A small child and a woman sit next to LTTE cadres training in a public playground in Kilinochchi, a district in the Northern Province, in this picture taken in June 2004. The Tigers held sway over all aspects of life in areas they controlled until their defeat in 2009. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
VAVUNIYA, Sri Lanka, Feb 3 2015 (IPS)

In four months’ time, Sri Lanka will mark the sixth anniversary of the end of its bloody civil conflict. Ever since government armed forces declared victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) on May 19, 2009, the country has savored peace after a generation of war.

Suffocating security measures have given way to a sense of normalcy in most parts of the country, while steady growth has replaced patchy economic progress – averaging above six percent since 2009.

But these changes have largely eluded the area where the war was at its worst: the Vanni, a vast swath of land in the Northern Province that the LTTE ruled as a de facto state, together with the Jaffna Peninsular, for over a quarter of a century.

Home to over a million people, one-fourth of whom are war returnees, the Vanni has been in the doldrums since ballots replaced bullets.

“Peace should mean prosperity, but that is what we don’t have. What we have is a struggle to survive from one day to another,” Kajitha Shanmugadasan, an 18-year-old girl from the northern town of Pooneryn, told IPS.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Many in the Vanni struggle due to a combination of poverty, war-related injuries and untreated trauma. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
VAVUNIYA, Sri Lanka , Jan 20 2015 (IPS)

In four months’ time, Sri Lanka will mark the sixth anniversary of the end of its bloody civil conflict. Ever since government armed forces declared victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) on May 19, 2009, the country has savored peace after a generation of war.

Suffocating security measures have given way to a sense of normalcy in most parts of the country, while steady growth has replaced patchy economic progress – averaging above six percent since 2009.

But these changes have largely eluded the area where the war was at its worst: the Vanni, a vast swath of land in the Northern Province that the LTTE ruled as a de facto state, together with the Jaffna Peninsular, for over a quarter of a century.

Home to over a million people, one-fourth of whom are war returnees, the Vanni has been in the doldrums since ballots replaced bullets.

“Peace should mean prosperity, but that is what we don’t have. What we have is a struggle to survive from one day to another,” Kajitha Shanmugadasan, an 18-year-old girl from the northern town of Pooneryn, told IPS.

She said youth her age were frustrated that multi-billion dollar infrastructure projects have failed to deliver decent jobs. “Look around, we have new highways, new railway lines, but no jobs, for five years people have been suffering, and it should not be [so] when there is peace,” she asserted.

Youth from the Northern Province have historically performed well at national exams, even during conflict times. That trend has held true: at the 2013 university entrance exam, 63.8 percent of those who sat their papers gained the scores required to enter the country’s top universities, a national high.

But with unemployment also at record levels here, and hardly any jobs for university graduates, those like Shanmugadasan are either staying out of universities or leaving the province in search of better prospects.

A new government, the result of presidential elections just a week into the New Year, and the Papal visit to the heart of the former battle zone on Jan. 14, have given rise to new hopes in the Vanni that life will improve for the ordinary people, who suffered during the war and have had little respite since the guns fell silent.

The 72-percent voter turnout in the Northern Province at the Jan. 8 presidential poll – an all-time high for the region – is a reminder to the new regime how desperate the people here are for real change.

During Sri Lanka’s civil conflict, life in the war zone was dominated by the fighting. Thousands of youth either joined the Tigers or were conscripted into their units. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

A small child and a woman sit next to LTTE cadres training in a public playground in Kilinochchi, a district in the Northern Province, in this picture taken in June 2004. The Tigers held sway over all aspects of life in areas they controlled until their defeat in 2009. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Now, young people have more freedom than they did under the Tigers, but many are frustrated by the lack of proper employment opportunities six years after being promised a peace dividend by the government in Colombo. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

A youth who lost his leg during the conflict stands by his vegetable stall in the town of Mullaitivu in northern Sri Lanka. He has a small family to look after and says he finds it extremely hard to provide for them. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

A quarter of a million people who were displaced during the last phase of the war, along with tens of thousands of others who fled at other stages of the conflict, have moved back to the Vanni. Many families with small children continue to live in slum-like conditions, as a funding shortfall has left many without proper houses. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Women have been forced to take up the role of breadwinner, with aid agencies suggesting that single females – either widows or women whose partners went missing during the war – now head over 40,000 households in the province. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

