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SRI LANKA: Women Pray for Sons, Husbands Caught in Civil War

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Dec 19 2008 (IPS) - As the Sri Lankan army pushes deeper into Tamil rebel-held territory hundreds women can only pray that their sons and husbands, believed held captive by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), are spared.

‘’We cannot tell the army to stop the march forward. They have to do their duty. But we suffer much mental agony,’’ said a young woman whose soldier-husband went missing 10 years ago. She believes that he is still being held in captivity by the rebels.

Some 4,000 soldiers and policemen have been reported missing in fighting with the rebels since the mid-1980s.

Visaka Dharmadasa, president of the Parents of Servicemen Missing in Action (PSMA) – set up in late 1998 to represent women relatives of those missing – said the biggest fear now is that the detainees could get caught in the crossfire or die inside rebel jails during air raids.

Dharmadasa, whose second son, an army lieutenant, went missing in September 1988 during a gun battle, said that as the army closes in on the rebel base in northern Kilinochchi district there is apprehension that the detainees could get trapped in the intense shelling and bombing.

‘’We are appealing to the government to make sure that they are not harmed and to the LTTE to release them now or whenever civilians are allowed to leave the region,” she told IPS.

‘’We are praying and hoping that since the LTTE has kept them locked for so long, in the name of humanity, they won’t be harmed and allowed to leave,” Dharmadasa added.

According to Dharmadasa the figure of 4,000 missing dates back to 2002 when a ceasefire and peace process was in force in Sri Lanka and fighting had stopped between the government and the rebels. Many more have been added to that list since then, but there are no reliable statistics.

‘’There has been very little engagement [on missing persons] between the government and the militants after the ceasefire ended and fighting resumed,’’ she said.

The rebels have denied charges that they were holding a large number of prisoners and have, in the past, said that all prisoners have been released. But Dharmadasa and other women, who have been waiting patiently for years for their sons and husbands to return do not believe them.

‘’In fact, some young LTTE cadres [while visiting the rebel-controlled town of Kilinochchi during the ceasefire] told us there were many soldiers detained, although the LTTE leaders denied the existence of any prisoners,” Dharmadasa, who has been knocking on the doors of government and rebel leaders for years to discover missing persons, said.

The strong-willed human rights activist, who spends most of her time at her association, says she is aware that there are two large bunkers in rebel territory where she believes the prisoners are being kept.

‘’These are two concealed bunkers built on either side of the road at Paranthan in Kilinochchi district. I have seen these bunkers during a peacetime visit with 200 other women to the region,” she said.

Thousands of government troops have poured into the Kilinochchi district and are on the edge of the town for what is expected to be a decisive battle. Though bogged down by rain and heavily-mined areas, troops are advancing in a pincer-like movement on Kilinochchi town where most of the hardcore rebels are holed up.

President Mahinda Rajapakse’s nationalist government has pledged to capture Kilinochchi by the end of this year, crush the LTTE and end the 25-year-old civil war. Hundreds of combatants on either side have been killed in the intensified warfare over the past two years.

Many thousands have died since 1983 when the rebels began a violent campaign for an independent homeland or autonomous powers in the north and east for the minority Tamil community that complains of discrimination at the hands of the majority Sinhalese.

In July 2007, the Sri Lankan army succeeded in wresting the eastern province from the LTTE and have since been concentrating on the north with almost daily aerial bombing raids.

The defence ministry claims to have pinpoint accuracy in taking on rebel targets, but this information cannot be independently verified as communication links to the LTTE have been cut. The government controls all information from the battlefield and restricts journalists to handouts.

Women like Indrani Aladeniya say they pray at small shrines maintained in their homes every morning seeking the safety of their husbands and sons.

Aladeniya’s son is a 27- year-old army captain who wentmissing in 1990 during heavy fighting in the north. “I expect that he will walk in through the door any time,” she said.

Victims from both sides of the war have been having regular meetings together, she said. “We have met the mothers and wives of LTTE cadres who had also disappeared. It was the same kind of sorrow.’’

The PSMA has organised three large gatherings of between 600 to 1,000 women from the Sinhala dominated south and from the north and the east -where rebel recruits come from and where young people are routinely detained by the army on suspicion of having links with the rebels – so they can console each other.

At a protest gathering in Colombo some years ago, women from both sides of the ethnic divide joined together to demand from the government and the LTTE the right to life of their lost men and boys.

“We want women from both sides to meet and comfort each other. The bottom line is that the women understand the issues better than the politicians,” Dharmadasa said. ‘’While the politicians and the elite want war they never send their own children to the battlefield.’’

The majority of Sri Lanka’s armed forces is made up of young men recruited from poor villages across the island with most joining the army and other security services for economic reasons.