Building hope in the wake of war – Sri Lanka’s War Widows

By Paul Jeffrey

Published by response magazine in July 2019.

When an artillery shell fell on her home in northern Sri Lanka in 2009, Sathiyaruban Tharskika’s world changed. Her husband was killed in the explosion. She and her two children were injured. A decade later, she still walks with a limp on a badly scarred leg. Pieces of ordnance remain embedded in her skull; doctors say it’s too dangerous to try to remove them.

As the sole breadwinner for herself and her two children, Sathiyaruban found a job at a cooperative restaurant, but what she earns isn’t enough to pay the school fees for both her children. So she sent her daughter off to a boarding school run by a Sri Lankan charity; education there is free for war orphans. Her son remains with her.

“We’re not living well but we’re surviving,” she said. It’s a common refrain from war widows in Sri Lanka’s conflict-torn north. “If I had more income I could insure that my kids get a good education and then a good job. That’s all I care about.”

As if the economic challenges weren’t enough, war widows like Sathiyaruban suffer daily discrimination and harassment in their communities.

“Men look at us differently because we’re alone. Many men try to take advantage of us, in our homes or in public places or transport. And if I even talk with another man, people will think I am a bad woman,” she said.

Sathiyaruban has found strength in a women’s group supported by the local Methodist Church.

“We share our problems and challenges, and we help each other,” she said. “We identify what problems are shared, and which are personal. We discuss what we can change, and what we have to live with. There are many widows here, and they struggle to find ways to live. I want to live, too.”

Imperial legacy: lasting division

Sri Lanka gained its independence from Great Britain in 1948, but the empire’s divide and conquer strategy left behind deep rifts between the largely Buddhist Sinhalese majority, which assumed power with independence, and the Tamil minority in the country’s north and east. Tamils, who are mostly Hindus but include a significant number of Christians, faced official discrimination in employment and education, and new laws made Sinhala–which few Tamils spoke–the official language. In response to nonviolent Tamil protests, government-sanctioned attacks were launched on Tamil communities. One anti-Tamil pogrom in 1958 killed several hundred people.

In response, a series of armed Tamil nationalist groups emerged, including the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (commonly known as the LTTE or the Tamil Tigers). Its 1983 killing of 13 Sri Lankan soldiers led to the worst anti-Tamil riots in the country’s history, with as many as 3,000 Tamils massacred in just one week. Tens of thousands of Tamils fled to the northeast, and the ranks of the LTTE swelled.

Over the next quarter-century, the LTTE became a brutal insurgent force, conscripting child soldiers and sending suicide bombers against civilian targets. It challenged caste restrictions and encouraged women to fight as equals, yet brooked no dissent within the Tamil community. In 1990, it expelled some 70,000 Muslims from the north of the country. Firmly in control, the LTTE constructed a functioning state in the north, with its own banks, police, civil service, and armed forces.

In late 2008, however, the Sri Lankan government launched a brutal final offensive. As the Tigers retreated in disarray, the government declared the first of a series of what it called “no-fire zones,” into which it encouraged as many as 400,000 Tamil civilians to gather for their own safety. But instead of protecting these no-fire zones, government forces relentlessly shelled them, all the while claiming a policy of “zero civilian casualties.”

The war ended in May 2009, but at a terrible price. Between 40,000 and 70,000 civilians were killed during the final months of fighting, according to United Nations estimates. The government denied any wrongdoing, but persistent demands for justice from the international community–and from Tamils themselves, particularly conflict-affected women–finally forced the government to agree in 2015 to a series of measures, including a truth and reconciliation commission, and a concerted effort to clarify what happened to thousands of men who remained missing. Yet the Sri Lankan government has failed to implement most of these promises, stoking further anger among Tamils and encouraging the resurgence of less accommodating and more conservative forms of Tamil nationalism.

“Day by day we lose our dignity. In our culture, we have to have husbands because we depend on them. But we lost our husbands in the last battle of the Civil War. If we get married again, people will criticize us, call us immoral women. But many of the women in our group don’t even know for sure what happened to their husbands. They’ve spent the last decade waiting for their husbands to somehow return,” said M. Thurkka, a widow who participates in a church-sponsored group in Kilinochchi.

