When Tamil Girls Come of Age

Witness  |  Nimmi Gowrinathan, Oct-Nov 2009

An interview conducted and edited by HELO.

www.Helo-Magazine.com 

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[For "Sri Lanka's Rebels After the Tamil Defeat", please scroll down]

[Witness stories are considered biased viewpoints. If you would like to counter or clarify the argument, please write to the editors. Only well-written and well-argued stories or comments will be considered for publication.]

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On my last visit to the northeastern part of Sri Lanka, an area which has been devastated both by the long-running civil war and the 2004 tsunami, I interviewed Rajni, a woman who looked almost exactly like me. She was tall like me, and had a presence about her. She had a spirit that was feisty. And after I began to interview her about her role as a soldier in the war, the question she asked me was: “Are you going to just ask questions or are you going to do something to help us?”

I’m Tamil Sri Lankan. I didn’t know a lot about the conflict growing up. I was in graduate school pursuing my PhD when the 2004 Tsunami struck Sri Lanka. And that changed everything. I joined the tsunami response program with Operation USA, which was an organization I always supported. For the past eight years as I traveled and worked in the country, it was the stories of girls coming of age inside of the war which most intrigued me.

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 Nimmi Gowrinathan

The orphanage where I worked was running one of the only vocational training centers for former fighters. The people at the orphanage helped me to set up interviews with women learning carpentry. We went into a class room by the road. I sat with some of the women and spoke to them one on one. But the men were sort of hovering outside. This was in the east at a time when the conflict was on. The paramilitaries were around and they were concerned the foreigners could be spies.

Rajni told me what happened to her. The most disturbing thing is the way she and others told their stories. If someone in the US told you their uncle passed away, they’d probably pause or something, but these women and girls spoke about trauma in this consistent tone. In a normal sentence she said her brothers and her husband’s brother had been abducted and killed and left in the road, that the government, knowing she was a former Tamil Tiger rebel fighter, came to the village looking for her. The neighborhood was shelled, hitting the house next door. Her two three-year-old twin girls who had been developing normally were left deaf and mute by the trauma.

She explained each detail with a sort of, this happened and this happened, as if it were matter of fact. I came to see after hearing many of these stories that there was little revelation because they had no social or personal space to process that trauma. Life was a question of daily survival.

Before all that happened, Rajni was in school. Her big family lived in a village on an island off the east coast. Lots of girls from the Tamil Tiger rebel force came and talked to the girls about joining. They were fighting against the ethnic Sinhalese-led Sri Lankan government in order to carve out a safe space for Tamils to live in amid the government’s long documented pressure and discrimination against Tamils.

Outside Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese government leadership made the case that the rebel group was a terror organization, killing for power. But inside the Tamil areas, even young girls were joining the force with the belief that it was their only option for escaping the government’s military patrols, police pressure and economic isolation.

Rajni hadn’t really had the desire to join a fighting group, she told me. Her brother was going to join. At that time she just wanted to study and take care of her parents. But then members of her family got sick, so to earn the salary she thought she had to join.

She described the training as very difficult, going into the jungle and living without food for a few days. But also she said that for the first time as a Tamil woman she was told she was equal to men. The gender equality thing was new for her.

Then she described fighting. The way she described it was very proud, that they had defeated the soldiers at this point. She and her unit were able to win certain territory. But she also described in the process how friends of hers were killed.

When she left in 2005, the Tamil Tigers split into two forces then fighting broke out between them. It was very demoralizing for her. A lot of people she had known were fighting on a different side. Everything she was fighting for seemed no longer valid because of the split. She got married, which was unusual for a woman who had been fighting, and she had these two twin girls.

Rajni was missing her pinky, which wasn’t actually from fighting but from a childhood accident. But at every checkpoint she was stopped at, they assumed she was a rebel because of the injury. She had been a rebel, but they didn’t actually know that so it was very difficult for her to get through every checkpoint without being harassed. Overall she was frustrated with her living situation, but she was also frustrated with me. People often came there asking questions and then did not do much else.

We started a leadership program at an orphanage in the northeast. The idea was that during the war all the doctors and teachers had left society and kids didn’t have any leaders. It was like a one month leadership training with kids from a number of different orphanages in the area. That was my personal and professional entrance back into Sri Lanka.

Arriving for the first time in 2005, it was scary. When you get off the plane in Colombo, its really hot and there were soldiers everywhere. Having read all the books and the stories of the war, it was a bit eerie. I was stepping into a story. Crossing the country there was also a lot of military, which was jarring for me because I was from the side that as far as I knew they didn’t like. But I didn’t know the political context well enough to be really scared in those early days.

