I Want My Wings Back to Fly in a New Sky: Stories of Female Ex-LTTE Combatants in Post-War Sri Lanka

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the lives of silent, socially marginalized, young women and their motivation to join Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), their role in the movement and their social position in post-war Sri Lanka. In order to understand this, I draw upon the experiences of six war-affected young women who are living with their families in a village in the north in the district of Kilinochchi, which was once considered as the LTTE stronghold. In this chapter, I argue that although these young women had been portrayed as heroines during the war owing to their engagement in a traditionally male occupied space and their new roles, the end of the war has pushed them back to a lower social hierarchy and their social position is worse than before the war. Although their involvement in the war created new spaces for their agency to a certain extent, the end of the war has cut their wings of freedom and demolished the previous spaces of agency.