Introduction

The photograph is a puzzling one. It appears to be taken from high up on a boat, with a calm sea stretching to the background horizon. Two incomplete figures frame the central image. On the left, a man's arm hangs down from a white short-sleeved shirt. On the right, lower down, we see the legs and torso of a man in shorts and a white shirt. In between there is what looks very much like a cage, hanging from cables. In the cage is a small group of obviously Christian clergymen, dressed in white robes. One wears a reddish-purple sash around his waist.

The picture was taken in 1993 at the port of Kankesanthurai (KKS) in Sri Lanka's northern Jaffna peninsula. The photographer was a Dutchman, Ben Bavinck, at the time employed by a consortium of Christian nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in Sri Lanka. This was the midpoint in the long civil war in Sri Lanka, which had started with sporadic skirmishes in and around Jaffna in the late 1970s, and would end with the definitive defeat of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009. Bavinck first came to Sri Lanka in the 1950s, working as a missionary-teacher at Jaffna College. He retired to the Netherlands in 1972, but returned to Sri Lanka in the late 1980s. In his new role as an NGO coordinator, he travelled back and forth across the island, delivering supplies for Christian projects and recording what he saw and heard in a meticulous diary (Bavinck 2011), selections from which have now been edited and translated from the Dutch (a choice of language which Bavinck, quite rightly, thought as good an encryption tool as any). At the point when the picture was taken, Jaffna was almost unreachable by land routes, and those few civilians trying to get in – rather than out – had to negotiate passes and permissions from the defence headquarters in Colombo.

The picture provides a striking visual metaphor for one central argument of this book. It is a picture that combines capacities and constraint, movement and boundaries. Priests are able to travel across the boundaries thrown up by the war, very often with a freedom afforded to almost no other civilians, but their means of travel, at this point at least, is a cage. The cage confines them and allows them to move. This is a book about religion and conflict, and it is a book that explores the paradox that combines capacities and constraints, borders and transgressions. It is a book researched in the last days of a long and brutal war, and written in the first years of what is turning out to be a troubling and unsettled peace. It is written by a group of researchers with their own differing histories and engagements in Sri Lanka.

In 2006, the authors started work together on a project focused on the role of 'religious organisations' in 'the conflict' in Sri Lanka's Eastern Province. This was an area that had suffered some of the worst of the civil war, but it had also been badly hit by the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and by the 'second tsunami' of humanitarian organisations that flooded the coastline, seeking partners and projects to absorb the huge amounts of money raised around the world in response to the disaster (Korf 2005; Stirrat 2006; Korf et al. 2010; McGilvray and Gamburd 2010). Our assumption was that faith-based NGOs, such as World Vision and Islamic Relief would occupy much of our attention in our research, and we assumed that the civil war between the government and the LTTE was the only conflict we would need to consider. Instead we found ourselves concentrating on rather more obvious religious organisations – the temples, mosques and churches of our title – and, in so doing, discovered there was no shortage of conflict within and between religious organisations, conflict which sometimes aligned with the deep currents of the war and ethnic polarisation, but at other times operated at a tangent to them.

Conflict

We start, though, with 'the conflict', the war between the government and the Tamil secessionist LTTE. Sri Lanka is a relatively small island, about 450 km from north to south, and 200 km wide at its broadest. Its population of 20 million is divided by language, religion, and what until recently was routinely referred to as 'race'. The last is now more politely called 'ethnicity'. The population divides relatively neatly on linguistic lines, with Sinhala the first language of just over 70 per cent, and Tamil the first language of nearly all the rest. The oddities of history and politics have combined to pull the classification one way and then another – Tamils are Tamil-speakers, but so too are Muslims, who are not considered 'ethnically' Tamil. Muslims constitute an 'ethnic' category, as well as a 'religious' category; Hindus, though, are a 'religious' group but not an 'ethnic' group. Malays are religiously 'Muslim', but 'ethnically' not Muslim. Almost all Buddhists are Sinhala, but not all Sinhala are Buddhists. Academics have not helped clarify the taxonomic landscape, as they tack back and forth between constructivist arguments, in which everything was invented in the nineteenth century, and primordialist counter-arguments in which all has been as it is now for thousands of years (Spencer 1990a; Rogers 1994).

Much has been written about the war and its causes. Many accounts start with the moment in July 1983 when the LTTE pulled off its most spectacular operation to date, killing 13 government soldiers in an ambush on the edge of Jaffna town. This was immediately followed by retaliatory violence against Tamils and their property in the south of the island. No credible official death toll was ever announced, but it is certain that hundreds, probably thousands, died in the week that followed the Jaffna ambush. It is also now widely agreed that much of the violence was orchestrated by ruling party politicians and carried out by party workers, with the active assistance in some cases of the police and security forces (Manor 1984; Spencer 1990b; Hoole 2001). All was changed. Many Tamil families started to leave the island, joining family and friends in Britain, Australia, the USA and Canada. Young Tamil men, though, slipped away to join the different paramilitary groups fighting the Sri Lankan government. Paramilitary activity quickly spread beyond the immediate surroundings of Jaffna town, to Tamil-speaking areas along the east coast. By 1984, what had been a geographically contained situation was now something very like a war, with an embattled state confronting increasingly organised and disciplined resistance across a wide stretch of the north and east.

The 1983 narrative provides a conveniently clear chronology for the war, a...