For more than three decades, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fought a gruesome war for independence against the majoritarian Sinhalese government of Sri Lanka. Even as the government fought LTTE on the battlefield, it also pursued a legal war through the enactment of counterterrorism laws that permitted indefinite detention and the use of confessions as sole evidence. This book applies theoretical insights from the work of philosophers such as Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, and Michel Foucault to the Sri Lankan context to examine the conflicting narratives relating to these laws produced by both sides in the conflict.
- Cover
- Contents
- 1. Do Tigers confess?
- Narratives of the war
- The ethnic conflict
- Combating rebellions
- Confessions as evidence
- The state of exception
- Finding the ‘truth’ about confessions
- 2. Rebellion and martyrdom
- Martyrdom
- Pride, loyalty, and discipline
- The suicide strategies
- Truth, fear, and fantasy
- 3. Facts, falsities, and fictions
- Confession templates
- The institutional voice
- Semantic criteria
- Legal criteria
- Semiotic criteria
- Fictions vs. reality
- 4. Punitive interrogation of Tamil Tiger suspects
- The suspect population
- Secretive investigations and the right to silence
- Punishment of the suspect
- The truth of torture
- 5. Judgement of the terrorist against the ‘formula of justice’
- ‘Finite justice’ in the journey of the criminal justice system
- Constructing the case against the terrorist
- Inequalities in the justice system
- The formula of justice
- (Pre)judgement of the terrorist by the judiciary
- Justice denied
- 6. Fantasies, fictions, myths, and denials about Tamil Tigers’ confessions
- End of the Tamil Tigers’ era
- Consequences of the mass prosecution strategy
- Tigers don’t confess?
- The future of confessions
- Appendix
- Confession of Nallaratnam Singarasa
- Confession of Sellapulle Mahendran
- Acronyms
- Acknowledgements
- About the author
- Bibliography
- Index
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