Ravikumar Thamil Selvi remembers running through the forest carrying her 4-year-old daughter in her arms. It was 2009, at the brutal culmination of 26 years of civil war in Sri Lanka. Then 21 years old, Thamil Selvi and her husband were running for their lives after the Sri Lankan army launched an attack on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) separatist group near their village, Theravil, in the north of the island. They were heading for Mullivaikkal, a town a few hours’ walk away on the eastern coast, along with others who were fleeing. Artillery and shells exploded around them, “shattering people into pieces,” recalls Thamil Selvi. Some people died on the way. Others lost their limbs. When she turned back to make sure her husband was still with her, she realized he was gone.
“He was missing, but we had to keep moving to get to an [internally displaced persons] camp. I had to protect my daughter, so I suppressed my emotions and ran for my life to save my child,” she says. “Until this day, I don’t know what happened to my husband,” she continues, tears rolling down her cheeks. After the war, she searched everywhere for him and asked the Sri Lankan government, the army and humanitarian organizations to help her find him. It was only in 2020 that then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa — who was defence secretary during the war — acknowledged for the first time that all those missing were dead. Until then, many families had held on to the hope that their loved ones could still be alive.
The civil war in Sri Lanka had a devastating impact across society. An estimated 89,000 women were made widows as a result of the war and are now the sole breadwinners for their families. Yet this need to keep their families going in the face of injury, displacement and loss has resulted in certain opportunities for the women and positive developments for the country.
“Demining has been a great leveler of the playing field for women in northern and eastern Sri Lanka,” says Cristy McLennan, the former Sri Lanka country director of the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a global charity dedicated to clearing land mines in postconflict areas. Of their 660 deminers in Sri Lanka, 153 are women, often working in all-female teams, playing a key role in the clearing of these indiscriminate weapons. Another international demining charity, HALO, has 1,200 Sri Lankan staff, 40% of whom are women.
The work simultaneously provides a stable source of income for the women and enables communities to return safely to their homes and develop their livelihoods, once the land is clear for farming and living. It also gives the workers a sense of comradeship and a strength in unity. The question is: Can this help them, and the country, to heal? Many Tamils in the northeast still feel a burning sense of injustice, 15 years on from the end of the bloody conflict. They believe that there has been a lack of accountability from the government and that much more still needs to be done. It is not only the country’s land that bears the scars of war.

The war was fought between the government — dominated by the Sinhalese ethnic majority — and minority Tamil rebels who sought to create an independent state in the north. The rebels saw this as the only answer to systemic anti-Tamil discrimination and marginalization, which had culminated in the Black July pogrom of 1983, when Sinhalese mobs killed between 400 and 3,000 Tamils, raped indiscriminately and destroyed Tamil businesses. This was the catalyst for the civil war. Beginning soon after, the fighting killed an estimated 100,000 people and left about 20,000, mostly Tamils, missing. In the early 1990s, a series of suicide bomb attacks by the LTTE killed both Sri Lanka’s President Ranasinghe Premadasa and the Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. A ceasefire was agreed in 2002, but it broke down in 2006. The war entered its final stages in 2009, during which fighting intensified, war crimes were committed by both sides and government forces declared a military victory.
Photos and videos from the end of the war showed prisoners with their hands tied behind their backs being executed by government forces, while corpses of female fighters were left with their clothes torn off, apparently after being raped. Sexual violence was widespread and systematic, and happened to both men and women.
The scars of the war remain etched on the land as well as on people’s psyches. An estimated 1.6 million land mines were left unmarked in the ground, contaminating swaths of land, mainly in the north and east — predominantly Tamil areas — where fighting was most intense. Land mines were laid by both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan army to defend territory and are still being found to this day in forests, on farmland and in residential areas. They are notoriously indiscriminate weapons which can kill and maim civilians — particularly children, who often mistake them for toys — long after wars have ended. The use, stockpiling and transfer of antipersonnel land mines was banned in 1997 under the Ottawa Convention, yet they are still being used today in conflicts around the world.
Thamil Selvi, now 36, is a small woman with a delicacy that belies her strength. For a decade, she has worked as a deminer for MAG. Every day, she gets up at 2 a.m. to cook and clean before catching a 5 a.m. bus to a minefield, where she dons a helmet and heavy personal protective equipment to search for mines and other unexploded ordnance in the ground. This is an arduous task, which involves using a metal detector to identify objects or a long rake to painstakingly comb through the soil, allowing mines to be exposed from the side rather than the top, thereby avoiding detonation. This is a method unique to Sri Lanka, forced on the country because of the sheer quantity of metal contamination, including metal that is not from mines; metal detectors are triggered so often that their efficiency for mine clearance is reduced. Often, the terrain is uneven and filled with dense vegetation, which needs to be cleared, while temperatures soar to 95 F (35 C). At 1:30 p.m., their work ends and, by 4 p.m., she is back at home.

