Letters From Batticaloa : TMVP's Emergence and the Transmission of Conflict in Eastern Sri Lanka

Abstract

In March 2004 a man known as Karuna Amman announced his defection from the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), an armed group seeking the formation of an independent Tamil state in the north and east of Sri Lanka. Six months after his defection, Karuna launched a new political movement – the Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal (TMVP) [Tamil People Linberation Tigers] - entering mainstream politics while still engaged in counterinsurgency operations against his former rebel partners. Five years later (May 2009), the Sri Lankan civil war ended. I argue that Karuna’s defection and TMVP’s formation were crucial factors in bringing the Sri Lankan civil war to an end. I also maintain TMVP is a collective embodiment of the practices and legitimising narratives through which the war was perpetuated and altered. Thus, TMVP condenses both a socio-political transformation and a cross-generational knowledge transfer; two key processes that I claim sustain and change any war over prolonged periods of time. The documentation and critical analysis of TMVP’s formation provides therefore a unique opportunity to expand and challenge current debates in conflict studies and anthropology. TMVP’s formation had unquestionable material implications because from one moment to the next the LTTE lost about 40% of its manpower and nearly half the territory under their control. But also because the defection meant the biggest intelligence breach ever faced by the LTTE; because TMVP turned into the largest and most overt challenger of its heretofore highly cohesive and hierarchical structure; and finally, because the dissidence not only accused the LTTE of exactly that which they allegedly were fighting against (discrimination), but because they connected such allegations to regional identity and to a considerable army of combatants. However, engaging with TMVP’s emergence also demands an exploration of how that phenomenon is a product and potential producer of certain epistemologies of conflict. Hence, this research also addresses the social spaces of knowledge transfer through which the meanings and reasons of conflict were transmitted outside the armed movement; equally sustaining as well as transforming the civil war. The ethnographic accounts of both TMVP’s emergence as well as the spaces of knowledge transfer render an explanatory framework for the sustainability and transformation of war in Sri Lanka. But the accounts will also show the opposite, namely, how the findings of the transmission process help explain the emergence of TMVP. In order to achieve such results, this dissertation proposes a novel concept coined as semantic alliance, a crucial theoretical outcome of this investigation applicable in other cases around the world and for different social phenomena. While this book contributes to revealing what was transformed throughout the intergenerational knowledge transfers and with TMVP’s formation, more crucially they all show precisely how these alterations were pursued. Whilst doing so, the treatment of these social phenomena is set to the service of challenging, broadening, articulating and refining current debates, most notably with regards to the social reproduction of war.