“Every year on the anniversary of the last battle there is a day of remembrance throughout the region. But this means little for us when our children are out on the roads begging because we don’t have enough food for them. They can’t go to school because they don’t have the proper uniform. And if they do go to school, they may sit next to a child who still has a father, and if they talk about him, the orphan child may get bitter.”

Krishnan Theivanai is a 64-year old Methodist woman whose husband and oldest son were killed in the war’s final moments.

“Every year the government sends people around asking questions about widows,” she said. “And they make big claims about how they support us. But I never get anything from the government. And how can I forgive them? If my husband and son were alive today I would be a normal person, just living my life. But they aren’t alive. So why should I forgive them?”

Other factors make life difficult for Tamil women. Indiscriminate logging in country’s north, often by companies linked to the military and other Colombo elites, has combined with other facets of climate change to markedly lower the water table in many areas, meaning women–the primary fetchers of water–must walk farther and spend more time each day acquiring water. Yet when one widow in the Vanni Forest, frustrated that her well ran dry, complained publicly that the military was cutting down the trees, a group of soldiers showed up at her house and began beating her. She told response that her son’s arrival home scared them off, but not before one of the soldiers slashed her throat, leaving a large scar. The woman filed a report with the police, but she said the military claimed it was unable to identify the specific soldier responsible.

“No way forward except to die”

This legacy of violence, woven together with the difficulties of the present, make life for some simply unbearable, and suicides are increasing in frequency, according to many in the region.

“We live in a situation of frustration and fear. We don’t have hope. No one is there for us, and usually when someone offers to help us widows, they expect something from us. I hope the church is a better place to get help and interact with God, where we can have a conversation with God about our situation. Otherwise, we can’t live anymore. There is no way forward except to die,” said Thurkka.

The pastor of the Methodist Church in Kilinochchi, the Rev. Thomas Sasikumar, told response that suicides are increasing for several reasons.

“Some people are killing themselves because of debt. They received a microloan, and these often carry high interest. They may have a weekly payment of more than 2000 rupees (more than eleven dollars), and many families simply can’t pay that. So some are hiding. I ask them why they’re never at home, and they say they took out a microloan from a loan company, and now they’re hiding. I tell them they can ask the police for help, that they can stay in their home and pay a little bit every week. But they’re frightened and they despair. Nearby in Jaffna, a whole family–husband, wife, and two children–drank poison and died because they couldn’t repay a loan,” Sasikumar said.

The credit squeeze often exacerbates the challenges of being a widow.

“One widow who owed a lot of money was told by the loan officer that if she became his sex slave, he would forgive the loan. Instead she killed herself,” he said.

“In another village nearby a widow with three children got a microloan. Every week on Friday the loan officer would come to her house to collect 2500 rupees. She always prepared him tea, as it is the polite thing to do. And she paid him the money. But people living nearby started gossiping about the visits, and some said she was a prostitute. It became a big scandal. They kicked her out of the village.”

Sasikumar said churches can do many things for the widows, including providing free educational opportunities for their children. And he says he encourages widows to remarry. “That solves a lot of problems,” he said.

He also preaches about the power of forgiveness.

It’s not an easy subject to broach among those who have suffered so much. And the term has been cheapened by government attempts to gloss over massive human rights violations during the war. “No future without forgiveness” proclaims a sign outside a military base at Veemankaman.

Yet Sasikumar speaks from his own experience.

“The army shot my father during the war. When the soldiers came to my village, most people ran away, but my father said, ‘We are civilians, so why run away?’ But they took my father and one other man and killed them. I was just 11 years old, but I made a slingshot and twice fired stones at the soldiers. After that, my anger was done,” he said.

Years later, after he’d entered the ministry, Sasikumar encountered the two army officers, now retired, who had killed his father. He got angry again, and spent a lot of time praying about his feelings. He finally realized that God called him to forgive, and that if he couldn’t forgive others, he had no hope of being forgiven himself.

“So I forgave those two men. And almost immediately, they both got sick. And they died. That was justice, because ultimately punishment belongs to God,” he said.

A passion for listening

On the other side of the country’s ethnic divide, the Rev. Sumithra Fernando is a Methodist pastor who was just entering seminary when her cousin, a Sinhalese army officer, was killed in a Tamil attack. She admits her cousin’s death left her bitter.

“I really hated Tamils,” she said.

