Prominent monuments are backed either through approval or funding by the state and these monuments present a selective historical narrative that marginalizes and facilitates the Sri Lankan government and the perpetrator state. According to Bellentani and Panico’s method of semiotic analysis,[1] considering both the material and cultural contexts, state-backed war memorials are exclusionary and ethno-nationalist on three fronts. Symbolically and linguistically, as all three of the main monuments discussed show, the structures contain exclusively Buddhist and Sinhalese elements. Secondly in memorialisation practice, The STF monument bases memorialisation practices on Sinhala-Buddhist practices and language. Finally, through the location of overly valorous war memorials in sensitive sites of conflict and its conjunction with the erasure of local community memorialisation. Despite, or perhaps as a result of, superficial claims of unity or pluralism, grand war memorials are a proactive force of continued repression of minorities in Sri Lanka.
Tao Yazaki
War memorials have long played a role in marking the transition from war to peace and in post-conflict recovery. Several members of the Visualising Peace team have researched the storytelling done by different war memorials, the perspectives they represent, and the potential they can have for driving conflict as much as mourning, remembering and recovering from it.
Student Tao Yazaki has focused her research on civil war and post-conflict transitions in Sri Lanka. In this presentation, she looks at colonial legacies and their impact on peacebuilding, and also at media representations and memorialisation. In a second presentation, which explores a series of international (not just Sri Lankan) case studies, Tao considers different trends in public and private memorialisation, the formation (or challenging) of collective memory through monuments, tensions between justice-seeking and stability (or a perpetrator’s peace) in memorial practices, and intergenerational remembering. Below you can read some further reflections, on state-sponsored memorials in Sri Lanka and the work they do to support the top-down, perpetrator’s peace imposed by the Sri Lankan government:
[1] Bellentani and Panico, “The meanings of monuments and memorials.”