the banal traces of death

i stand corrected. while my blog entry had claimed that 4 had been killed by a bomb explosion in batticaloa, it were in fact two, a bystanding riksha driver one of them. it doesn’t make the act less atrocious, to be explained only through a completele contorted logic inherent to terrorism. terrorism has been means of fight of the ‘liberation tigers of tamil eelam’, ltte, for decades. the war they fought stemmed from the deliberate discrimination of their ethnic minority. this fact however is no justification for acts of terror.

it is only that especially the present sri lanka government, at the moment winning the war against the ltte on the battlefield, has no plan for piece, no idea of how to reconcile the minorities in the country. instead it relies on war aggrandizing propaganda, whilst big parts of the country submerge under acts of violence, corruption, vengeance.

the acts of torture reported to me are utterly barbarous, similarly the behaviour of the gangs of the former war lords who are now in regional politics. the principle of legal certainty is widely absent in this country, instead abductions, the usage of masked squealers, violence against members of the press are present in everyday life. this is the country that many people chose to go to for holidays.

Update: Thomas in his comment was kind enough to avoid any mentioning of photographic merits of the pictures shown. And there are simply none. they are simple snaps of what presented itself to the eye, the first even taken inside the car through the windshield. getting out and taking the picture in presence of the police posts nearby was regarded as too dangerous. in sri lanka you can get arrested for less, and even if the danger for a foreigner is probably smal, my local colleagues have to fear at least questioning, getting into the files of the government and its organs for suspicious behavior. and you can vanish for less there.