Yet the experience of living together in the seminary with those who she perceived as the enemy began to wear down her enmity. After graduation, she started doing humanitarian work in Tamil areas, helping victims of the conflict, especially women and children. She says she became convinced, even as the war continued, that peacebuilding was possible if she could get ordinary people on each side of the conflict to start talking. After graduate studies abroad that focused on gender and conflict, she returned to Sri Lanka and put her beliefs into practice.

“I really felt for the widows. The military and government people got compensation, but the civilians got nothing. Or some got a small piece of land and five bags of cement. But day to day survival remained difficult,” she said.

The Sri Lankan government prohibited many humanitarian groups from helping the Tamils, but Fernando and the Methodist Church convinced officials that she was interested in bringing people together, not fostering further division.

“I have a passion for listening, so at first we went with nothing but a desire to listen, to revive the women, to share our belief that there was hope if they’d work for it,” she said.

With financial assistance from United Methodist Women, Fernando began bringing Sinhalese women with her, including women who had lost family members in the Civil War. Bridging gaps of caste and language and tradition wasn’t easy, but it paid off.

“We got them to talk about their own experiences. And I told my cousin’s story and how I was angry with the Tamil people, but how upon seeing their people suffering I had changed my mind. I told how my anger had been replaced with understanding. The women come to the first workshop with anger, but by the second workshop they were calming down. By the third time we gathered, they opened up and started telling stories, and as they listened to each other they knew and really felt they were no longer alone,” she said.

“When people are separate from others, they think they are the only ones suffering on the planet. But when they come together with others, others who have also lost loved ones to violence, they learn they aren’t the only ones. That makes it easier to examine the conflict and identify the roots of the violence.”

Fernando believes traditional approaches to peacebuilding that start at the top are often doomed to fail, because those who sponsored the violence in the first place are unlikely to see their way to resolving conflict. Better, she believes, to start at the bottom.

“From the perspective of the widows it’s easy to see that it was never a people’s war. It was a war made by men. It had political roots, which civilians often didn’t understand but for which they suffered. Conflict generated by politicians was inflicted upon the people. And it was the women and children who suffered the most,” she said.

“We had widows from both sides of the war. We started at the grassroots and moved up. Forget about peace talks among the hierarchies. I never believed in those. The people at the grassroots have never had a voice in that process, and we gave them a voice. We gave them the space to talk. Perhaps only the church has the ability to create that space.”

Thevarasa Am Jemina Quance is a Tamil widow who participated in the workshops. “There was a lot of pain released in those gatherings. When I came home afterward my children said I was a much happier person,” she said.

Yet she cautions that releasing anger isn’t the same as forgiveness. “We have let go of a lot of the anger. We’ve forgotten a lot. But we haven’t forgiven them,” she said.

Such uneasy tension is common among the Tamil widows who have participated in the workshops and support groups. “I no longer get angry with those responsible, with the army. But I can’t forgive them, because if my husband were still alive today I wouldn’t face these challenges. So I’m no longer angry. But I can’t forgive,” said Sathiyaruban.

Again with help from United Methodist Women, Fernando also worked to help the conflict-affected Tamil women establish some economic security. She sponsored sewing classes and dug wells.

Many of the participants were Hindu, but Fernando said an individual’s religion wasn’t considered. What mattered was that they were affected by the conflict and needed healing. No one proselytized.

“Our evangelism is letting people feel our love and concern for them in our work. We’re not trying to drag them into Christianity. We want them to know God in our caring work and in their own life experiences. These war-affected women continue to suffer and hurt, and I want to share hope where there is none,” Fernando said.

When she first started journeying from her home in the capital city of Colombo to the Tamil heartland in the northeast of Sri Lanka, Fernando says she was shocked by the despair she encountered.

“Many of the women I met were so traumatized that they had no hope. Some of them wanted to die, but they stayed alive only because of their children,” she said.

“Then we started our psychosocial work with them, and in the safety of our gatherings they asked powerful questions. Who is God? If there is a God how can that God let us suffer like this? And their questions led us step by step deeper into their hearts. As we wrestled with their questions, we all came to see the world differently. We came to understand why the fighting started, why they had to hide in the jungle, and why the wounds were so slow to heal after the fighting stopped. We came to understand some of the next steps, where women who once were victims become community leaders, moving from their pain to a new sense of leadership and commitment to their families and communities. If real peace is going to come to Sri Lanka, they’re the ones who are going to build it.”

The Rev. Paul Jeffrey lives in Oregon.