The LTTE’s kurumbetti airplanes have struck again. We do not know from where they came. Still, neither this attack which caused more psychological damage than physical, nor the aborted attempt by the LTTE to recapture Mullaitivu earlier this month nor the frequent attacks on civilians escaping towards Government controlled areas, can affect a directional change in this war. We have gone beyond that point.

The end of a war naturally results in relief and celebration. Such ends, however, are also beginnings, and how we mark the end can colour how we proceed thereafter, as individuals and collectives. This essay approaches nationalism and nation-building in terms of one of its key building blocks: dignity.

Almost seven years ago, I went to Kilinochchi to cover Prabhakaran’s first media conference (or ‘spectacle’) after the Ceasefire Agreement came into force. I went with two journalists from the Divaina and one from the Island. There was a photographer as well, if I remember right. The LTTE insisted that only one journalist will be allowed into the place where the media conference was to be held. My colleague from the Island had a greater need and since covering media conferences was not exactly my thing, I was happy stay back. We had to hang around for hours, myself, Janaka Liyanaarachchi and the driver. We spent the time talking with LTTE cadres, some armed and some not, tasked with providing security.

They were all extremely young; the oldest would have been in their early twenties. Even throwing in the language handicap, it was not hard to see that ‘Eelam’ was not an entity that had been inscribed in any serious way in their minds. They didn’t speak about politics. They didn’t want to talk about traditional homelands, devolution of power and other such things the conflict was supposed to be about.

These armed men and women were friendly, courteous and hospitable. They wanted to ‘chit-chat’. The girls thought that Janaka looked a lot of Vijaya Kumaratunga. Some of the boys asked if we knew how to set up a garment factory. I am not saying of course that they were representing the general concerns of the entire population of Tamil people their age, but I could not help wondering what each of them would have said if someone who knew Tamil asked them what their objective in life was. I remember remembering the Anthropologist Valentine Daniel referring to a young man who had engaged in looting during the ’83 riots responding to a similar question with the bewildering, ‘I want a video’ (meaning, as per the idiom of the time, a VCR).

I have since had occasion to meet a group of LTTE cadres who had surrendered to the security forces. They had been given vocational training as part of the rehabilitation process. The officers in charge of the group, as part of the rehabilitation process, had invited my wife to speak to them about practical ways of not only employing newly acquired skills to develop livelihoods but contributing towards social cohesion once they return home.

We arrived late, around 7.30 pm, having had to travel some 100 plus kilometers after visiting communities that had suffered much on account of the war and the tsunami. My wife was wearing an osariya and as she walked into the hall there was no discernable warmth emanating from the 30 odd young ex-LTTE cadres in the hall. Not surprising, she said later. She spoke in Sinhala and in the broken Tamil that she knew, but had an excellent interpreter to help circumvent the language barrier. She spoke at length but a couple of things she said stuck in my mind.

"Two days ago, I was in Kokkadicholai. I was having a long discussion with a group of about 50 women. It lasted several hours. My two daughters, aged 8 and 5 were outside, playing with some children in the village. My daughters knew no Tamil and their new found friends knew no Sinhala. It was not easy to drag them away by the time we had finished the discussion. There were hugs and kisses and then the inevitable goodbyes and waving. Ten years from now, if they were to return to Kokkadicholai and find that those children were somewhere else, carrying guns, or had died in battle, then we would have failed them. No one will help us. We must help ourselves and each other.

"When I was pregnant with my second child, I visited Puthukidiarippu. I walked those roads with people in the area. I ate mangoes that they offered me. That is all in my blood and the blood of my child. This is our naekama, our relatedness and our strength."

She would have spoken for about 45 minutes. When she was done, there was no hostility. There were smiles and applause.

Two weeks later, these same men visited a training facility located in a sprawling and elegantly sculptured landscape including an impressive vegetable garden and architecture that virtually grew out of the environment.

There were lectures, but there was discussion as well and the men (boys, essentially) spoke their hearts out. They appreciated the fact that they were warmly welcomed and treated with dosai for breakfast, something they were having for the first time since handing themselves in or being captured. They spoke about their dreams, what they planned to do with their lives, the vocations they had picked etc. They joked around, teased each other and were at ease. They had questions too. One of them asked if loans could be provided for people to go abroad.

This was the answer: "No. Why should we give people loans to leave this country? We give loans to people so that they can stay here and build their communities. All we are doing is showing you that a lot of things are possible if you are genuinely committed to changing things in your communities."

The one-day ‘exposure’ was new to these young men, none of whom had ever visited this district. For the people facilitating the programme, they were not ex-LTTE cadres but just another group of people interested in seeing and learning.

