Up Country Tamils: Charting a New Future in Sri Lanka
relocated to the North and East, have not identified their ethnicity
as Up-country Tamil.
However, many Up-country Tamil men were arrested by
the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and the Terrorist
Investigation Department (TID) during the ethnic conflict in Sri
Lanka. Again, there is no information on how many people were
arrested under the PTA, nor their place of origin and ethnicity,
since there is no proper documentation or publicly available
database.
Up-country women face similar and unique problems as do
women in the North, East, internally displaced Muslim women,
and also Sinhala women from former border villages, due to the
ethnic conflict. The female relatives face different issues when
compared to their male counterparts.
Accessing Information
Women find it very hard to get relevant information from
government authorities about missing relatives. They do not know
what exactly should be done when their relatives are missing,
disappear, or are arrested. Women are often not aware of the
reasons for the arrests, who arrested their relatives, and where
they were taken. Most of the time, their immediate reaction is
influenced by a neighbour’s advice.
A woman who was interviewed for this study said the following:
“I first went to the trade union leader at the regional office
and waited there for so long. Then they took me to the
police station to make a complaint. I thought I should have
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