Navigating Through a Changing Terrain: From War To Postwar

5.1 War: Displacements, Militancy, and Mistrust

As our previous research has shown (Azmi et al. 2013), young people in Eastern Sri Lanka were faced with numerous restrictions, such as on movement, access to education and jobs, and on what they could say in public.

During the war, borders were drawn between government-controlled and LTTE- controlled territories. Movements between the different areas were monitored, and there were restrictions on what one could bring into the areas controlled by the LTTE (the lack of goods and medicine was felt deeply during the war).

I will tell my own experiences. It is personal. I will tell. Yes, I sat the GCE A/L exam {University entrance exam} in 2007. But I should have done that in 2006. My parents kept me in Batticaloa town as our area was under LTTE control. I attended tuition classes there. It was in 2006 August I came home and stayed. Just one week before the exam, when my friends came to know that I came home, they wanted to meet me. So we decided to meet in the Kovil (Hindu temple). I also wanted to do some special prayers for my exams. Five of us went there. A group of LTTE cadres both men and women came to the Kovil and they captured us telling us they need more people. I cried and did not cooperate to go with them. (...) They dragged us forcefully away and pushed us in to a van, we screamed. Nobody could help us as they were with guns. I cried all the way. I was beaten severely on my legs. We were taken to a place called (name withheld for anonymity). I saw many girls like me. Some had come there willingly, some were taken by force. (...) From the first day I had the intention to escape. I did not eat a thing given. I kept on crying. One night, I escaped along with my three friends. The fourth one could not join us as she was kept in a different building. It was a scary experience. We had to walk in the forest. We were afraid of LTTE who were in the forests. It took almost two days to reach home. I was fully tired when we reached home.

Other young people were less directly involved in the battles but were struggling to survive in LTTE-controlled areas and had histories of displacement, often repeated displacements. One young man, Kumar, had come with his family to the East from a village in the North Central Province. The family had been displaced multiple times during his childhood, living with friends and family and in displaced people’s camps. In 1993 he came to a village in the LTTE-controlled area of the Eastern Province to live with his brother and to study. He came here because it was easier as a young man to live in an LTTE-controlled area. He completed his O-levels in the village, but had to go to the government-controlled area to sit his exam as he was registered in that area. When he came out of the exam, he was arrested on the suspicion that he was in the LTTE. He spent a total of 16 months in three different prisons, in different parts of the country. In 1998 Kumar came back to his village, married, and started a thriving business, which was still operating when interviewed in 2011.

A particularly remarkable feature of the stories told by young people about their experiences during the war is their ability to move on with life. Many lost their opportunities to complete education, to get training for suitable jobs, and to get employment, but there were many stories of those who managed to move on. Darini managed to escape the LTTE by embarking on a dangerous journey through the forest and managed with delays to finalize her A-levels after the forced recruitment. Kumar recovered from 16 months in prison and gradually built a successful business. Another young man living in a border area told how he and his family were displaced multiple times, often having to leave their house in the night for a few days.

5.2 Postwar: Limited Opportunities for Social and Spatial Mobility

We are free from LTTE recruitment, but we have fear about unknown persons in the area. (Interview female NGO employee, March 2010, referring to new militant groups)

When the violence and fear eased after the initial phase of negotiating peace, the postwar setting created hope and what young people saw as an opportunity for social mobility through education and employment. From 2007 and in the years that followed, the immediate postwar period was distinguished by continued monitor­ing, checkpoints, and house roundups by the military and the police to check that everyone in the household was registered in the village. The militarization of communities was very prominent. Freedom of movement changed and to some extent improved after the war, as there were fewer risks involved in moving around, and there was no fear of forced recruitment. However, young people still had to navigate suspicion and build in the time that it required to go through multiple checkpoints on their way from the villages and into the towns, for example.

Checkpoints were used by the government as a way of monitoring people's movement in and out of former LTTE-controlled areas. There were also major checkpoints between the East and the rest of the country. In 2010, one young male student, Rajan, said he was still being asked at the checkpoints about whether he had weapons or not. He explained the anger he felt at checkpoints:

We do not have the freedom to move like other Sinhalese people.

Harassment toward young women often took place at checkpoints and other places (both during war and after). Young women also found it very difficult to approach the military to obtain passes to go to the lagoon, and many felt unsafe approaching the military in the forest when collecting firewood or honey. When harassment took place, young women were reluctant to report the problem. As one young woman said “No, no, we cannot do that because the politicians are also dependent on the security forces and the police, so no use of going to any of them.” However, gradually more trust was established between security forces and people. The war-related violence was no longer there, and the organized crime and inse­curity of the first years after the LTTE was defeated in the East in 2007 gradually eased.