What do ordinary people want? Dosai? Of course not, but an acknowledgment of their right to cultural identity is absolutely necessary if they are to reintegrate back into their respective communities and engage in something productive. Conflict resolution and indeed resolution of perceived grievance and addressing of aspiration, reasonable or otherwise, is not reducible to employment generation. Reconstruction and development do have a place in healing processes, but they are in the end necessary but not sufficient salve.

Inclusivity helps correct citizenship anomalies, no doubt, and a set of reforms that empower the citizen to the detriment of the politician as well as institutional adjustments that make for checks and balances so necessary for better governance would invariable take care of many of the grievances that are cited (correctly or erroneously) as being the fundamental source of the conflict. What should precede or at least unfold concurrently with the above processes, I believe, is a recovery of self-respect and dignity by all those who have suffered in the war. I believe this is the non-negotiable pathway towards ensuring that honour is included in the peace that is to come.

Nationalism makes no sense without national pride. If pride in a nation is a powerful stimulus for creative and productive engagement in the affairs of governance, the processes of development and the recovery of meaning, then it has to be preceded by pride in self and acknowledgment of everyone else’s right to dignity.

There are words that need to be expunged from the post-conflict lexicon. ‘Victor’ and ‘vanquished’ for example. ‘Triumph’ and ‘defeat’ too, and ‘triumphalism’ and ‘defeatism’. We have to understand that as individuals and a collective we have to come up with a formulation where ‘victors’ and ‘the vanquished’ are categories that we inhabit collectively, on account of our human condition, on account of an historical togetherness and in view of the critical importance that dignity has to acquire in the post-conflict arena.

It is not enough to distinguish, say, the Tamil civilian from ‘terrorist’. It is also important to see ‘fellow-citizen’ and ‘human being’ beyond given identity; not to erase identity altogether and collapse it all in a ‘Sri Lankan’ that means nothing, but acknowledge ethnicity as a critical but nevertheless close second to that which flows from citizenship.

When we return to the issue of citizenship anomalies, we may resolve them in any number of ways, but we will be poorer, as individuals, community and as nation or nations, if we had in the process opted to sacrifice pride and dignity, either from a victor perspective or from a defeated one.

Almost 20 years ago, when I read in an internet news group that almost the entirety of the JVP’s politburo had been eliminated, I was sad. I was sad not because I supported the JVP (not only did I not, but I had suffered first hand the violence unleashed by that particular avatar of the JVP) but because to many the JVP represented the best chance of change, dignity and a socialist future (regardless of how logical or otherwise such dreams were).

Whatever R. Sampanthan says, I doubt that many Tamils place much value on Prabhakaran and the LTTE. I believe however that even those who vehemently oppose the LTTE would acknowledge that for many Prabhakran symbolized a different and desired future. They would not lament the death of a terrorist, but would no doubt be inclined to lament the termination of a dream, and whether this dream had corresponding substantiation just does not matter. We could light a firecracker in legitimate celebration of the former, but it could reverberate as an echo of gunshot that represented something quite different to at least some of our fellow citizens.

Some who have been closely monitoring the situation of civilians caught in the Wanni have made the following observations:

"Many have had the experience of being shot at by the LTTE as they escaped or (by) the army personnel at the entry points, deliberately provoked by LTTE fire. The LTTE's direct shooting at civilians has on most occasions been aimed at the legs, but cases of fatal shooting have also been reported.

"In contrast, generally the behavior of soldiers at entry points has been exceptionally good. The civilians escaping from LTTE territory had been invariably forced to participate in activities of the Tamil Tigers before the guerrillas began to retreat in the face of the military advance."

I can’t help feeling that this is still a consolation prize. Protection is good and necessary of course, under the circumstances, but protection by definition is a dignity robber. There will be 'collateral' in any military operation to remove the threat of terrorism but there is one thing that should not fall into that unhappy category: dignity. That is something that both ill-will and a sense of superiority can produce and requires appropriate safeguards.

We are treading on tender territory here. A lot of water and blood have flowed under the bridge, and I don’t know what happened to those kids in Kilinochchi. I believe, though, that we are never too late in seeking relatedness, referencing commonality or recognizing that one more wound is unnecessary even if an additional lesion would go unnoticed in a body that has been wounded much. All this, not as resolution and recovery of civility for all time, but as foundation for tomorrow’s rebuilding, regardless of the architectural genre we resolve to go with in the end.

Malinda Seneviratne is the editor of the magazine ‘Spectrum’ and can be contacted at malinsene@gmail.com.