Do tigers confess? : an interdisciplinary study of confessionary evidence in counter-terrorism measures of Sri Lanka

For over three decades, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fought a gruesome war for independent statehood against the majoritarian Sinhalese Government of Sri Lanka. While confronting the Tigers on the battleground, the government also pursued a legal war against the LTTE by enacting its counter-terrorism laws. These laws permitted indefinite detention and the use of confessions as sole evidence. Armed with these laws, the Sinhalese Government boasted the prosecution of thousands of Tamil Tigers on the basis of their confessions. The Tigers countered by protecting their secrets through the adoption of their suicide strategy - consuming cyanide capsules to prevent being captured alive. Examining the conflicting official narratives from both sides of the war, this research explores the confessions of Tamil Tigers within the broader discourses of terrorism and counter-terrorism. The thesis positions the counter-terrorism regime of Sri Lanka as a postcolonial instance of the 'state of exception' (as theorised by Giorgio Agamben) in order to grasp the broader causes and consequences of such extraordinary measures. In doing so, it takes the wider aspects of the conflict into account and explores its historical, political, military and cultural ramifications. The research questions I examine in this process are: What attributes of the Tigers' military subculture support or dispute the fact that Tigers have confessed en masse? Can the authenticity of these confessions be determined by linguistic and narrative analysis methods? How have the state's agents enforced the counter-terrorism measures among the suspect population, and how do such measures impact on individual suspects? What are the possibilities and limits of a fair hearing for Tigers from the judiciary in Sri Lanka? Recognising the polysemic aspects of the law, truth and justice, the thesis probes the narratives of the two key players in this conflict - the terrorist and the state - within an interdisciplinary context, encompassing multiple fields: jurisprudence, human rights, criminology, history, ethnic studies, terrorism studies and narrative analysis. In sum, the scope of this thesis goes beyond legalistic analysis and encompasses a range of themes: the hegemonic authority of the state, the martyrdom of the terrorist, the linguistic elements of evidence, the discipline and the punishment of the enemy, and the administration of justice