A woman stands in front of this small business she operates in Mullaitivu. The single mother was able to open the shop with the help of a grant she received from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

The war left tens of thousands disabled, but six years on there are hardly any programmes or facilities that cater to this community. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

This man, a former member of the LTTE who was blinded in one eye during the war, bicycles over 20 km each day in search of work. A father of one, he has found it hard to adjust to post-war life. Credit: Amantha Perer/IPS

Other former Tigers, like this rehabilitated cadre-turned-barber, were fortunate to benefit from government-sponsored aid programmes. Here, the one-time militant attends to a client at his barber’s shop in the village of Mallavi in Sri Lanka’s north. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Many in the Vanni struggle due to a combination of poverty, war-related injuries and untreated trauma. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

The immediate aftermath of the war saw thousands of tourists flocking to the region, gawking at the remnants of a bloody past. Their numbers have since dwindled and a war tourist trail now remains mostly deserted. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

The election of a new president and the visit of Pope Francis to the former war zone – two monumental events coming within five days of each other in early January – have raised hopes in the north that real, lasting change is close at hand. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Devotees pray to the 500-year-old statue of the Virgin Mary as it is paraded around the Madhu Church during the annual festival. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
MADHU, Sri Lanka, Oct 27 2014 (IPS)

Rising out of a thick forest about 17 km from the nearest main road, the Madhu Church is a symbol of spiritual harmony and tranquility. When the wind blows you hear the leaves rustle. Other times a solemn silence hangs in the air. Old-timers say that once, almost an entire generation ago, the grass grew six feet high in the church compound, and elephants wandered through it.

Located some 300 km by road from Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo, this place is the most venerated Catholic shrine in the country, home to a 500-year-old statue of the Virgin Mary that millions of faithful people believe to be miraculous.

But the peaceful hush that surrounds this holy place is likely to be broken in the months to come.

“[Our Lady of Madhu] has survived so much for so long and is still with us, protecting us, keeping us safe." -- Benedict Fernando, a pilgrim from the coastal town of Negombo
Heavy construction work takes place round-the-clock here, as efforts to rebuild the side chapel of the Sacred Heart slowly bear fruit. It was severely damaged during a shelling incident in 2008 that, according to some priests, killed over three-dozen people who were seeking shelter, and left 60 injured.

New residential quarters are also underway and about four km from the church a new helipad is being planned. All this for the scheduled visit by Pope Francis set to take place during the second week of January 2015.

“It is a blessing from God, people not only here but all over the island are waiting to see him and hear him at this Church,” said Rev. S. Emilianuspillai, the administrator of the shrine.

The papal visit will be the crowning moment for the church and the relic enshrined within that survived some of the most turbulent and violent years of Sri Lanka’s modern history.

The administrator told IPS that despite some reports that the visit could be cancelled due to impending presidential elections, preparations were going ahead.

Located in the northwestern Mannar District, the church was within the war zone for much of Sri Lanka’s three-decade-long conflict. When heavy fighting engulfed the church compound in April 2008, it had been under the control of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) for over a decade. The war ended a year later with the defeat of the Tigers by government forces.

Emilianuspillai still recalls those harrowing days six-and-a-half years ago when he and 16 others were trapped within the church as shells exploded all around. By 6.30 pm on Apr. 3, 2008, a decision was made to move the statue to a safer place. It was a journey fraught with danger, Emilianuspillai, said. Just a mile into the trip a shell fell right in front of the vehicle containing the relic, which the priest had cradled to his own body for safekeeping. “Absolutely nothing happened to it, or us,” he said.

Worshippers gather near the damaged chapel of the Sacred Heart in August 2009, just three months after the war’s end. Credit: Courtesy Amantha Perera

Little less than a year-and-a-half later, in August 2009, the same church compound was filled with over half a million worshippers for the first annual post-conflict feast, all seeking the blessings of their beloved Mother of Madhu.

Devotees revere the statue as a symbol of unity and peace, bringing together Tamils and Sinhalese, as well as Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, all of whom would mingle during the massive annual feasts.