During a break at a minefield in Munudru-Murippu, a village in Mullaitivu district in the northeast, Thamil Selvi says she sank into depression following the war, when she was living in a camp for displaced people. “My future was blurry, I didn’t know what to do next. I lost all my senses, but little by little I was able to stand on my feet again.” Her work as a deminer helped her do this — not only by creating financial stability but also by building a camaraderie between her and the women she works alongside. She describes them as a “united family,” adding: “Everyone treats me gently, with a lot of love and affection. I am much happier and livelier when I’m in the minefield — my personality comes out.”
These women risk their lives every day to clear the land, which is then given back to the local community so people can return to their homes, farm their land or simply live without fear. But they also share a solidarity which is evident in the way they interact with one another. “We have a sisterhood,” says Shashikumar Ketharagowri, 45, who has been working at MAG for 10 years, first as a deminer and now as a team leader, managing 12 others. I see her joking around with them during their break. “During stand down, we take it in turns to go round to each other’s homes to cook and eat together.” I meet her in the middle of a forest in Vengalachattikulam in Vavuniya district. As a resident of the nearby Periyathampanai village, she sees her work as being “like a social service.” She adds that they also provide clear economic benefits to people’s lives. “Very recently, we released 4 acres of land and the owners almost immediately started cultivating lentils.” This is crucial as the country recovers from the economic collapse that hit in 2022, after years of overspending, causing rampant food and fuel shortages and, ultimately, a political crisis.

This camaraderie helps women live with the social stigmas they face. “Living as a single mother is a major challenge for women in the north and east, but if we concentrate on what others think about us then it is not going to help our lives,” Ketharagowri says. When her husband left her and their two children, she had to find a stable income quickly. Clearing land mines was her answer. “I don’t really care what others think of me, I am a self-sufficient woman.” She adds that most women in the north and east share the same resolute strength: “Since we have gone through a very gruesome 30-year war, we are able to do anything.”
The demining work helps all the women provide for their own families. Thamil Selvi’s daughter is now 20 and dreams of becoming a fashion designer. With her income from demining, Thamil Selvi is able to pay the 10,000 rupees ($33) for her tailoring classes. “With all the difficulties in the field as a deminer and the sorrow of not having my partner and not knowing what happened to him, my biggest compensation in life is realizing the dream of my daughter and seeing her happiness,” she says.

But the challenges are sometimes too much to bear. Nirashan Paulraj Mathivathana, another female deminer working for MAG at the minefield in Munudru-Murippu, has attempted suicide three times. “Every time I tie a rope on a bar and try to get on top of a chair to commit suicide, I think of my children, and if I leave then there’s nobody to look after them,” she says. Her husband abandoned her in 2011 when she was pregnant with their third child; now it is up to her to provide for them all. “Even though I was depressed many times, I have a burning fire within me to fend for my family,” she says. “I don’t want my children to have the same future. It is this thought that gives me the power to go through life and to keep moving.”
The 41-year-old from Talaimannar, a village on Mannar Island in the northwest, has been working for MAG for three years. When asked about how she feels working as a deminer, she says: “Women are equally as powerful as men — if not more — in mind and in body. There is nothing we cannot do.”
The effects of the war are still felt in the continued military presence, as well as in what is left in the soil. One of the most pressing issues is the continued militarization of the northeast, according to Thiruni Kelegama, a lecturer on modern South Asian studies at the University of Oxford, who says it “perpetuates a climate of anxiety.” There are reportedly hundreds of military bases and camps dotted around the northeast, many of them built on land that was forcibly taken from Tamil civilians. “There are still armed patrols there. It compromises the mobility and safety of civilians, especially women,” she says, adding that it reinforces the perception that the area is still under occupation rather than undergoing a process of reconciliation.
I pass several military bases in the area, and visit an abandoned Sri Lankan army camp in Santhiveli. Having been under the control of the military for 30 years, MAG deminers are now in the process of clearing it, after which it will be returned to the local community.
