Up Country Tamils: Charting a New Future in Sri Lanka women in the North and East or women of other communities in the border zones. Maunaguru (2016) writes on the progress of women’s rights activism in Eastern Sri Lanka from 1975 to 2003. However, she does not have information on the women who migrated to the East from the Up-country, although they faced similar issues as other women in the North and East during war. Furthermore, women’s organisations and women activists have been documenting the struggles of women since the beginning of ethnic tensions, riots, and also during the armed conflict. Suriya Women’s Organisation in Batticaloa has been documenting these issues since its inception in 1990. So did Rajani Thiranagama (1990) of the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) in her co-authored book, The Broken Palmyra, which documents human rights violations in the North in the 1980s. Vasuki (2014) explains how grassroots and village-level women’s activism emerged in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka, specifically from 2000 to 2012. She speaks about Tamil and Muslim women’s struggles during the war. The article does not specifically mention the issues of women who migrated to the East from the Up-country following the 1977 and 1983 riots. Whether those women’s close relatives were disappeared, or arrested, or killed is not discussed. The reasons for not discussing these issues are two-fold. First, these women who migrated to the East may not want to identify themselves as Up-country Tamils anymore, due to social stigma or discrimination. The second reason could be that women’s organisations in the East do not work with this community, or do so without knowing or asking whether these women are of Up-country origin. 60

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