May 11, 2011
SINNAPANDIVIRICHCHAN: The women are taking back war-torn northern Sri Lanka, one square metre at a time.
In some parts of the Tamil-dominated north, women are said to outnumber men by 10 to one. In the aftermath of the brutal civil war that cruelled this part of the country for the best part of three decades, the men are dead, held by the army in isolated internment camps, or have simply disappeared.
The war is over, but with as many as 40,000 civilians killed, the UN estimates, much of the north is still barely populated and hardly rebuilt.
An important reason is a land still blighted by mines. Both sides of the Sri Lankan conflict laid mines, but the number is unknown. The best estimates suggest it is in the hundreds of thousands.
For decades during its separatist war against the government, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam - known to the world as the Tamil Tigers - had jungle factories turning out thousands of landmines a week. The army laid its own fields.
Now the fighting is over, young women are the sole breadwinners in thousands of families and they are taking up one of the few jobs going: the difficult and dangerous task of clearing their scarred land, mine by mine.
Yogalingam Rubaganthy, 29, a mine clearer for a year, is helping train the second all-woman clearance team being run by the British Mines Advisory Group (MAG), funded by AusAID.
''It's difficult work. It's hot and it's dry and it is difficult to be in the field all day [and to] concentrate,'' she said. ''But [it] is possible for women to do the work; they have the ability.''
Rubaganthy lost her father, a sister and two brothers when her home in Killinochchi was shelled. She has one younger brother left, who is now back at school. ''That's the main reason we are all here,'' she says. ''We have responsibilities for our families. I must look after my family now.''
She sees benefit for the country, too. Fleeing the fighting, Rubaganthy spent months in an internment camp.
''The camps are not a nice place to live, and many people are still there,'' she says. ''They need their lands free from mines so they can come home; come back to [their] livelihoods.''
Clearing Sri Lanka's mines is especially difficult because of the way the war was fought.
The Tamil Tigers spent years laying vast minefields in an attempt to build a physical barrier that would separate the Tamil-dominated north from the Sinhalese south. But in the final weeks of the conflict, as they fled the advancing Sri Lankan Army, the Tigers took to so-called nuisance mining - laying mines without a pattern.
They deliberately laid mines around trees, near houses and wells, or on paths - any place where troops and people would be likely to tread.
MAG's technical operations manager, Magnus Rundstrom, says clearance teams scour villages first. The next priority is farmlands. Most people here rely for a living, to some degree, on what they can grow on their land. There are mines laid deep in the jungle too, but these are a lower priority. .
Rundstrom says that in conservative Sri Lanka it would be inappropriate for female mine clearers to work alongside men, ''but the training they receive is exactly the same, and the work they do is exactly the same''.
At 24, Egambaram Renathani is head of her household. She is being taught how to check for tripwires; to gently scrape beneath the earth, checking for mines. ''I am learning for one week,'' she says. ''It is difficult but it is important for my country. I am proud to do this job.''
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