The women tell me that, during the war, the army sometimes warned civilians to evacuate before they attacked, but at other times they didn’t and the shelling was indiscriminate. Vengalachattikulam, in the northern Vavuniya district, was one of the most violent hot spots during the war. The mines here have been laid completely at random, meaning deminers have to perform a thorough sweep of the land. So far, they’ve cleared six Rangan 99 antipersonnel mines from this site, which were used by the LTTE to defend territory, and 18 items of unexploded ordnance from both parties, including mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Ketharagowri’s sister was killed during one attack by the Sri Lankan army, and her father went missing in another. “Up until now, we still don’t know what happened to him and we’re still searching for him.” Despite her repeated heartbreak, Ketharagowri doesn’t want to be “stained by the memories of the war. I want to move on.”
Clearing the remaining contamination from the land is crucial to ensure no one else is harmed again by the remnants of war, like Jesudasan Victoria, who lost both of her hands to a land mine in 1994. Victoria leads me through the gate to her colorful home on Mannar Island. The 49-year-old has lived on this idyllic stretch of land with her mother and brother since 1967. We sit down inside as her chickens peck around in her front garden. She jokes that once she starts talking, she won’t stop. She was 18 years old and out collecting firewood in a nearby forest with a group of women when the accident happened. It was Dec. 22 — her mother’s birthday.
“That morning, I had prepared tea and a cake for my mother. Out of all the women, unfortunately, I was the one who spotted the land mine,” she says. But she didn’t know what it was and assumed it was a jewelry box. Her curiosity was piqued. “Something took over me, I wanted to immediately get inside it somehow. I trampled on it, bit it, but it wouldn’t open. It looked so attractive to me and I wanted to find out what was inside it. In the end, I tried to open it and it went off and all I could see was my tendons and nerves hanging out and blood pouring out of both arms.”
She was rushed to hospital, but it took a while for her to be treated. “All of the Sinhalese patients were being treated, but the Tamils were stranded outside. I had to get up from my stretcher and scream, saying, ‘I’m oozing with blood, please help me or I won’t survive, or just give me a poisonous injection and kill me,’” she recalls. That was when a Tamil doctor heard her and came rushing out to help her. It took more than a year for her to fully recover. Despite her injury, she is full of energy and joy. She enjoys riding her bike wherever she likes around the island. “My happiness is that even though I don’t have both hands, I still do every normal task that every other person does.” She goes to her friend’s house and hosts them at her home, despite living below the poverty line. “Even though I have little, I like to share and eat with them,” she says.

Victoria’s story is used as a case study during risk education sessions in schools and with communities. She herself warns people of the dangers of land mines. “I have told many children about the risk and to be careful. But I’m worried about the children born in the new generation who are not aware of war and its horrors,” she says. “I hope and pray that such a tragic accident doesn’t happen to another person.”
Some of the deminers believe their work can help both themselves and the country to heal from the trauma of war. Others believe nothing will make this happen. “It’s just the remnants [of war] we are clearing, but not the memories,” says Kandasamy Nirogini, a deminer from Mannar with long dark hair tied back in a braid and pearls glimmering in her ears. “[The memories will] be forgotten only when [our] entire generation perishes. For now, they are etched in our souls,” she says, with tears in her eyes. The 35-year-old deminer clearly remembers when, during the final phase of the war in 2009, a fragment of a shell struck her leg and hit her 2-year-old daughter in the stomach. She describes how “shrapnel pierced [my daughter’s] tummy and her intestines were coming out.” Her family had been displaced and were sheltering in a tent under a coconut tree when a shell hit the tree and exploded above them. Both her daughter and her sister died in hospital later that day. Nirogini had to have a metal plate inserted in her knee and cannot stand for long periods of time.
Her suffering didn’t stop there. “I was very badly treated by my first husband after the war and then he abandoned me,” she says, during a break at the minefield in Munudru-Murippu. She had to support her three children alone, until she remarried, but was unable to do a lot of work because of her injury. “I went to a garment factory to work as a seamstress but I couldn’t manage that, as I had to stand for too long and my foot got affected. But at the same time, I have to be the breadwinner for the family.” Despite demining being a very physical job, she manages, because her team leader and deputy team leader support her. Still, her days are long and tiring. “I wake up every day at 1:30 a.m.,” she says. “The strength [that I have] is simply because I just have to do it. That’s it. There’s no other option.”