In the early days of Sri Lanka’s conflict, Madhu was also one of the largest refuges for those fleeing the fighting.

“[Our Lady of Madhu] has survived so much for so long and is still with us, protecting us, keeping us safe,” Benedict Fernando, a pilgrim from the coastal town of Negombo, about 250 km south of Madhu, told IPS.

Praying for reconciliation

Tamils living in the Northern Province also hope that the papal visit will shed light on burning post-war issues that have remained unresolved. The region is one of the poorest in the country with poverty levels sometimes thrice the national average of 6.7 percent. It has also been hit hard by an 11-month drought and losses to the vital agriculture sector. This despite the injection of over six billion dollars worth of government funds since 2009.

“There is a lot more work to be done,” Sellamuththu Sirinivasan, the additional government agent for the northern Kilinochchi District, told IPS.

Other lingering issues include the over 40,000 female-headed families in the Northern Province, struggling to make ends meet in a traditionally male-dominated society.

With assistance from the U.N. and other agencies slowing to a trickle, such vulnerable groups have been left to fend for themselves.

“The economic situation has stagnated despite the large investments in infrastructure. In such an environment, even able-bodied and qualified men and women find it hard to gain employment. These single women with families are really vulnerable [to] exploitation,” Saroja Sivachandran, who heads the Centre for Women and Development in northern Jaffna, told IPS.

Then there are those who went missing during the war.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has just begun the first countrywide survey of the families of the war missing. The survey and its recommendations are to be handed over to the government sometime in mid-2015. But there is still confusion over the number of missing, which some have put as high as 40,000. The ICRC says that it has recorded over 16,000 cases of missing persons since the 1990s.

“The war has ended, but the battles continue for us,” said Dominic Stanislaus, a young man from the town of Mankulam, about 60 km north.

On first glance, the Vanni, the popular name for the northern provinces, seems generations removed from the war years. Glistening new highways have replaced barely navigable roads marked by crater-sized potholes left by shells. A new rail line linking northern Jaffna to the rest of the country after a lapse of a quarter of a century was inaugurated earlier this month.

But burning questions about when the missing will return home, or where the next meal will come from, remain unanswered.

Many, like Stanislaus and Fernando, pray that the papal visit will hasten the healing process. In the meantime, the Madhu Church will continue to bring hope to thousands who still live with the wounds of war.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

It has been four years since the guns fell silent in Sri Lanka’s northern Vanni region, after almost three decades of ethnic violence. Unfortunately peace does not mean the end of hardship for the most vulnerable people here: the women.

Kugamathi Kulasekeran, from the village of Allankulam in northern Sri Lanka, is taking care of three boys, while looking for one missing child. Her husband went missing during the war. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

In general, life has improved for the Northern Province’s 1.2 million inhabitants. Of these, 467,000 are newly returned war displaced, most of whom fled the last bouts of fighting between the government’s armed forces and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) from 2008 to 2009.

Central Bank Governor Ajith Nivard Cabraal frequently mentions that the previously underdeveloped Northern and Eastern Provinces have been recording double-digit growth rates since the war’s end: in 2010 and 2011, the economy of the Northern Province grew at 21 percent and 27 percent respectively, outstripping national growth rates by leagues.

But on closer inspection, it is clear that not everyone is benefiting from this growth, least of all the 40,000 families that now have single mothers at the helm. Their husbands or partners left dead or missing during the conflict, these women have now become the sole breadwinners of their households.

Researchers and experts say that two main obstacles hamper women’s attempts to reap post-war economic benefits – a development effort that is skewed towards males, and a deeply entrenched patriarchal social structure.

“In spite of their number, female heads of households are marginalised both by the government and their own communities in the north,” said Raksha Vasudevan, author of a recent study on female-headed households published by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Development Studies.

“They are clearly discriminated against in hiring for most jobs, even though they are willing to work in non-traditional roles and also face more difficulties than men in accessing credit,” Vasudevan told IPS.

IPS interviewed several women in the north who said they were willing to work in garment factories, in hotels, or even on construction sites but employers do not seem keen to let women into the workforce.

According to the 2012 Labour Force Survey conducted by the department of census and statistics, the female unemployment rate of 13 percent was six times higher than the male unemployment rate, which stood at two percent in the same time period.

