For some Sri Lankan women, military is the saviour: book

Wives and mothers in militancy-infested Sri Lanka have come to accept the military as the sole avenue of employment for their husbands and children, however anguished they are about losing them in the war, a new book says.
"Given the absence of non-military public sector expansion and lack of employment opportunities even for the urban youth, agrarian devastation, closure of garment factories and breakdown of rural economies, wives and mothers have come to accept the military as the sole avenue of employment for their husbands and children," writes Neloufer de Mel in "Militarizing Sri Lanka: Popular Culture, Memory and Narrative in the Armed Conflict".

According to de Mel, women also have to constantly negotiate with paramilitary and para-legal entities in going about their daily business and are vulnerable to gendered abuse as these groups stand accountable neither to the government nor the law.

"Militarizing Sri Lanka" is about the work of militarism and militarisation in relation to the Sri Lankan armed conflict, and covers a period spanning the late 1980s to 2005.

The writer says women have also taken advantage of the military economy in various ways.

"During the war, a thriving sex industry operated in the north-central city of Anuradhapura, the site of a major transit camp for Sri Lankan Army soldiers either going to or returning from the battlefields of the north," de Mel, an English professor at University of Colombo, says.

From about 10 sex workers in the city in 1986, the figure shot up to 1,000 by 1996, she claims.

Source: ptinews.com