Abstract
Even though the civil war in Sri Lanka officially ended in 2009, the hardship created by war is long-lasting and will take years to reconcile. This research is about the impact of war politics on women of Tamil community in the Ampara district of Sri Lanka during the period of armed conflict. The findings of this study reveal that the girls of the Tamil community were forcefully recruited to join the Tamil militant groups. Hence, parents found the only way to rescue their children and to assure their existence was to arrange teenage marriages. Most of those marriages were not legally registered. This paved the way for the male partners to abandon their spouses, often with children. The women whose children were forcefully recruited to militant forces and whose life was lost in the battle filed were given the dignity of ‘Veera Thai’ (Heroine Mother) with an allowance as gratitude for bearing such a war hero. However, it was revealed the title itself had resulted in many types of hardships. The government also deliberately denied any public assistance to those families. The study has found that the women in the numerically weakest groups during war time, irrespective of age difference, had undergone many and varied hardship. The study further has identified that the hardship experienced by these women continued even in the post-civil war context. Therefore, the study urges that these types of hardship faced by women in the post-war context need to be handled with political sensitivity to the equity and justice for women.
Highlights
Women play key roles in economic, social and family life
This research is about the impact of war politics on women of Tamil community in the Ampara district of Sri Lanka during the period of armed conflict
This study is about the hardship faced by the women of minority Tamil community during the time of war and their continuity after the ending of the civil war with a particular focus on Ampara district in the Eastern province of Sri Lanka
Summary
Women play key roles in economic, social and family life. they are the most vulnerable victims of any kind of social and economic issues including ethnic conflict and civil war and the related impact. The voluminous literature on Sri Lankan civil war has only made passing remarks on the hardship faced by women during the war time and the continuity of hardship after the end of civil war. They have failed to deeply analyze ad understand the nature and dynamics of hardship faced by the women in war context. This implies that there is no adequate study of this dimension of the impact of war—war hardship faced by women—in Sri Lankan context. The major thrust of this study was to fill the above gap in the literature
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