"It is high time the financial sector and other sectors of the economy tap into the…womanpower in the labour force." -- Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, head of the Point Pedro Institute of Development
Cabraal says the years following the war’s end have seen the investment of three to four billion dollars in the north, which formed part of the LTTE’s de facto separate state for the country’s minority Tamil population and thus was left out of national development assistance for over two decades.

The bulk of that money, Cabraal told IPS, has gone into the development of infrastructure like roads, highways, electricity, housing and water projects.

According to Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, head of the Point Pedro Institute of Development based in northern Jaffna, a close glance at the sectors that are booming in the north illustrates why women still complain about the lack of jobs.

The fastest growing sectors in the north in the last two years have been banking and real estate, each expanding by 114 percent; transport has been growing at a rate of 69 percent, construction at 56 percent, fisheries at 78 percent, and hotels and restaurants at 65 percent.

All of those sectors, with no exceptions, are dominated by men.

“It is high time the financial sector and other sectors of the economy tap into the…womanpower in the labour force,” Sarvananthan told IPS.

Many women here said they are eyeing cottage industries like poultry, home gardening and sewing, which they feel have a ready-made market – but they lack the necessary start-up capital to make these small ventures pay.

Even the few women who are able to find work remain trapped by a culture steeped in patriarchal attitudes and behaviours. It is particularly tough for widows, or women whose husbands are missing, to seek non-traditional forms of employment outside “acceptable” positions as schoolteachers, or government clerks.

“The women I interviewed reported feeling ashamed, and fear of being ‘gossiped’ about when they moved around on their own,” said Vasudevan. “Any hint of interacting with non-related males could lead to being ostracised by their communities.”

Women in charge of their families’ welfare, who are forced to interact with male employers or buyers of their produce, thus find themselves hit by the double whammy of poverty and social exclusion.

Savithri, a widow with two young kids aged three and six, has begun to plant vegetables in her small garden in the northern town of Kilinochchi, but says that selling her produce is proving difficult.

“The buyers are all men, they try to bully me and get a cheaper price,” she told IPS.

Savithri said most buyers were keenly aware of her economic distress and would wait until the last possible moment, “just before my harvest was worthless”, to confirm purchases and therefore secure the lowest possible price.

No matter how trying her work gets she knows she must keep it at if she wants to keep sending her children to school.

Soldier or housewife?

During the war, the LTTE developed a strong female cadre contingent, including fighting formations. Women were expected to take up arms for the cause, shattering the old stereotypes of women as fragile creatures, in need of protection and best suited to sitting at home.

But that status accorded to female LTTE cadre did not extend to civilian women, who remained fixed in their role as mother-wife-housekeeper.

Loyalty to one’s husband was of the utmost importance in upholding social relations, a mindset that has travelled down through the war years into peacetime.

Now, “even though remarriage could be an emotionally and financially sensible option for many women, the heavy stigma attached to the idea in Tamil society prevents them from even considering it,” Vasudevan said.

Saroja Sivachandaran, who heads the Jaffna-based Centre for Women and Development, told IPS that post-war assistance programmes targeting single women have not taken off in the north.

“With donor funding now drying out, these women find themselves in even more precarious situations,” she said, referring to the fact that the U.N.-Government of Sri Lanka Joint Plan of Assistance for 2012 was underfunded by 77 percent, having received only 33 million of a desired 147 million dollars.

The lack of proper housing coupled with economic insecurity has created a highly precarious situation for women.

“With many still lacking homes with locking doors, they feel very exposed to attack at any moment,” Vasudevan said.

However, officials in the region told IPS that there were no reports of such incidents, adding that the government is doing all it can to ease the burden on female-headed households.

Rupavathi Keetheswaran, the top public official in the northern Kilinochchi District, told IPS that single women with families have been targeted for livelihood programmes, including credit for home gardening, self-employment and the distribution of cattle.

"War or no war, it is still a man's world out there,” says war widow Rajina Mary from Sri Lanka's northern Kilinochchi District. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
DHARAN, Nepal, Dec 13 2012 (IPS)

Sita Tamang’s husband went missing sometime in 2004, two years before Nepal’s civil war came to an end. A native of Dharan, a town about 600 kilometres southeast of Kathmandu, Tamang waited seven years after his disappearance before she tried to claim compensation offered by the government after a 2006 peace deal ended this country’s bloodshed.

