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by Talia Jayasekera

Crime is on the rise. This is glaringly obvious to all Sri Lankan citizens. Some academics put it down to the ethnic conflict that has ravaged the country for the past 20 years while others say it is violence stemming from the discriminatory Rule of Law of the British and Dutch. Rituals and traditions of this country were stifled by so-called foreign man-made laws. Judicial systems reversed how traditional rituals were seen and made them criminal activities.

"In the times when South Asia, particularly Sri Lanka, was governed by the Dutch and the British, they wanted to bring law and order to the natives as a way to contain violence in the colonies. They believed that the Roman-Dutch laws brought order to the chaos that reigned and made a rational individual out of the native. Almost as if breeding a new kind of native".

In the third session of the Democratic Youth Leadership Programme conducted by the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute (SLFI) and the National Council of Swedish Youth Organisations (LSU) on Violent Youth Conflicts in Sri Lanka, speaker Dr Jani De Silva made these points under the topic, 'The Rule of Law, Honour and Shame'.

"But the problem with this was that the natives had cultural and social institutions of their own. When social institutions clash, bad things happen. By the British setting up judicial systems, it caused deep abrasions with the natives and contradicted their beliefs", said Dr De Silva who works as an independent researcher.

"It was not that the ruling parties were evil or they thought the natives were evil either, but it was their way of bringing law and order to the colonies".

"The five aspects to the Rule of Law are Government through rules and regulations, separation of private and public, monopoly of coercive violence, monetization of economies and codification of laws", she said.

"The first aspect of the Government through rules and regulations meant that only the elite got jobs. This was the way the Government was seen through the eyes of an individual. People who had connections in the Government and who had a better educational background would get governmental positions".

"In the next aspect, women, children and the aged would be discriminated against. In the past, women held many positions but with the separation of public and private, they were not allowed this freedom. Instead more and more jobs opened for men in factories, judicial systems, shops. It would take a few decades before women could overcome this problem".

"Also the problem with land division came into focus. It was the tradition that families divide the land into 'punguwas' when the head of the family died. Often these 'punguwas' were varied in size but then the British introduced the "acre". The fact that 80% of the land in Sri Lanka, in that period, was owned by the British caused problems. Where there was vacant land, this is termed State-owned land. Peasant rights were ignored". "There was a discourse of status based on material wealth. Social categories became more prevalent based on education, wealth and status", she said.

In the early periods, there were many rituals that brought honour and made adversaries become friends but with the Rule of Law, these rituals then became shaming rituals. The Rule of Law changed the way age-old rituals were seen. This is the case with the "Duel of Honour".

"The Duel of Honour was a very historic ritual. It too had three aspects and they were the idea of fair play, respect for your adversary, separation of combatants and non-combatants." "People who took part in this duel commanded a sort of respect through their courage. Once the duel was over it would bring the two opponents together in a binding friendship. And also people not a part of the duel would be seen as the non-combatants", she said.

"With the introduction of the Rule of Law, this ritual was then seen in the courts of law as manslaughter or homicide instead of a ritual of honour".

"A typical case example of the Rule of Law changing a ritual of honour would be when insurgents started acting against the Sri Lanka Army in 1971. The Army, who had never had their authority questioned before, were shocked at this behaviour. Unable to handle the situation in the proper manner, they lashed out at the insurgents and their families and friends. This goes to show that they couldn't separate the combatants from the non-combatants".

"Such was the case of the Kataragama Queen, well-known story in Sri Lankan society. An Army cadre entered the house of this young girl, who was engaged to one of the insurgents, and shot her in the head." "Gradually rituals of honour evolved into shaming rituals. This was a way of reducing your opponent or losing side to shame in front of others. The shaming rituals would reinforce hierarchy and reduce the opponent to spectacle," Dr. De Silva explained.

The Rule of Law may have hindered more than helped our culture when the British ruled. In a country seeped in tradition and ritual, foreign man-made laws only helped to breed confusion and violence against the authorities. Traditions and rituals, centuries old, were now termed as illegal procedures in the eyes of the law courts. In a court of law, the only important thing is the outcome/result.

The symbolic traditions and rituals were lost to the materialistic world. This only caused people to protest the discrimination and as our nation evolved, it became commonplace to turn these respected traditions into means of shaming the enemy. Soon it became easier for people to resort to violent behaviour in the form of revenge to shame their enemies and gain their own personal justice.

The Democratic Youth Leadership Programme (DYLP) is a collaborative project between SLFI and LSU and is financially supported by the Swedish International Development Co-operation Agency (SIDA).

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