Incidents of Cutting and Chopping

Abstract

On 25 October 2000, 27 Tamil boys and young men were killed at the Bindunuwewa rehabilitation centre in the hill country area of Sri Lanka while being held as surrendered child soldiers. Most died from cut or burn wounds and the President at the time, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, called it ‘an unfortunate incident’.¹ There were 69 police officers present in the vicinity of the camp on the morning of the massacre, but the event was blamed on an attack by local villagers (see Keenan, 2005a, 2005b). This chapter analyses a theatre project that took place in the centre in July 2000, some three months before the incident of cutting and chopping. The project involved both a training programme for the staff, offering the instructors guidance about using participatory theatre within their rehabilitation initiatives, and a series of theatre workshops with the young men that were run over several days. The workshops included a range of theatre games and exercises that encouraged a relaxed and cooperative atmosphere amongst a group of participants aged between 13 and their early twenties. Each day improvisations and devised scenes were developed, leading to a short performance on the final day of the project to all camp residents including staff. I had overall responsibility for the workshops and ran them with one Scottish² and four Sri Lankan colleagues who were all part of the intercommunity Big Circle Applied Theatre network in the country.

Q: Did any incident occur while you were with these others? A: An incident occurred of cutting and chopping.

(Court transcript from survivor, Jaganathan Uttamanathan)

We are concerned with the battles or games between the strong and the weak, and with the ‘actions’ which remain possible for the latter.

(de Certeau, 1984, p. 34)