So far, MAG has cleared 38 square miles since starting work in Sri Lanka in 2002, alongside three other mine action operators, including HALO, and the Sri Lankan army. There are ways of telling who laid which mines. “We treat all the land mines the same. However, the majority of the mines we’re finding at the moment [across the north and east] are government-laid ones, and we know the government laid them because we know what mines the government laid,” says Andrew Warsap, MAG’s technical operations manager. The latest land mine MAG found at the Santhiveli site is of a type that was imported from Pakistan by the army. These mines have an explosive charge that lasts for a long time, making them the most dangerous. The LTTE ones are handmade from wood, so they degrade over time and don’t keep the same explosive charge. There are no definitive maps available showing all areas contaminated with land mines, so speaking to the community is key. Warsap says that MAG’s operations in Sri Lanka extend to an area of just over 8,100 square miles, in eight different districts, which is “about the size of Wales.” But they are finding fewer mines compared to last year for roughly the same amount of land cleared, an indication that they are edging closer to finishing their work in Sri Lanka.
The government of Sri Lanka issued a National Mine Action Completion Strategy for 2023-2027, which outlined an aim to complete all clearance work by 2027. Yet McLennan says that more explosive contamination has been found since the strategy was launched. That, combined with a strengthened Sri Lankan rupee and reductions in overall funding, means the target of finishing by 2027 is no longer feasible. McLennan says a few more years would be more realistic, but only if the sector maintains the current levels of funding available. This looks more and more uncertain. Since my trip to Sri Lanka, the foreign aid sector has been pummeled, not only by the funding pause and dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) by Donald Trump’s administration, but also because of a number of countries, including the United Kingdom, slashing their foreign aid budgets. The U.S. is MAG Sri Lanka’s largest international donor, making up 40% of their funding, although the majority of this is from the Department of State’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement, which is separate from USAID, and therefore not facing the same level of defunding efforts from the Trump administration.
Ziggy Garewal, MAG’s new country director for Sri Lanka, says MAG has been affected by the USAID funding pause but has since received waivers for most of its programs, including Sri Lanka’s humanitarian mine action projects. These waivers have been extended past the U.S. government’s 90-day review that ended on April 20, enabling MAG to continue its work up to the time of publication.
Even with the strategy’s potential overrun, Sri Lanka is on course to be the next extensively contaminated country in the world to be declared free of land mines, which will be a remarkable achievement.
A safer future for Sri Lanka is within reach, and now there are hopes for radical change with the new government. In September, the left-leaning Sinhalese politician Anura Kumara Dissanayake was elected as president. Two months later, his National People’s Power (NPP) coalition won a historic two-thirds majority in Parliament. “It signaled discontent with corruption, mismanagement and the entrenched power structures that had always been there,” Kelegama says. The NPP got nearly 62% of the vote, winning even in the Tamil-dominated Jaffna Peninsula. This area has “historically been dominated by Tamil nationalist parties,” she says, which demonstrates “a willingness to look beyond divisions.” The new president has vowed to build a country where all citizens, regardless of ethnicity and religion, feel equal. It remains to be seen if he will deliver on Tamil voters’ key demands, which include justice for past atrocities, land restitution and improving the economy and cost of living, but Tamils I spoke to in Sri Lanka were optimistic. “With the new President Anura Kumara Dissanayake I hope things will become better,” Thamil Selvi says. “I am hopeful for change.”
But it will be an uphill battle, given the lack of work so far on the harms done during the civil war. Past truth-telling initiatives and commissions set up to investigate wartime abuses, particularly conflict-related sexual violence, have been “criticized as biased because they fail to address the genuine needs of victims and survivors, especially women,” Kelegama says, and are “often seen as tools to deflect international scrutiny, and to stop calls for accountability.” This view has been echoed by Human Rights Watch and the U.N. — the latter of which warned in 2021 that the government’s failure to address past violations significantly heightened the risk of human rights violations being repeated.
Kelegama adds that the voices of women have not been included in decision-making on peacebuilding initiatives, despite increasing evidence from postconflict zones around the world — such as in Northern Ireland and Liberia — that including women in negotiations not only ensures protections for women’s rights and other marginalized communities but also improves the durability of peace.
All of the women I spoke to have powerful stories to tell — of loss, but also of strength, endurance, bravery and hope. They are helping the country to heal through their vital work in demining the land, but the pervasive and untreated trauma and injustice will be harder to fix than land mines. Their voices and those of other Tamil women need to be listened to. Answers are needed for their missing loved ones. Accountability is needed for past atrocities. Better economic conditions are needed to help improve their quality of life. Even when the deadly legacy of land mines is resolved, the new government has a daunting task in addressing the psychological wounds of the civil war, but it needs to be done: Clearing the land is simply the first stage of healing a country.
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