The material and human costs of war

Book ReviewA collection of war time memoirs published by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies; Translated by Miriam Naveendran, Reviewed by Lynn OckerszAlthough the financial and material costs of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict have received a reasonable degree of attention by the Sri Lankan state and other relevant sections over the years, the same cannot be said for the human costs of the war. Approximate figures of war casualties have occasionally surfaced from concerned quarters but such statistics are no reliable pointer to the staggering suffering that the war entailed over those 30 years or more for the civilian public of North-East Sri Lanka.The latter inadequacy could only be rectified by credible qualitative commentary and analyses on the emotional and physical pain those civilian sections that were directly exposed to the harsh realities of war endured, mostly in silence.

‘Memories from Kilinochchi’, an ICES publication translated by Miriam Naveendran fills this lacuna most adequately and admirably.A special merit of this publication is that it brings together first person memoirs of the civilian survivors of the war from no less a district of importance in Northern Sri Lanka than Kilinochchi, where some of the bloodiest and concluding battles of the North-East conflict took place. The victims are allowed to speak for themselves and we are justified in stating that the singularly mind-numbing tragedy which is war is presented to us in the most engaging and graphic fashion in this timely collection of memoirs.



The collection could be described as a veritable mirror to the Longsuffering the people of Kilinochchi were made to endure for no fault of theirs. Their life was a heart-rending saga of aerial bombardments, displacements, hunger and homelessness and such harrowing experiences are driven home to the reader with a freshness and cogency hardly encountered in the discourse and literature focused on the civilian victims of war and their suffering; also insensitively and glibly referred to by some as ‘collateral damage’.We are informed that families were bombed in bunkers where they were forced to take shelter.

Children lose their parents in blitzkriegs and vice versa and in almost a split second, happy homesteads are reduced to embers. Survivors of such horrors are compelled to trudge long distances in search of succor. Likewise, livelihoods are dramatically disrupted along with the wrecking of the future of the young on account of the endemic destabilization that war brings.

Simply told, their lives are reduced to a living-death.Hopefully, this collection of memoirs would be read by particularly those governing sections that are on record that they are ushering in a Sri Lanka where national harmony and unity will be enduring realities. For, although the battles have ended and the guns have seemingly fallen silent, many are the minds in the North-East that have been brutally scarred.

So much so, we are compelled to say along with a suffering survivor: ‘The war on the outside has ended, but the war in the mind continues...

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