When she finally managed to get hold of government officials in Dharan overseeing compensation procedures, she was met with the thorny request that she “prove” her marriage to the father of her three children, whom she had lived with for a decade and a half.

As was customary, Tamang and her husband had gone through the traditional marriage ceremony but had not obtained any civil documents.

In addition to taking care of her three children, including two daughters, Tamang was saddled with the added burden of seeking the required paperwork before even beginning the bureaucratic process of securing compensation.

“That is the way things are here,” she told IPS simply. “Women will always have it a bit hard.”

Thousands of miles away, in northern Sri Lanka, Rajina Mary, a 38-year-old war widow with four children, ran into similar hurdles when she began constructing a new house with assistance from the Sri Lanka Red Cross in late 2010, about a year and a half after this country’s civil war ended.

“The labourers would not take orders or instructions from me because I was a woman. They are used to taking orders from men,” Mary told IPS, standing in front her house in the village of Selvanagar in the northern Kilinochchi district, deep in the former war zone.

When the workmen refused to follow her instructions, Mary and her children were forced to take over the construction themselves, digging most of the foundation and carrying hundreds of bricks and cement sacks.

“It was cheaper for us. But that is the way things are here, it is a very male-dominated society,” Mary said, echoing Tamang’s words.

Aid workers, counsellors and experts working in post-conflict regions in the two South Asian countries say the patriarchal nature of rural societies makes them unenviable locations for widows or female heads of households.

A woman remains pensive during a support group meeting for families of missing persons in the southeastern Nepali town of Biratnagar Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS.

“There is a lot of anxiety, a lot of depression. Most of these women live in isolation without anyone to talk to, even when they live among family,” Srijana Bhandari, a counsellor with the Women’s Rehabilitation Centre (WOREC) working in Dharan, told IPS.

After her husband disappeared in 2004, one woman struggled for seven years to send her son to school and seek assistance for her young daughter’s epileptic condition. It was only in November 2011, when WOREC began talking to her, that she finally opened up about the many challenges confronting women suddenly left to fend for themselves and their families.

Now, thanks to the advocacy group’s intervention, her son has a scholarship at the village school and she receives a monthly medical stipend for her daughter.

“Before we spoke with her, she was finding it really hard, there was no one to help her, some members of her family even looked at her as a burden,” Kamal Koirala, WOREC’s programme coordinator, told IPS.

Even on the rare occasions when women find new marriage prospects, they come under enormous pressure – ironically from their female in-laws – to reject the offer. As a result, many women end up eloping, leaving their children behind, WOREC officials said.

Koirala told IPS that women rarely, if ever, open up about pressure brought on them to turn to sex work, but said aid workers have strong suspicions that the practice is widespread.

The situation is not much different in Sri Lanka according to Saroja Sivachandran, who heads the Centre for Women and Development, a non-governmental organisation working on gender issues in the country’s northern Jaffna peninsula.

Despite a three-decade-long conflict in which many females fought alongside their male counterparts, especially among the ranks of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), northern Tamil society is still steeped in patriarchal values, Sivachandran told IPS.

“The problem is that now, single women or female heads of households – and there are thousands of them – have to compete with males for everything from jobs to housing assistance,” she said.

In both countries, scores of women were left to navigate the post-war landscape after the fighting ended.

The Nepali Red Cross lists 1401 persons as still missing, six years after the conflict ended. Officials say at least 90 percent of the families left behind are now headed by women, 80 percent of whom are mothers.

In Sri Lanka, the United Nations estimates that around 30,000 of the 110,000 families that have returned to the former war zone in the northern province are headed by women.

In 2010, the World Bank found that two-thirds of the participants in a cash for work programme worth 5.5 million dollars were women.

In fact, programme managers made special allowances for the women by offering more flexible working hours. The programme also paid elders who looked after children while their mothers or caregivers took part in the work scheme.

But the women who are faced with rebuilding their lives after decades of war, while also dealing with the suffocating customs and traditions of male dominance that date back generations, say there is very little chance of things changing.

“It was like this even during the fighting, why should it change when there is no fighting?” Mary asked.

(END)