Healing and reconciliation

Vinod

The Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) - founded upon the principle of restorative justice, focusing on determining responsibility for events related to the conflict and identifying the measures needed to prevent their recurrence in future - presented its report to the President

A video which went viral around the world has now gone viral on mobile phones in Sri Lanka. It purports to show a youth in Beirut diving off a seaside promenade, hitting a concrete slab and bouncing into the sea – which turns scarlet with his blood.

The popularity of this video in Sri Lanka, as well as of similar viral videos doing the rounds on mobile telephones – even the spurious Channel 4 video was highly popular - points to a very deep lesion in the collective psyche.

About half the population has never, except for the past two and a half years, experienced peace. Violence has been the norm, images of dead and wounded people have been a staple on television and in their daily existence. It is as if, in the absence of the brutal visual images of war in their lives, they are now enjoying the visceral delights of violence, death and injury elsewhere.

Psychiatric assistance

The deep-seated traumatic effects of the conflict are evident in the fact that one in every eight Sri Lankans has some form of mental disease, distressing enough to cause them to ask for psychiatric assistance. This is significantly higher than the global average of one in ten.

About 8 percent of those referred for psychiatric evaluation in the Army were found to be suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – what used to be called shell shock. The incidence of this illness among combatants of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, as well as among the general populace, is estimated to be correspondingly high.

The three decades of conflict in Sri Lanka may have contributed towards the very high suicide rate – one of the highest in the world; the highest through ingestion of insecticides or of yellow oleander (kaneru) seeds. Suicide appears to have killed more people than died of combat-related causes.

Family members

The conflict most profoundly affected children. Over 300,000 children were displaced by the fighting in the North and East. Many more were likely to have been traumatised by the impact of family members dying and by the fear of bombs – as well as by the visual imagery of war, death and destruction.

Unfortunately, there is a shortage of trained psychiatric personnel. Although a sufficient number of psychiatrists are produced by the medical education system, the majority prefer to seek employment abroad. There are more than five times as many Sri Lankan psychiatrists in Australia, New Zealand, the US and the UK than in Sri Lanka.

The shortage caused the authorities to rush through a 1-year diploma course, those who qualified being appointed to rural areas. The appointment of trained non-specialists to rural clinics has been facilitated through a training programme in mental health for Medical Officers of Health. As Professor Rohan Gunaratna said, addressing the Inaugural National Conference on Reconciliation at the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute of International Relations and Strategic Studies on November 24, the North remains, despite two years of reconstruction, in ruins.

Decades of conflict

If the physical damage is still apparent, how much more must remain of the social and psychological harm? Although the armed conflict, the most visible manifestation of the divisions within our society is over, the underlying causal cracks are still there. We do not know to what extent war propaganda and the experience of war may have exacerbated those rifts.

The forgoing should illustrate the depth of social trauma caused by the three decades of conflict and the difficulty in healing it. It points to the urgent need for reconciliation, in order to prevent any future conflict.

The success of the South African experience of restorative justice - repairing the harm caused by criminal behaviour, by co-operative processes that include all stakeholders, offenders as well as victims – through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been documented widely.

LLRC

It is necessary for us in Sri Lanka to seek a similar course of action. The first step was taken when the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) - founded upon the principle of restorative justice, focusing on determining responsibility for events related to the conflict and identifying the measures needed to prevent their recurrence in future - presented its report to the President.

The government has pledged to implement the LLRC recommendations. It is to be hoped that effective action will be taken – especially in relation to its suggestions regarding the issue of accountability – but in the spirit of restorative, rather than retributive justice. Not only will victims and their loved ones be able to achieve closure, but the perpetrators, too, could be reintegrated into society as part of the process of social healing. The overall healing of our society requires reconciliation across the rifts that divide it.

The government has already taken the first steps towards breaking down the barriers between ethnic groups through language. National Languages and Social Integration Minister Vasudeva Nanayakkara has said in Parliament that there are no plans to limit singing of the National Anthem to the Sinhala language.

Trilingual Sri Lanka

His ministry has been involved in teaching all three official languages to government officers, part of the process of making the government open to speakers of all major languages in Sri Lanka. The government has also declared 2012 to be the Year of a Trilingual Sri Lanka.

Rohan Gunaratna said at the Reconciliation Conference that what is required is a complete change in attitude on the part of all people in Sri Lanka. He referred in particular to his old school, Ananda College – founded as a Buddhist school, catering very much to people of Sinhalese ethnicity.

What he would like to see, said Gunaratna told the audience, was for a Tamil language stream to be opened at Ananda – the very symbol of Sinhala-Buddhist education. It is this type of thinking which is necessary for building a Sri Lankan national identity overlaying and standing above considerations of ethnicity.