BETWEEN THE WAR AND THE SEA

Abstract

This paper looks at the linkages between the Asian tsunami which devastated Sri Lanka in December 2004 and the nation's ongoing armed conflict, from the perspective of women's experiences of these critical events. Public discourses, while politicizing the natural disaster represented by the tsunami, have tended to naturalize the armed conflict and the even larger toll on life of the ethnic struggle. A sustained process of militarization in Sri Lanka has taken place, ensuring the widespread presence of militarism institutionally and ideologically. This has shaped nationalisms, local economies, patriarchies, as well as new forms of agency, and the paper discusses the different ways in which women have been drawn into the country's militarization. In the early 1990s, women's activism, research and the demand for the implementation of international conventions such as CEDAW initially found a unifying focus in broad issues such as violence against women and development. The presence of the war fundamentally affected the way in which both violence and problems of development came to be understood. One of the consequences of the extensive work done with women most affected by the conflict in the war zones was that levels of feminist consciousness seem to be much higher in these areas than elsewhere. The paper concludes by contrasting the unprepared and hasty nature of much of the gargantuan aid intervention that poured into Sri Lanka after the tsunami to the deeper experience among many women's rights groups on issues of violence, displacement, loss of life and livelihood.