Tracing Cultural Nationalism in Traditional Homeland-based Solution to the Sri Lankan Ethnic Conflict- a Discourse Analysis Approach to the Represented Media Texts.

Abstract

The ethnic conflict, which has claimed the lives of more than 70,000 people, is an ongoing intensive, political as well as military conflict on the island-nation of Sri Lanka since 1983. It is predominantly between the majority Sinhala community and the minority Tamil community, spearheaded by the LTTE. The North and East of the island have been claimed as the traditional homeland of the Tamil community. The conflict has caused extensive damage to the population and economy of the country. It led to the ban of the LTTE as a terrorist organization across the world. The “territoriality” of the Tamils and the Sinhala communities has instilled a strong sense of cultural nationalism and ethnocentrism in contrast to statist nationalism. It was realized as a state of alienation, a network of longings, a call to love and to die for one’s land. Recently, two significant events took place. The first is that on 16th October 2006, in a judgment that could have far-reaching consequences, the Sinhala-dominated Sri Lankan Supreme Court declared as illegal the merger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces to form a single Tamil-dominated North-Eastern Province as the place of “historical habitation” of the minority Tamils. The two provinces were merged in 1988 under the emergency regulations by the then President J.R. Jayewardene following the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord in July 1987. This was in recognition of the Tamils’ long-standing demand for a homeland within Sri Lanka since the independence in 1948. The second is that on Monday, 14 May 2007, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), which is the dominant partner in the Sri Lankan coalition government, and is the party of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, formally proposed that Sri Lanka be a “unitary state” instead of “federal state” advocated by the International Community. These two events are viewed as planned moves by the Sinhala Community to deprive the Tamils of their claim of the traditional homeland. There have been many media texts, especially newspaper editorials and manipulative language resisting this claim in general and reproducing their counter claim based on these two major moves in particular. This paper traces the visible as well as invisible ideologies such as cultural nationalism and ethnocentrism in disclaiming the traditional homeland-based solution to the Sri Lankan Ethnic Conflict. It adopts a critical discourse analysis approach, expounded by N. Fairclough, T.A. van Dijk, R. Fowler, M.A.K. Halliday, etc., to the texts of the media, resisting and reproducing the affect and attachment towards land.