Michael Roberts
The sharp warring conflict in Syria today amidst the ongoing war in Ukraine and that in Gaza underlines stories and ‘pictures’ of battlefield dead (both civilians and soldiers). These in their turn highlight the fundamental differences in the manner in which some Asian countries conduct funerals and face the issue of death embodied in a corpse (in some cases that of a loved one or kinsperson).
This fundamental difference has equally fundamental political consequences. For this reason, I take my Thuppahi-readers (no offence meant) to a segment in one of my past presentations when I presented thoughts relating to the official display of Velupillai Pirapaharan as a corpse in May 2009.
Postface: Velupillai Pirapāharan was not shot in the head as Pirapāharan, but as a Tiger soldier out there in dense swamp terrain. When the several photographs of his head and body were shown initially in May 2009, there were a few in Sri Lanka who suggested that he had been executed. A source with army links suggested to me that it was a sniper shot. But somewhere along the line (I forget where) I picked up the critical information that his body was found in the swamp areas bordering the western waterline of the Nandikadal Lagoon. To my thinking this ruled out a sniper shot and suggested that he was killed in some fire fight. Further, and critically, I surmised to myself that those army men behind the shooting would have been unaware that he was Pirapāharan; rather, that he was just another Tiger in a group of Tigers which included many LTTE leaders seeking to escape and fight another day. It was for this reason that I retrieved photographs of the swamp area from the Ministry of Defence web site and inserted two in my anthology Fire and Storm (Colombo, Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2010).[21]
This speculation on my part has recently been confirmed in an article by WLD Mahindapala which also displays images of the swamp area and vicinity.[22] Mahindapala is a government apologist and to my thinking a Sinhala chauvinist (I have been castigated by him in the past). But it is precisely this circumstance and his high-level connections that enabled him to gain entry to the specific locale of this last battle in the company of Lt. Col. Rohitha Aluvihare, Commanding Officer of the 4th Battalion of the Vijaya Infantry Regiment, the unit involved in this specific struggle. This fight had initially occurred in the dead of night between 3.30 and 6.30 a. m on the 18th May morning after a platoon led by Sgt Bandara had been surprised and nearly overwhelmed by this Tiger contingent’s move out of their last redoubt. Reinforcements and heavy fire had then been mounted against the area. The shooting is said to have lasted till 11.00 a.m. that 18th day, with the army losing 4 men and having 4 others injured. Later that day the army sent commandoes into the swamp area for a clearing operation, one that included the recovery of bodies.[23] This task had continued the next morning, that is, on the 19th May. The army men were suddenly confronted by a number of Tigers who had remained hidden. It was when this Tiger unit had been overcome that they discovered Pirapāharan’s body, with his probable identity being indicated by his identity card and a tag marked 001.
Final confirmation of this identification was reached by bringing the former LTTE Colonel, Karuna, as well as Daya Master, one of the political chiefs in the LTTE regime,[24] to the locality where Pirapāharan’s body had been laid out. The body had been stripped of clothes for this pragmatic task of identification. That is understandable. Pathologists examine bodies in their natural state. Even films of forensic science investigations, such as Waking the Dead, evoke realism by showing corpses stark nude with pubic hair on show (unlike Channel Four’s prurience[25]).
However, the question that arises at this point is the same as that which faced President Obama. Did President Rajapaksa and his advisors have to display body and face in their lurid state to the whole world through media outlets?
As I have argued in my previous essay, one did not need to be a rocket scientist to conclude that Rajapaksa’s regime would gain considerable popularity in the Sinhala-speaking world at home and abroad by revealing this final nail in the LTTE military coffin. So, for him, it was good populist politics, besides being a pragmatic way of confirming to everyone everywhere that Pirapāharan had been killed.[26] However, the further point to note is that issues of sensibility would not have arisen because the habitus of most Sri Lankans precluded them from reading the world in this manner and seeing the disfigured head as a repulsive sight. After all, when President Premadasa was decimated by a LTTE suicide bomber on May Day in 1993, his remains in the form of corpse charred to cinder were displayed in all the newspapers, including government-run ones. This, too, was probably good politics because it served to present the LTTE as a terrible force. But conditioning such practices is the fact that to most Sri Lankans death in whatever form is an integral part of this world of suffering, a universe where pain is mixed with pleasure. The contrast with much of Western society today is stark: “It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it” (Elizabeth Kübler-Ross)
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