There was food I didn’t like. There were lizards in the bed. I lived near one of the orphanages. Everything about it was extraordinarily uncomfortable to me, but as an ethnic Tamil it was the first time I really felt at peace. I spent my whole life thinking something doesn’t fit, in America. Then I went to Sri Lanka and found kids running around with the same names as my sister and brother and girls who were forced to tie their hair back and wear ear rings like I had been. It all somehow made since and was really powerful for me. I went back to Jaffna to villages where my family was from.

The kids allowed me an easy entrance to the country. They ask: Who are you? Why are you here? Why don’t you speak Tamil well? I think it was around the second week when the kids started to get comfortable with me and accept me. And then they started opening up with their stories. It became very easy to juxtapose that, like Rajni, this could have been my life if my parents hadn’t left during the ‘80s.

There was cuddle fish and daal and stale bread for breakfast. I couldn’t even imagine eating it, but then there are these kids looking at you waiting for you to eat cause they couldn’t eat before you did, out of respect. Despite how physically uncomfortable that was, I couldn’t imagine not going back there.

What was an awakening for me was the complexity of the conflict. The way I understood it was the government oppressing the Tamils and the Tigers were fighting for justice for Tamils. But the stories these kids lived through pointed more toward the breakdown of society. There was, for example, an increase in alcoholism and an increase in sexual abuse which you wouldn’t think would be associated with conflict.

The political space is defined by the Sinhalese led government. There are four brothers who are running the entire country and that is what defines the political space. The amount of dissent or democratic involvement allowed is determined by them. Yes, there is a Tamil political party, an alliance that is a collective of almost all of the Tamil parties. There are two or three Tamil parties which came out of the split from the Tamil Tigers in 2005. Politically, this was a population, the Tamils, which did not know who they could trust.

In Tamil and Sri Lankan culture at this time, it’s been hard for people to see the leadership potential in a girl. I met a girl who was eight-years-old. She was one of those kids who stood out in the crowd. As soon as I met her, she wanted to stand up and recite a poem for me. She did a dance. She would always come by and sit next to me. She also said to me, “There will never be peace. Ever since I was little there have always been soldiers.”

She could be a leader, she has that potential, but now, in this situation she’s one of two hundred kids at an orphanage. She may be forced to get married. She may make a little money for embroidery work. Maybe she’ll be able to work for some NGO project. But either way, she won’t have control over her own fate. Even if one joined a rebel group like Rajni had, she could only choose from a narrow set of options for how to live her life.

At the orphanage, we found that the kids really liked the Indian Bollywood performances so we decided to institute a play. The radio was pretty big there. They have Tamil artists and Hindu movies. They like Indian actors, but they don’t understand what they’re saying. The local cinema is Sinhalese, but the Tamils follow entertainment from Tamil India. They have these funny Tamil movie stars who are like their version of Arnold Schwarzenegger, with their big mustaches, real stocky. And the girl is always a little chunky to match the beauty sense there. The kids also love the Indian cricket players, Princess Diana, and the other global stars.

We had these performances at the orphanage programs. The boys were very active. They’d sometimes walk up and ask if they could play Michael Jackson. We did it at a time after the tsunami when there was all this chaos, but now when the kids see me when I come back, they ask when are we going to dance? It’s important to have that. You compare their lives with yours and think it’s all trauma, but they do find these moments of joy and happiness to live for.

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Nimmi Gowrinathan

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Sri Lanka's Tamils After the Rebel Defeat

Witness  |  S. L. Neelavan, Aug-Sep 2009.

www.Helo-Magazine.com 

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Interview with S. L. Neelavan, an ethnic Tamil humanitarian aid manager and rights activist from Sri Lanka who is based in Washington, DC. Neelavan, using a pseudonym, was interviewed by Joe Tsali.

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On July 26^th, 1998, I lost my dignity. It is also the day I decided to leave my home country, the South Asian island of Sri Lanka. My story is much like the experience of many Tamil families in Sri Lanka during the last few decades of turmoil. And it can explain why the civil war may not necessarily be over.

That night, Sri Lankan security forces came to our home in the capitol, Colombo, looking for my father. I was nineteen and had just finished high school and entered college. I spoke all three languages of our country—my native Tamil, as well as Sinhalese and English—and was already traveling outside Sri Lanka and meeting with the US Ambassador to discuss the civil war in my home region in the north.

My father had to drink extensively in those days to sleep because he had been tortured and the stress kept him awake. He had a successful life, but then during the civil war in the north he lost everything. With us that night was my mother, my sister, who was twenty-six at the time, and my other sister, who was thirty-four at the time. She had married very young and had two sons with her. One was nine, the other six.

The security forces knocked on the door. We opened the door even though it was one in the morning. One soldier asked my father:

“How many times have you been taken into custody by the Sri Lankan authorities?”

My father was detained by the Sinhalese-dominated security forces three different times, but at this time it was early in the morning and he had been drinking to help himself sleep. He got so panicked, he said, “Two times maybe.” Then the soldier came and slapped him.

