The annihilation of an ethnic or national group is inevitably accompanied by rape, sexual humiliation, disappearances, mass murder, and torture. Victims’ suffering is acute, and survivors’ trauma lasts generations. Few crimes are more shocking or abhorrent. But if we are to eradicate these injustices and help survivors rebuild their lives and their societies, genocide needs to be examined not in terms of individual evil but in terms of the historical and structural evil of colonization.

Ben Hillier’s Losing Santhia, which details the Tamil national struggle in Sri Lanka, explores this colonial backstory and the deeply personal stories entwined with genocide. Santhia was a leading member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). She joined when she was a teenager, like thousands of other Tamils born in the 1970s and 1980s. Santhia’s short life (she died in 2017 at the age of forty-two, a refugee stranded in Indonesia) has a direct link with the colonialism that divided the island between its two main linguistic-national groups. The Sinhalese, who are predominantly Buddhist, make up about 75 percent of the population, while the Tamils, predominantly Hindu, make up about 15 percent. Muslims and Christians comprise most of the remaining 10 percent.

Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was known prior to 1972) suffered almost three centuries of colonial domination at the hands of Portugal and the Netherlands. Yet it was the British who sowed the seeds of the disaster to come. Unlike their predecessors, the British Empire took control of the whole island beginning in 1796. In order to formally unify Ceylon, they divided its inhabitants along national, linguistic, and religious lines — laying the basis for Sri Lanka’s eventual metamorphosis into an exclusivist, chauvinist Sinhala-Buddhist state.