ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the political and ethno-religious dimensions of the Sri Lankan government’s commemoration of its military victory over the Tamil Tigers in 2009, after almost 30 years of civil war, and at its half-hearted attempts to institute a framework for transitional justice. While an Office of Missing Persons and an Office for Reparations have been instituted, largely as a consequence of international pressure, overall the country continues to be in a post-war situation in which the guns have fallen silent, rather than in a post-conflict situation in which the sources of conflict have been addressed. The military victory has led to a triumphalist assertion of the identity of the majority community, which culminates in annual victory celebrations. In the post-war era, Sinhala Buddhism serves as a rallying point in the face of the repercussions of globalization and the loosening of community ties. However, given its exclusivist nature, it reproduces and sustains conflict. With the opening up of a new Sinhala-Muslim fault line, the complex conflict configuration has even hardened, while the majoritarian idiom of celebration and commemoration openly jettisons the idea of Sri Lanka as a plural society, founded on the notion of “unity in diversity”.