After the war, aid organizations located in the area focused on vocational training and creating jobs for the former cadres who came out of the LTTE. However, there was limited availability of employment for all groups of young people.

Employment for young people. Education is a big problem. Those who have finished A-levels cannot find a job. But very few have finished A-levels here. During the war, the parents hid their children and did not send them to school so there are many drop outs as a result. After that the children could not continue their schooling. So there are many youngsters with very little education here.

Generally economic participation of youth is low in the Eastern District according to field officers in a local nongovernmental organization (NGO). Mobil­ity played an important role in moving on with lives after the war ended. Because of the disruptions in education and lack of employment opportunities, many young people tried to move out of the region. Very soon after the war ended in the East, agents recruiting people for employment in the Middle East established themselves in Eastern Sri Lanka (Brun and Van Hear 2012). In the beginning mainly women - including married women - went mainly to work as housemaids. They were leaving their children behind to be looked after by other family members. Later, adult men started to go to the Middle East too, often working in construction industry or in the hospitality sector. During the later fieldwork periods, it became apparent that increasingly young men and also some young widows had started to follow. In fact, spatial mobility takes place at different scales. Internationally, many young people interviewed dreamt about going abroad. Very few of the young people who grew up in rural areas in the Eastern Province had connections to the Tamil diaspora, formed largely of high-caste people and people from other areas of the island who went abroad during the war. A new trend was the illegal boarding of boats to go to Australia (IRIN 2012). Very few people made it there, but stories abound of young men who were arrested, faced trial (which included restricted mobility), and as a consequence experienced even fewer possibilities for social mobility in the future.

In addition to moving out for work, many families interviewed tried to send their children to universities to do external degrees as their grades were often not good enough for standard university education. Parents had invested in their children’s education and made many sacrifices during the war in order to keep up their children’s education. Education and migration are seen by many as the only ways to escape poverty in the area. However, even weekend classes on open degree programs at universities are a challenge for families to afford due to the socioeconomic differences in parent’s ability to send their children for higher education. In addition to the costs, the lack of transport from some of the more remote areas - also former LTTE- controlled areas of Eastern Sri Lanka - makes it difficult for young people from these areas to get access to education. For young women particularly, transport becomes a main restriction on accessing higher education. Even higher-level school courses in commerce, science, or math are not available in the remote schools.

As explained above, social life also changed after the war. There had been very few possibilities for civil society participation during the war, but afterward, young people used opportunities to become more actively engaged in their communities. For instance, youth began taking part in youth clubs for sports and cultural pro­grams and special awareness campaigns (Azmi et al. 2013). One key informant in an NGO told us (March 2011):

We cannot expect a very quick change when it comes to their contribution to development. They [former LTTE-cadres]are gradually getting membership of some organizations. But they are not yet prepared to take any administrative responsibilities. But in the future they may take such opportunities as well. Because USAID, KPNDU, RDS, and Samurdhi programmes give trainings and conduct meetings for people. So those people will also get the training and in the future they can contribute to the development of our village.

Many young people worked closely with the Rural Development Societies in their areas, and both young men and women were involved. However, because of limited transport facilities, young women were more restricted in their ability to participate. Young men came by bicycle, but young women would not do the same over long distances. Particularly in the evening, parents did not allow their daugh­ters to take part in meetings without what was considered safe transport. Access to transportation thus played a role in shaping young people's spatial mobility and thus their possibilities for social mobility, exemplifying how unfair conditions and gender injustices are created in postwar society.

5.3 Beyond Postwar: Can Youth Navigate Toward Justice?

Once people were afraid of being young in the east, but now the situation has improved. We feel a little bit fearless and we want this situation in the future too. (Female student, March 2010, quoted in Azmi et al. 2013, p. 117)

Much has changed since the end of the war in the East. By 2014 checkpoints are totally removed, monitoring of people by the military and police is less visible, even though “everyone” knows that monitoring is still taking place. The military still plays an active role; it has taken over vast areas of land and runs farms and to a large extent controls the NGOs operating in the area. The military is also involved in civil administration. From the interviews in 2011 and 2014, the prevailing attitudes among the young interviewees were that their lives were still affected by restric­tions of movement, persistent inequalities, and the lack of political representation.

However, in the later interviews we conducted, we became aware of a shift in some of the young people's attitudes. Three different attitudes were prevailing in the final interviews in March 2014. First, some people wanted to disassociate them­selves with the postwar setting. They were tired of having to relate to their past and did not want to be defined through their experiences of war - they wanted to move on and hence navigated the new insecurities that emerged in the post-conflict context.

