Sunday, December 2, 2012


Still Counting the Dead: A welcome first step

“We used to be a very proud people”1 – Uma, The Teacher
Few years ago, during a very wintery January weekend, at a Copenhagen hotel, I was scrambling to prepare a last minute Power Point presentation for a conference themed, violent conflict and health. The reason was one of the Mullivaaykkaal survivors had agreed to speak at the conference’s public symposium as an eyewitness of Vanni war (witnesses from Iraq and South Sudan also spoke at the symposium). The presentation was meant to aid the witness while speaking at the symposium. I was planning for a very brief video or photographic presentation followed by few slides with texts, therefore I was looking for pictures and videos both in my computer and online. Suddenly I remembered about this particular video, which I watched back in May 2009. I managed to get the YouTube link for that video with the help of a friend, in that video, a healthcare professional is attempting to resuscitate (cardiopulmonary) a toddler boy with abdominal injuries and he is gasping for breath few times and later video is showing his dead body, throughout this ordeal, boy’s mother’s faintish sobbing can be heard in the background. I was watching this video with another doctor and I stopped the video in halfway because it was excruciatingly painful to watch, there was a complete silence and we didn’t speak for few minutes. Eventually we decided not to use part of the video, which is showing the resuscitation of the boy. Due to my medical training, normally I am ‘comfortable’ in seeing blood, flesh and injuries but this particular video is extremely agonizing to watch, the irony is, unlike any other typical video taken during the Vanni war, this video doesn’t show much blood or graphic visualisation of bodily injuries.
Here I am recalling my experience for simply to highlight the courage and determination of those survivors of the Vanni war to come forward and share their tragic stories with wider world. They are courageous in two aspects, firstly, for defying the security risk to them and to their families and secondly, their willingness to revisit the memory – even for few hours – of one of the most brutal civil wars since Biafra conflict. The level of dehumanisation and brutalisation of human life during the last few months of the Vanni war is comparable with the conditions of Nazi concentration camps.
Therefore it is extremely important for every reader of this book to acknowledge the invaluable contribution of those survivor-witnesses to the post-war discourse on justice and reconciliation. Whatever their personal political views may have been but one cannot find fault with their desire to see justice for the thousands of victims perished during the war.
II The battle for narrative Continue reading »