Denials, excuses and justifications by former LTTEer:

Prospects for rehabilitation

Dr D. Chandraratna Perth, Australia

In my recent visit to Sri Lanka I came across a number of accounts given by former LTTE cadre who are now in rehabilitation camps. Some were stories told to me by those working with the former LTTE members and some other stories were in the print media. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of these but many are plausible.

We have heard and read similar accounts from the Holocaust to other recent wars which were widely reported in books and newspapers. What interests me is the value of these as guides to the scientific expert who is involved in bringing these men and women into the fold of mainstream society which is a difficult task.

The atrocities they committed, the denials of responsibility, their versions of moral accounting, justifications and excuses give valuable insights to those who are working with these cadres to select the right therapies and techniques to rehabilitate them and normalize them.

This is going to be a drawn out process and for the curiosity of the readers however, let me elaborate on this as an academic exercise.

Social facts

In both psychology and sociological theory these accounts are hardly useful to understand the structural causes of the violence and nor are they social facts as such but purely individual accounts to satisfy judgement by onlookers, caretakers, judges and umpires.

In scientific language these accounts are referred to as vocabularies of motives or motivational accounts. These have clear functions but vary according to the different social situations.

For argument sake, an LTTE member returning after a successful killing spree will use the motivational account to bolster one’s esteem or pride in the group but once captured the same person will offer a justification or a denial of responsibility for the same act. Hence the audience is a key factor in these accounts.

Political setting

The accounts that we read now are told to the captors ostensibly with a view to realign with the norms and standards of a different political setting which is different from that of the society of terrorists.

These accounts do not belong to the same category as Freudian rationalisations for repressed guilt or unconscious motives of one’s past biography. At least we are not psychoanalysing them though this may be necessary in the case of the disturbed persons.

These are plain, simple, learnt explanations available from a whole host of justifications taught to us in our daily socialisation. These are offered in the hope that they will be accepted by victims, judges, lawyers, human rights activists, reporters and the whole lot. And we must always remember that these accounts can vary with the type of audience listening to it.

We saw the excuses and denials of responsibility on the part of the doctors but when the audience changes the denials can be different and that is why these accounts do not belong in the same category as the repressed memory syndrome (RMS) IN THE Freudian language.

At the outset I gleaned from these accounts two types: justifications and excuses. Some accounts are justifications for the atrocities they committed. ‘Because the Sinhalese were demonstrably pointed out as the arch enemy of the Tamils they were justified in the killing no matter whether they were innocent civilians or the armed soldiers’.

The LTTE indoctrination aided by texts of revisionist history in the classroom made them convinced of the enemy both armed and unarmed. Being unarmed was of no consequence because the body present was that of a future enemy. Just as a normal soldier justifies in killing the enemy they were also guided by the same motive. The second type of explanation was following orders of the Generals.

The average terrorist deviants are not that different from the normal delinquents: their neutralising accounts except for the fact that they are guilty of far more serious crimes than the garden variety delinquent.

Terror suspects

It is difficult to imagine that the terror suspects had no sense of conventional morality though with some of the very young it is possible that they have a warped sense of morality than the rest as they lived their whole life in a violent culture. But this is exceptional. Denial of responsibility can take many forms- ‘I did not want to do these but was forced’-’I had no choice in the matter’.

Then there is the denial of the victims- ‘I did not know who they were- that was the given target and I had no choice in the matter’ I did not know they were babies or women because to me they were just enemy objects to slay’.

Social controls

Denial of the suffering is another excuse. The justification will be that death was swift and there was little or no suffering. Delinquents also appeal to higher loyalties such as the gang camaraderie and the clique. ‘When others are doing it I could not just keep quiet for they will put me out’.

The normal delinquent and the terror suspect both behave exactly the same when apprehended and questioned by offering socially acceptable vocabularies of motive which are different from that of the ideologically committed.

The ideologue on the other hand will not be affected by the conventional social controls of the average suspect and may not yet be keen to relieve the responsibility or offer mitigating evidence.

