Lia Kent is an Australian academic currently based at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Colombo, Sri Lanka. She has written extensively on post-conflict peacebuilding, memorialisation and transitional justice.
The monuments are impossible to miss. Rising from the flat and otherwise featureless Vanni - the broad, scrubby northern region so different from the dense, fertile vegetation of the island's south - these official markers to the end of the civil war project a story that is unashamedly heroic, triumphal and militaristic. In this story of good versus evil, of Tamil terrorists versus Sinhalese protectors of the nation, there is little room for multiple narratives…
…the sheer number of official monuments, their overbearing presence, and the rigidity with which they portray the events of the war and draw lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ speak to an underlying anxiety about the fragility of the postwar political order.