The second set of attitudes is more associated with the feeling of unequal treatment and injustice. Young people feel they are not treated equally in development-related allocations. As farming and fishing still dominates the employment structure in the East, lack of attempts to improve these sectors may push more people into poverty in the absence of any other viable livelihood options. When asked, Do you have a hope that this area will develop in the future? A young man responded:

If Sinhalese people come to this area, then the area will develop. Because, only then the government will be interested in developing the area. Because the government provides all the facilities where the Sinhalese people are living. They would provide irrigation facilities three times a year. We also have many ponds, if they were maintained we could cultivate more, but they never consider these ponds. (A young man, March, 2010)

The third set of attitudes is more associated with LTTE nostalgia, mourning for losing the war and the feeling that the LTTE was the only actor that tried to do something for the Tamil people. This has led to dissatisfaction with the lack of political representation for Tamil interests. Despite the horrors of war like abductions and fear, several youths mentioned that the situation was better in the past because under LTTE rule young people could get better access to education, there was less corruption, and society was better organized. This nostalgia may have arisen due to the present deprivation of freedom and equality, making young people feel more disempowered and deprived of fairness and equal rights than under the LTTE. Fear and suspicion linger not only among local people but also among their political representatives. This nostalgia from the LTTE is closely linked with young people’s position in society and their experience of government disinterest in their concerns, which keeps alive the dreams of a separate Tamil government because they do not feel that they have politicians representing them at the national level:

The President is making an effort to show the world that we are fine........... But we are

not... because we are forced to be silent........... youth like us do not want any further

problems in the country....we have to tolerate...................... It is not the president who

should be blamed but politicians from Batticaloa and Tamil community who want us to be silent. (A young man interviewed in March 2014)

Questions regarding political representation and power have been a central issue in Sri Lanka’s ethno nationalist conflict and imply a quest for corrective justice. In recovery programs it is important to consider whether such programs accommodate problems related to political representation and power in the war-affected areas. The current volatile political climate in the country requires careful navigation to find one’s place in society and impacts on young people’s experience of represen­tation, membership, and consequently citizenship and access to justice. The differ­ent attitudes of young people toward the postwar situation in the east clearly come together in how they feel included as members in the Sri Lankan society. Previous work by the authors (Azmi et al. 2016) shows how many young people in the area are gradually withdrawing from formal politics as they lost faith in the system and in their own safety. This may partly be related to the fact that, despite the dominant one-nation discourse promoted by the Sri Lankan government today, young people in the East often do not feel like full citizens in the postwar state. When asked how she felt as a citizen of the country, one interviewee explained:

Being a citizen of this country, I feel freer than earlier. It is a good place to live if there is peace and people are good. (Young woman interviewed in March 2011)

For minorities in the country, being a citizen of Sri Lanka is much broader than the identity documents people carry to prove their citizenship. In the above con­versations, although the interviewees felt like a free citizen in the postwar period, movement outside Tamil-speaking areas in order to find employment was limited due to poor or no knowledge of Sinhala, the majority language:

Although Sinhala and Tamil are considered as official languages, we cannot work in Tamil if we go out. We did not have the chance to learn Sinhala previously. Now many are moving out of the village to get employment but language is one of the main problems to get the jobs. (Young woman interviewed in March 2011)

How young people feel as citizens in Sri Lanka and to what extent they feel included in the society becomes clear through their experience of language. As opportunities for employment had already dried up in the study area, people, especially youth, were learning Sinhala in order to find work outside the East. Young men had gone to Colombo to work in companies, and they often helped their friends and relatives to move there through established networks and experiences. The experience of a restricted effective citizenship rights and of multiple forms of political, economic, social, and cultural marginalization is often expressed by young people as being afraid of the entering the space of dominant ethnic group:

If I go to Sinhala areas I always get afraid. Even though it's peace, I feel frightened. I am unable to go alone to Colombo. I have to renew my license {driving license} but I am afraid to go. I can't speak Sinhala. (Young man interviewed in March 2010)

Although the situation in Sinhala-dominated areas has also changed since the end of the war, the perceived fear still exists in the minds of Tamil youth, especially those who live in the former war areas. Further, due to centralized administration system, people from all parts of the country had to go to the capital in order to get their official works done, such as obtaining a passport, driving license, or national identity card. In such a situation, lack of Sinhala knowledge creates a vulnerable environment where they can be bribed or cheated by middle men. However, young people do not stop moving out of their areas as a result of the fear, restrictions, or lack of Sinhala knowledge. Rather, they find ways of chal­lenging the fear in search for social mobility, even crossing national boundaries in search of employment.

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