Denials draw upon the shared cultural vocabularies and equally the denials are also shared between the partners to the crime when they are in the same refuge. They can collude in each other’s denials. The rank and file of the LTTE as a group can take on a sense of false public self. They can pretend to a concerted ignorance - that they were oblivious to the grand designs-the unspoken arrangements of LTTE.

The lower levels can easily distance themselves from the higher cadre and allege that they were kept in the dark about the banality and criminality and hence plead innocence. ‘We were simply misled on what the real situation was’. This is a kind of collective blindness to the big picture. Those who listen to these accounts are perplexed and they can either believe in the collective

Innocence of the rank and file now that the real culprits are gone or else take the opposite view that these violent men were not passive, non ideological and unwilling men following orders but were virulent, violent men and women who were willing executioners of the innocent Sinhalese.

It is plausible that the social exclusion of Sinhalese in all social matters made the extermination and the violence against the Sinhalese palatable to the foot soldiers of the LTTE not unlike the social exclusion of the Jews, gypsies and homosexuals in the case of the Nazi agents.

It will be hard to understand and interpret the accounts of those who inflicted pain and torture. Torture would have been commonplace as many such places and chambers were discovered in the terminal phase of the war. What do we make of the accounts given by those torturers who inflicted pain and injury? How was this brutal pain inducing methods covered up? Were there different language rules like in the case of the Nazi’s- such as appropriate treatment, cleansing, finishing off and the like?

Torture cadre

Or were there terms taken from the private daily life lexicon to make the atrocities and pain look normal. The Argentinean junta for example had terms and euphemisms- Assado (bonfire to burn dead bodies), grill -(the metal table used to burn the prisoners), Comila de pescado ( fish food) - drop them from planes in the deep sea, Submarino- holding the client’s head in urine and faeces short of suffocation.

Or the Israeli banana for the Palestinians (being tied as a banana) or fridge being locked up in a coffin sized cupboard with cold air blown in or the sack treatment ( in a dirty muslin sack) The torture cadre has three plausible excuses for taking on responsibility for the action and they are obedience to authority, necessity and splitting.

The most facile but comprehensible explanation to deny responsibility is to appeal to strict rational authority. We had to carry orders otherwise we would be killed. The benefits in following orders were also obvious. One becomes a favourite son- a Mahavir - by following orders unquestioningly.

Good Mahavirs are iconic loyalists. The lower you are in the hierarchy the greater is the force of this account. One’s own morality is irrelevant.

Torturers say the first act is difficult but once it is routinised the next is a piece of cake; remember Calley’s chilling words about the My Lai massacre- ‘it was no big deal’. These criminalist patterns need close surveillance.

The second is necessity- that is to save oneself or in the interest of our ultimate goal. These pain killings were a small price, however dirty it may be for achieving our greater glory. The third is splitting self and that is ‘I was not myself since I joined the LTTE’. It corrupted me, split my personality and I have to get it back through rehabilitation.

IDP’s as Pawns for a Machiavellian Intent

Rehabilitating the former combatants will depend on correct diagnoses coming out of the statements they make. This is no easy task and a certain degree of latitude for ‘a vital lie’ must be left before they are accepted. Sri Lanka saw the worst case scenario of the human rights attack.

The Western values of individualism are imposed on our societies with colonialist zeal to denigrate Sri Lanka in the eyes of the Western World.

Even today the attack on the IDP situation is more on the individualistic freedoms and not on economic or social rights. Any right thinking Human Rights Group must seek support for the Sri Lankan Government. There is not a concern for the innocent but for their own future well-being.

Given the fact that the identification of hardcore LTTE in the camps is difficult the possibility of mustering the ideologically committed to a new movement is not impossibility. The disingenuous demands to free the IDPs before they are ready can be a ploy to help regroup combatants.

In the world the concern is always extended to the political underdogs and that concern discounts disabling nation states. Various agendas can be played out for ulterior banal motive: illegal arms, geopolitical interests and long-term conflicts. Hence Sri Lanka must sort out the IDPs and former combatants with utmost care.