We were all standing around my father as he fell down. My sisters looked in my eyes as I was the next oldest male of the family. Imagine; I was nineteen, with the resources I had, and I could do nothing. With tears in his eyes, my father was looking at me, not the soldiers. The soldier lifted his boot.

“Tell the truth,” he said. “You are a real terrorist.” The other soldier threatened to hit him with the butt of his Kalashnikov rifle. My nephew who was nine years old went to my father and helped him to the couch.

If you have a son, you will have two wishes, you want to have your son bury you, and you want to feel that your son will protect you. That was the day I lost my dignity. I couldn’t do anything. If I had stood up that day and fought back, my whole family could have been killed.

There are many moderate Sinhalese. I had more Sinhalese friends than Tamil friends when I lived in Columbo. One Sinhalese friend asked: “Do you see any difference between us? Why are we fighting?”

Let me point this out. In my country, like in the Middle East or Australia you see that people actually give their life to protect this friendship, but in Sri Lanka the Sinhalese, the vast majority who are very sympathetic to the Tamil’s dilemma fail to understand the racism rooted in the culture.

My Sinhalese best friend is asking how there can be genocide when we Tamils and Sengalese live together. But he fails to see that while he and I are okay, if we drive to a different location, the police can put me in jail or take me and slap me, but not him. The best way for me to describe the situation is this. If you breathe normally while I cannot, how can you tell whether I’m getting enough oxygen?

The story of how my family survived the civil war illuminates how many Tamils have been systematically denied their right to human dignity during this war. It also illuminates why the violent Tigers until their recent military defeat in northern Sri Lanka were the only political group left willing to stand up for the rights of Tamil civilians in the face of militants in the Sinhalese-led government.

In the Ramayana, a Hindu holy book, there is an episode called the Mahamsa. It is a religious story which says that Ashoka came to Sri Lanka, married a lion and created this caste called the Sinhalese. It says that they are very powerful warriors who created a whole civilization and have been living here for a long time.

Tamils, according to the story, came only from the southern areas of India to invade Sri Lanka, so they should not stay but should be chased away. Some people believe this, particularly among the Sinhalese majority, and it forms the early foundation of the divide between the largely Buddhist Sinhalese and the Hindu, Muslim, and Christian Tamils of Sri Lanka.

Throughout the history of Sri Lanka, the South Asian island country previously known as Ceylon or Serendip, the Tamils and Sinhalese have lived politically divided. That is, until the British united them into one colony which became independent in 1948. The Tamils had fewer resources, lower quality rice paddy land for example, so foreign missionaries chose to focus on the area, establishing schools. Many Tamils were able to get education this way.     

After independence from Britain, Sinhalese leaders wanted to keep power. There is a story that Buddha, on his death bed, chose Sri Lanka as the future home of Buddhism. Since the Tamils were seen as having originated from India later than the Sinhalese and many had accepted the missionary’s Christianity, some Sinhalese nationalists claimed that they would threaten Buddhism. For this reason, the Sinhalese leaders did not want to share power with the Tamils. Meanwhile, the Tamils thought the Sinhalese would not share power because they believed in the Mahamsa myths.

The Catholics have been the winning card of the Tamils because the Catholic schools were the top source of education in the Tamil areas. These facilities received US funds, UN development support, and human rights advocacy and these things.

In 1948, when the British granted independence, we had a democracy. A majority government came to power; this was the Sinhalese government. For the next thirty years, the Sinhalese-dominated government made discriminatory laws including a kind of reverse affirmative action which made sure that the minority would get nothing. There was a strong attempt to make Buddhism the only religion. Sinhalese was made the official language by the 1956 Official Language Act. And so on. For thirty years the Tamils were peaceful in their attempts to win greater representation and rights, but nothing changed.

There are Tamils who live in the north, the ones most affected by the civil war, but also Tamils who live in the central hill country who descended from those who worked for the British in the 18^th century plantations. The Tamils from the central area have a different political situation given representation in the government and they do not suffer the violence like the north. Also, there are former Tamil rebels of the north who signed an agreement with the government who are given a kind of patronage. But Tamils of the north who have been affected for so long by the war don’t see them as representative at all.

My family originally lived in this place in the north, beside Our Lady of Madu Basilica, the holiest space for Catholics in Sri Lanka. The Basilica was apparently built by the Portuguese 600 years ago. My family was Catholic and we ran a breakfast at the Basilica. Each year there would be a four or five day feast and we would feed maybe half a million people.

We had multiple bakeries, multiple kilns open, huge storage, many kinds of foods throughout the year.  This was our family business. The reason the government targeted my father wasn’t for big political activities; it was because he had a huge restaurant that could feed great numbers of people. And the government thought it would be used to help the insurgents.

