still war that gets people engaged.

Gah. I haven’t watched this yet, but here it is. This is Killing Fields Part Deux. As you can tell from the title (Crimes Unpunished), it has an agenda, what I consider an unhelpful one, but I do think a lot of this stuff did happen. This suffering was ‘strategically’ set up to happen as part of the LTTE and Prabhakaran’s agenda (to engender exactly this international response) but it is what it is. People suffered and died.

War is a hell of a thing. It can continue to define a country long after the war ends. Like Sri Lanka. Or Uganda. Right now Sri Lanka is in the middle of its yearly war flashback, which sucks, if it didn’t occasionally produce stuff like this. In the same way, Uganda finds itself at the center of a Joseph Kony social media storm, despite the fact that the warlord is no longer in Uganda.

Well, yeah. Yeah I think they did. In Chootivamsa/Mahavamsa style it’s quite obvious that you kill a rebel and their families. In modern times, however, it seems pretty barbaric to kill a 12 year old child, in this case Balachandran Prabakaran, the son of LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. You could say it makes sense, but it’s in no way an especially moral act.

The general reconciliation policy post-war has been ‘eh?’, but now Presidential Adviser Rajiva Wijesinha has proposed something quite substantive. The most notable recommendation is for a Senate, which I’m meh about, but the other recommendations seem pretty damn solid. Acknowledging and expressing loss and suffering, acknowledging and addressing bad governance that affects all Sri Lankans, ensuring fair access to public and police jobs, and ensuring at least bilingualism in the public sector. These are all very good things.

A political dog whistle is a code word that sounds reasonable, but which the faithful can hear. In the US it would have been something like ‘states-rights’ for slavery and segregation. In the Sri Lankan context, many people are using ‘accountability’ to perpetuate the Eelam war by other means. This blogger Anapayan puts it well: “Tamil nationalists’ demand for accountability is not meant for reconciliation or justice rather a political maneuver to suit their incompatible political agenda.”

Sri Lanka is full of fake protest (fauxtests if you will) and everybody is live streaming the UN Human Rights sessions and, uh, I’m just trying to ignore it all and hope that it goes away. I’ve heard that international pressure forces the government to .. aaah. It’s all irrelevant. Everyone just comes off as posturing assholes.

The government has released an estimated death toll for the end of Sri Lanka’s Civil War (not the whole thing mind you, this is essentially 2008/2009). The number is around 9,000 dead. The BBC is quick to qualify this against a 40,000 report in the controversial UN report, but that report is essentially from a reading of TamilNet and dubious. My best guess was around 10-15,000. Let’s say that the government estimate is low but not unreasonable.

I knew the name when I heard that she’d died. The last I’d heard of Marie Colvin she was trying to broker a deal for the LTTE leadership. It is terribly sad that she died and I’m sorry for her family’s loss.