The moral panic of the grease devil revealed popular-and ongoing-anxieties in post-war Sri Lanka. Eventually, the government felt compelled to respond: “The Grease Devil is not real,” they admonished, in a statement broadcast over a striking image purported to capture one such figure, who bared blood-reddened teeth set in a face painted white. Government officials dismissed complaints, while the Secretary of Defence joked that the grease devil might be the ghost of the Tamil Tigers’ dead leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran. Police spokesmen denied the existence of grease devils at community meetings and in media appearances. The suspects were met with vigilante violence, and were occasionally seen running into army camps or police stations for shelter. Stories of the assaults circulated through local rumor and newspaper articles but when no officials intervened, many accused the devils of being government soldiers, or at least protected by security forces. In August 2011, two years after the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka, villages throughout the country were haunted by “grease devils”-men who were once known as petty thieves, but now assaulted women and killed indiscriminately, their bodies smeared with oil to escape capture. Sri Lanka is a country haunted by demons and specters.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |