Land and Tourism in Post-war Sri Lanka: A Critique on the Political Negligence in Tourism

Abstract

This critique argues that the mechanism of land utilization under post-war tourism in the Northern and Eastern provinces of Sri Lanka was instigated by marker-driven political negligence. It discovers that the introduction of post-catastrophic tourism (Zizek 2014) has been influenced by immediate commercial motives and no attention has been paid to the political significance of the traumatic historical memory of the community affected by a lasting conflict. The post-war tourism has generated a phenomenon called dark tourism in the area concerned, where the curiosity to see the ‘monuments’ of the fierce battle could be exploited for recreational purposes. The victorious southerners used their political hegemony to legitimize their commercially motivated invasions by converting the once battlefield to a tourism zone of ‘leisure tourism practices’ (Pieris 2014: 266). For this purpose, the most valuable lands located in potential of nature tourism have obviously been grabbed by the Sri Lankan military depriving of those who claim the right to those lands. In the meantime, the apparent mass tourism promotion by the government between 2009 and 2014 too has significantly disregarded the fundamental principle that careful attention must be paid to, ‘the visitation to places, where tragedies or historically noteworthy death has occurred and that continue to impact our lives’ (Tarlow 2005: 48) before obvious profit motives. In the context of this paper, the above aloof attitude in neglecting geo-political sensitivity of the community by the then politico-administrative agents, who were blinded by their own development paradigm, is identified as a dangerous humanitarian mistake from a wider universal sense. While acknowledging tourism as an agent of development, this paper understands that the trivialization of land rights and the disregard towards the significance of a historical memory and the ownership of a community, which has turned ‘the suffering into a leisure experience for contemporary tourists’ (Smith et al. 2010: 38) cannot also be easily overlooked.