11 years following the brutal conclusion of the armed conflict between the state security forces and the LTTE, the postwar remains steeped in a panoply of visual debris.

The cosmetic bombast of loan-bolstered, militarised ‘development’ exalted as ‘Uthuru Vasanthaya’ (Northern Spring) & ‘Nagenahira Navodaya’ (Eastern Awakening) sits uneasily over the compromising wreckage of the systematic genocide of a community.

The ‘victory’ was one that was actively framed by way of potent propaganda as one that was of sovereign imperative and Sinhala Buddhist in language and character. It was narrated as the apex of a triumphant nation-state project built on the legacies of kings.

Where justice and accountability remain an unmet necessity, the enduring visual detritus of war reveal an unremitting history and present of violence against the island’s political minorities and offer a predictive glimpse into their even more precarious future.

On the sands of Mullivaikkal, where community remembrance has been hindered at every turn, sun-and-salt-bleached family albums remain entangled with little schoolbags and tattered saris that still remain only half-buried in the soil.

These belonged to the nearly 300,000 Tamil civilians who were trapped on this sliver of sand between the advancing military and the retreating Tigers, succumbing to the state-directed artillery shelling and LTTE gunfire.

Portraits of the disappeared persist in the defiant palms of family members who have for over one thousand days sustained a vigil that has gone largely ignored demanding knowledge of the whereabouts of their loved ones vanished at the sinister hands of the state.

Mothers are taunted with the possibility that their children might be alive somewhere in the dark recesses of state detention, as the melancholic teenagers conscripted by the LTTE were piled onto army buses upon surrender, photographed, and never seen again.

A thousand grainy atrocities captured by the 'proponents' of the war on compact digital cameras and mobile phones persist - gleeful kills and violations memorialised by smug soldiers standing exultant over the hastily piled corpses of brutalised 'terrorists'.

What the personal photographs of soldiers do not display is the humanitarianism, heroism or ‘discipline’ that has become integral to Sri Lanka’s current political vocabulary that might speak to its future success and stability.

The farce of the ‘No Fire Zones’ were recorded by LTTE cadres who wielded cameras alongside their guns, desperate to supplement bids for a ceasefire in the final months. It did not prevent the massacre of between 40-70,000 civilians at the hands of the state/aspiring state.

Soldiers compelled into military service from the rural Sinhalese south by poverty & unemployment ‘freeing’ Tamil civilians were recorded by embedded state media to contrive the war for television sets & amplify the cinematic state fictions of a ‘humanitarian rescue operation’.

Photographs/footage of shelled hospitals in the designated ‘No Fire Zones’ were captured by humanitarian workers and civilian Tamil photographers who risked their personal safety to ‘witness’ atrocities carried out by the state.

These serve as testimony to the pervasive devastations of the war zone and the thousands of deaths of a frontline community who would not know funerals or dignity in injury or death.

These serve as evidence for posterity and a historical record of the gross violations of International Humanitarian Law and crimes committed against a people by the ‘legitimate’ state.

Such images number in the thousands, the continued necessity of their winding afterlives are as disturbing as the contexts of their making in the midst of horrors of the warzone.

They speak to the quiet horrors of the island’s postwar; a smug victor’s ‘peace’ that does not belong to its still-persecuted minorities. In spite of the overwhelming volume of credible evidence - visual, testimonial, forensic, cartographic -

The Sri Lankan government continues to deny its operation was anything but ‘humanitarian’ going so far as to say it pursued a policy of ‘zero civilian casualties’.

These pictures speak to the terrifying realities of the Sri Lankan state and its consolidation of power through securitisation intertwined with a nationalist rhetoric that permits for the demonisation of enemy ‘others’ who warrant 'eradication'.

For many thousands who continue to suffer in the postwar, key perpetrators (photographed triumphantly standing over the bodies of their loved ones) have now (democratically) returned to power as political figures & administrators with demands for justice being bluntly denied.

Perhaps you find these words incredulous or fabricated or contradictory to your 'peace' and 'politics', but perhaps that is an indication of what remains to be learned by us all. That your 'peace' remains a war for survival, justice, accountability.

Yet for some of us, this is what 'peace' by 'victory' looks like.

11 years later we have failed to reflect, to hold our ‘own’ accountable, and that remains the greatest crime.