When an artillery shell fell on her home in northern Sri Lanka in 2009, Sathiyaruban Tharskika\u2019s 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\u2019s too dangerous to try to remove them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As the sole breadwinner for herself and her two children, Sathiyaruban found a job at a cooperative restaurant, but what she earns isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not living well but we\u2019re surviving,\u201d she said. It\u2019s a common refrain from war widows in Sri Lanka\u2019s conflict-torn north. \u201cIf I had more income I could insure that my kids get a good education and then a good job. That\u2019s all I care about.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As if the economic challenges weren\u2019t enough, war widows like Sathiyaruban suffer daily discrimination and harassment in their communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMen look at us differently because we\u2019re 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,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sathiyaruban has found strength in a women\u2019s group supported by the local Methodist Church.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe share our problems and challenges, and we help each other,\u201d she said. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Imperial legacy: lasting division<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sri Lanka gained its independence from Great Britain in 1948, but the empire\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2013which few Tamils spoke\u2013the 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cno-fire zones,\u201d 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 \u201czero civilian casualties.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2013and from Tamils themselves, particularly conflict-affected women\u2013finally 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDay 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\u2019t even know for sure what happened to their husbands. They\u2019ve spent the last decade waiting for their husbands to somehow return,\u201d said M. Thurkka, a widow who participates in a church-sponsored group in Kilinochchi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEvery 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\u2019t have enough food for them. They can\u2019t go to school because they don\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Krishnan Theivanai is a 64-year old Methodist woman whose husband and oldest son were killed in the war\u2019s final moments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEvery year the government sends people around asking questions about widows,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd 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\u2019t alive. So why should I forgive them?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other factors make life difficult for Tamil women. Indiscriminate logging in country\u2019s 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\u2013the primary fetchers of water\u2013must 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNo way forward except to die\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe live in a situation of frustration and fear. We don\u2019t 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\u2019t live anymore. There is no way forward except to die,\u201d said Thurkka.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The pastor of the Methodist Church in Kilinochchi, the Rev. Thomas Sasikumar, told response that suicides are increasing for several reasons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSome 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\u2019t pay that. So some are hiding. I ask them why they\u2019re never at home, and they say they took out a microloan from a loan company, and now they\u2019re 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\u2019re frightened and they despair. Nearby in Jaffna, a whole family\u2013husband, wife, and two children\u2013drank poison and died because they couldn\u2019t repay a loan,\u201d Sasikumar said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The credit squeeze often exacerbates the challenges of being a widow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOne 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. \u201cThat solves a lot of problems,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He also preaches about the power of forgiveness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s 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. \u201cNo future without forgiveness\u201d proclaims a sign outside a military base at Veemankaman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet Sasikumar speaks from his own experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe army shot my father during the war. When the soldiers came to my village, most people ran away, but my father said, \u2018We are civilians, so why run away?\u2019 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Years later, after he\u2019d 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\u2019t forgive others, he had no hope of being forgiven himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSo I forgave those two men. And almost immediately, they both got sick. And they died. That was justice, because ultimately punishment belongs to God,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A passion for listening<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n On the other side of the country\u2019s 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\u2019s death left her bitter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI really hated Tamils,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI 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,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI 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\u2019d work for it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t easy, but it paid off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe got them to talk about their own experiences. And I told my cousin\u2019s 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,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen 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\u2019t the only ones. That makes it easier to examine the conflict and identify the roots of the violence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFrom the perspective of the widows it\u2019s easy to see that it was never a people\u2019s war. It was a war made by men. It had political roots, which civilians often didn\u2019t 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,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thevarasa Am Jemina Quance is a Tamil widow who participated in the workshops. \u201cThere was a lot of pain released in those gatherings. When I came home afterward my children said I was a much happier person,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet she cautions that releasing anger isn\u2019t the same as forgiveness. \u201cWe have let go of a lot of the anger. We\u2019ve forgotten a lot. But we haven\u2019t forgiven them,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such uneasy tension is common among the Tamil widows who have participated in the workshops and support groups. \u201cI no longer get angry with those responsible, with the army. But I can\u2019t forgive them, because if my husband were still alive today I wouldn\u2019t face these challenges. So I\u2019m no longer angry. But I can\u2019t forgive,\u201d said Sathiyaruban.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many of the participants were Hindu, but Fernando said an individual\u2019s religion wasn\u2019t considered. What mattered was that they were affected by the conflict and needed healing. No one proselytized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOur evangelism is letting people feel our love and concern for them in our work. We\u2019re 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,\u201d Fernando said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMany 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,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThen 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\u2019re the ones who are going to build it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Rev. Paul Jeffrey lives in Oregon.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4107"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4107"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4119,"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4107\/revisions\/4119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/sri-lanka-2018-1023-51A.jpg\")
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