The Weight of Memory: A Sri Lankan Reminder

By Sbarrkum

Every country carries its wounds, but some of us carry them in our bodies. I rarely speak about Sri Lanka’s civil war on this blog, because most of us have learned, painfully, to move on. But sometimes a comment or a casual reference to the LTTE pulls open a door that many of us have spent decades trying to close gently.

For me, this is not rhetoric. It is family history.

Two of my cousins were killed in the late 1980s; one by the LTTE, the other by the Army. Two more relatives were tortured. During the worst years, mobs came to burn down our home because they suspected we were Tamil. My mother stood outside, spoke to them calmly in Sinhalese, and convinced them to leave. That is how close violence came to us; literally to our doorstep.

I myself was arrested twice on suspicion of being an LTTE operative. I spent two days in police remand and was beaten with a belt. Friends who happened to witness the arrest intervened and contacted someone who could get me out. Had I remained until Monday, I would have been taken before a judge and sent to the notorious Boosa Prison. Many never returned from there.

I also lost people I cared about deeply. My late partner’s parents were among the sixty villagers killed in a single LTTE attack. In the area where I live, nearly every family lost someone; a brother, a father, a cousin, a neighbour.

Most Sri Lankans have made their peace with the past. We have had to. The country could not function otherwise. But when the conflict is invoked lightly or abstractly, without awareness of the cost paid by ordinary people, it reminds me how easily those of us outside the centre of global conversation are forgotten.

This is not a demand for silence. It is simply a reminder:

For many of us, this history is not theoretical. It is personal, lived, and unbearably real.