Back in 1979, Tamil political groups were choosing instead of joining the government to burn buses. The insurgents then killed the first Sinhalese secret service agent lost in the Sri Lankan Civil War right after he was seen in our restaurant. He was talking to my father that day. Then after he left the restaurant, the rebels took him and cut him into pieces and threw him into a farmer’s well. The government felt that my father had a hand in it, so he was jailed.

If you go to a Sri Lankan police station you’ll see how well this secret service agent was appreciated after being killed in action. His place of death was right next to our place, so every time we put our address down at the police station we got special treatment from the police. That’s why my father was arrested and tortured, and largely why we lost everything.

My father was put in prison again and tortured in 1983. He was released right before the notorious July 1983 prison riot massacre. According to Amnesty International and others, the government responded to a riot started by Tamil political prisoners by recruiting street thugs to silence them. Apparently, the thugs killed a number of prisoners. Fortunately, my father was released that morning so he didn’t get killed.

My mother became a teacher, a principle, and she led the family. And all of my family was split because the government started to take businesses and land from Tamils who were under suspicion. My brother who was 14 at the time was not permitted in school because the government told the schools not to include people under suspicion. We didn’t know what was going to happen. We feared they could come and take us and kill us. A few of my siblings left and went abroad.

Since I was the youngest, my mother took me with her much of the time to village meetings or to identify those killed in a bomb explosion or what have you. Once she brought me with her to identify my uncle’s body after Sinhalese government soldiers shot passengers of a bus in retaliation for a Tamil insurgent attack on the local police station. And I was able to see the blood of those killed, including a Sinhalese bus driver who tried to prevent the shooting of the Tamil passengers. So from a young age, I witnessed how my society was destroyed systematically by political violence and how Tamils and Sinhalese bleed the same red blood.

By 1987, my family and community began rebuilding because the Indian government peacekeepers had come to reduce the fighting. But the war broke out again because the Indian forces, despite coming to keep the peace and even having ethnic Tamils among their forces, turned against the Tamil Tiger rebel group.

One Indian commander came, who wanted to sell the extra meat imported from India for the soldiers to us because we had a huge restaurant. My brothers told them we couldn’t take it because of the fasting missionaries, but the Tigers told us if we took such things from the Indians they would shoot us.  

One day when I was only nine there was a funny episode. The Indian military attacked the Tigers’ warehouse and took all their meat and food. The local Indian commander then wanted to sell those to us, but the Tigers’ had warned us not to buy it the night before. When we refused, the commander got so angry, he ordered his unit to take all of us into custody except my mother. We ranged in age from me, nine, to my father’s uncle who was in his seventies.

A small group of Indian soldiers held us while the commander extracted statements. I was so young they asked to sit on the side. First, they beat my brother and he screamed. It was hard. But then an Indian soldier who happened to be Tamil took the chef from the restaurant, a funny guy.

The soldier told him, “I’m going to pretend to beat you really hard, so you scream. That way they will say I’m really torturing you.” The chef started screaming really loud, but the soldier said, “Don’t scream! I’m not beating you yet!”

The commander would take each of the men, put a paper in to type and put his name there. “Have you seen the Tamil Tigers?” “No, I promise sir I have never seen them sir.” Then they would take the guy up and do the whole thing over again. Finally, a local priest came. We were released after three days.

Over the next eleven years, my family lost every building, every home we owned to the war. We fled to schools in the area, surviving on aid. Sometimes when I was still young I even had fun running to reserve the best shade under a tree for my family or running to be the first in line to get food rations for the family.

We escaped to India for some time and then ultimately arrived in the capitol, Colombo, where I was at least able to return to school and return to the north now and then to help with the delivery of humanitarian aid.

The future of the Tamil people who fled the fighting and are held by the government in mass internment camps will be horrible. The government will likely keep them interned for years and years. Amnesty International is reporting that they will be kept in these camps until they are mentally and physically suppressed. Kept with malnutrition, maltreated, and handicapped, so they can not rise up and fight. Demoralized.

The diaspora will be angry about the Tamil Tigers’ defeat, the loss of political support both from the West and inside Sri Lanka for those interned, and will end up supporting extremist groups. And next time they may come back even more extreme. The extremists will recruit some of these demoralized Tamils into their new groups. They will probably try to strike deeper than before. It will cause great pain for the Sri Lankan community and the war will return. There will be no peace unless the whole stance of the government changes. Maybe next year one could be a politician, or a rebel, or killed, or killed by a Tamil. The imperfect world system has failed to see these truths about the situation.

If the Tamil Tigers, the leading rebel group fighting for the rights of ethnic Tamils in northern Sri Lanka, have been defeated by the Sinhalese-led government as recent events indicate, the international community needs to step in to represent the Tamils. The Tamils are looking for self-determination and equal rights, but feel the West has abandoned them. Having lost the rebels, they are now political orphans.

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