Abstract:
This critique argues that the intervention of military in land utilization and recreational
tourism in the Northern and Eastern provinces of Sri Lanka was instigated by markerdriven geo-political negligence. It discovers that the nature of the introduction of postcatastrophic tourism (Zizek, 2014) has been affected by profound non-articulation
of political significance to the traumatic historical memory of the inhabitants who
were affected, which has resulted in generating a degree of dark tourism in the area
concerned. The southern invasions in the form of usual pilgrims which ‘combined
battlefield and leisure tourism practices’ (Pieris, 2014: 266) has characterized ‘the
presentation and the consumption of real and commoditized death and disaster area’
(Foley and Lennon, 1996: 198) which has originated in consequences of a long term
conflict. Correspondingly, the apparent mass tourism promotion by the government
between 2009 and 2014 too has significantly disregarded the definitive symbolic
principle of ‘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. The study observes that serious memories and sensitivities of the thirty
years of the war-affected community have not been paid attention to and has caused
dangerous humanitarian negligence in a wider political sense. While the function of
tourism at present as an agent of development in improving the living condition of
the community seems evidently true in this context, the trivialization of the symbolic
significance of a historical memory and 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.
