The Memory of a State: What Sri Lanka Keeps Forgetting

Analysis & Commentary

By Alfie Ameer
Principal Consultant & CEO, Vonfidel Group | Chair, VONFIDEL K9 & Vonfidel Ranch

In project management, we speak of organizational process assets and institutional memory — the accumulated knowledge, lessons, and embedded practices that prevent an organization from repeating its most damaging mistakes.

Nation-states are no different. Or at least, they should not be.

Sri Lanka’s tragedy is not merely that it has suffered repeated national shocks. It is that it behaves, almost every time, as though it is the first time. Emotional memory is activated. Structural memory is not.

Outrage is cyclical.
Reform is temporary.
Forgetting is systemic.

And a state that does not remember accurately cannot correct itself intelligently.

A Pattern of “First-Time” Disasters

If we step back and examine only structure — not emotion — a clear pattern emerges:

• The 1971 JVP insurrection — a foundational warning about internal security, intelligence fusion, and early intervention.
• The 1987–89 JVP insurgency/second insurrection — demonstrating the cost of delayed political resolution and security–intelligence misalignment.
• The Eelam War (1983–2009) — a sustained armed separatist insurgency demanding long-term intelligence doctrine, counter-insurgency governance, and civil–military integration.
• The 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami — a once-in-a-century natural disaster that should have permanently reshaped disaster preparedness, coastal zoning, emergency communications, and inter-agency command.
• The 2019 Easter Attacks — a failure not of intelligence collection, but of intelligence governance, prioritization, and executive trust.
• The economic collapse and financial shocks — fuel and gas queues, currency shock, banking fragility, food insecurity, and mass social destabilization.

Each of these events should have permanently altered how the Sri Lankan state thinks, decides, and prepares.

Instead, each was treated as an exception. A tragedy. A storm we “got through.”

That is the core failure of institutional memory in Sri Lanka: events are archived emotionally, not structurally.

What Institutional Memory Actually Means

Institutional memory is not nostalgia. It is not memorial days. It is not anniversary speeches.

True institutional memory exists only when failure is embedded into structure so tightly that repetition becomes difficult.

It lives inside:

• Law — what is enforced, constrained, and irreversible.
• Doctrine — how institutions interpret threat, authority, and escalation.
• Standard operating procedures — who acts, when, and with what autonomy.
• Leadership selection — who is promoted and for what kind of performance.
• Oversight architecture — who monitors power, and with what independence.

A state that truly remembers makes certain failures expensive to repeat. Sri Lanka has made them politically inexpensive.

We investigate. We issue reports. We convene commissions. We speak in measured tones. And then, quietly, the system resets itself.

Memory that does not alter design becomes theatre.

When Competence Becomes Inconvenient

There is another structural truth rarely acknowledged openly.

Sri Lanka has never lacked individual excellence:

• Officers who detect threat vectors early.
• Analysts who connect fragmented signals.
• Professionals who warn clearly and persistently.

What it has consistently lacked is a system that protects and amplifies them.

Across different crises, the same pattern appears:

• Early warnings are raised.
• They clash with political narratives or institutional comfort.
• The officers involved are rotated, isolated, administratively neutralised, or absorbed into foreign training loops at precisely the moment their operational role should intensify.

Regardless of motive, the structural consequence is always the same:

Competence becomes disruptive to institutional equilibrium.

When excellence unsettles comfort, institutions choose comfort.

At that point, the system no longer optimises for foresight. It optimises for continuity.

Why Sri Lanka Keeps Forgetting

Three structural drivers sustain this amnesia:

1. Failure Is Personalised Instead of Systematised

Crises are framed around a few individuals. Removals provide emotional closure. Systems remain untouched.

2. Silence Is Mistaken for Stability

Normalcy is confused with recovery. The political desire to “move on” precedes real correction.

Silence after failure is not healing. It is latency.

3. Obedience Is Safer Than Accuracy

Dissent is socially and professionally costly. Institutional conformity becomes the survival mechanism.

Over time, organisations learn not how to remember — but how to not see.

The Psychological Cost of Institutional Amnesia

This does more than repeat crises. It reshapes national psychology.

It produces:

• Citizen desensitisation
• Expert withdrawal
• Public cynicism
• Reform fatigue
• Normalisation of failure

At that point, collapse is no longer shocking. It becomes expected.

This is not simply governance decay. It is cognitive decay at the national level.

Data Is Not Memory

Sri Lanka is rich in data:

• Commission reports
• Audit findings
• Parliamentary records
• Intelligence post-mortems

But data does not become memory unless it transforms power relations.

For data to become memory, it must be:

• Legally binding
• Institutionally owned
• Politically protected
• Operationally rehearsed
• Independently audited

Without these, reports become ritual documents of non-change.

What Mature States Do Differently

Mature states:

• Lock failure into statutory reform
• Insulate intelligence governance from political interference
• Rehearse crisis continuously
• Create permanent independent review bodies
• Treat competence as national infrastructure

Sri Lanka performs these episodically — not structurally.

The Question We Avoid

The essential question after each crisis is not:

Who failed?

It is:

What system allowed this failure to recur?

And the more uncomfortable extension:

Who benefits from that system remaining unchanged?

Trust Is Not Restored by Speeches

Trust collapses not when a crisis occurs — but when the same category of crisis keeps occurring.

Sri Lankans are not angry because the state failed once. They are exhausted because it fails in identical patterns.

Predictable failure is the signature of a state that does not learn.

A Take-Home for the Ordinary Citizen

You do not need to be a policymaker or an academic to understand this:

• If a country encounters the same types of crises,
• Promises reform each time,
• Yet preserves the same structures —

Then the issue is not misfortune. It is structural forgetting by design.

The Way Forward: Building Memory Architecture

Sri Lanka does not suffer from a shortage of intelligence, expertise, or diagnosis. It suffers from a shortage of institutional courage to embed memory into power.

True reform would mean:

• Designing institutions that remember by force of law
• Shielding early-warning professionals
• Making preventable failure expensive
• Making prevention prestigious
• Teaching leaders that continuity of learning is the highest form of patriotism

A state without memory is not cursed by fate. It is constrained by its own design.

Design can be changed. But only if the nation chooses to remember correctly — and structurally.