Whose truth? > An end to blame

For one young Tamil woman we'll call Luxmy, support for her homeland has transformed her goals as an activist. Her life has been threatened so many times that she prefers to keep a much lower profile in Toronto than she did in Sri Lanka.

She believes change in Sri Lanka will have to come from the grassroots, not from the people with power. She has seen too many of her activist friends hurt to believe that her old brand of activism is the most effective.

AUDIO: Mary Wiens' profile of Luxmy. Listen . (runs 7:42)

"You know doing something big and then you being killed or kidnapped or have to hide, instead of that doing work slowly but for a long time," she says. "That's what I also was thinking myself. I'm also very, very fed up with all the politics back home."

Luxmy is from Jaffna, in the north of Sri Lanka. Since 1983, armed conflicts in the north displaced thousands of families. Many villages were left without any men: they were killed, forced to flee or had joined militant groups. Army soldiers raped countless women. It was a period of terror for many Tamils, just as it was for Sri Lankans in other parts of the country.

Luxmy was part of a group for women formed in Jaffna at that time. It provided a place for destitute women to find shelter and get job training. Just 14 when she joined the group, she remembers it as one of the happiest times of her life. The experience also taught her a lot about leadership, as she was often in trouble with both sides in the conflict.

She was once travelling to Colombo with a group of rural women when their bus was stopped by government soldiers and diverted to a deserted building. Luxmy remembers seeing women's underwear in the room where they were taken. Many of the women started screaming, convinced they were going to be raped - and possibly murdered - like so many other Tamil woman had been during the conflict.

Even though Luxmy was younger than most of the other women on that bus, she took charge. She remembered the name of a very senior army official in Colombo, and ordered a soldier to call him.

"So I just mentioned his name and, 'Do you know what you're doing?' and 'This is not the way to check,' and 'Why do you have to bring us here?' and 'What is your name, what is your badge number?' and 'Someone has a pen here,' " she recalls. It was, she says, "just acting. But inside I was so scared."

The soldier made the call, and was ordered to release the women.

Luxmy often found herself caught between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan government. Finally, there came the day she was forced to flee Sri Lanka. She went to Germany, where she formed another women's' group, trying to bring together Sinhalese and Tamils, Buddhists and Christians. Again, she was threatened, from people within the Tiger movement. One day, late at night, she was so badly beaten she had to be hospitalized. She still suffers from memory problems. Friends of hers in Canada heard about the beating, and arranged to get her to Toronto.

Now, being a human rights activist is no longer primarily about challenging authority for Luxmy. She will if she has to, but she says those one-on-one confrontations are too dangerous, and do not produce meaningful change. She believes real change will come from the people themselves - working from the grassroots - like that domestic violence group she formed.

But even in Toronto, changing political opinions is hard to do. So many Tamils came here because of the civil war, and brought with them, Luxmy says, their old habits of blaming the other side.

"People who are living here have come here a long time ago and they have old memories and they have old opinions. And my mother just came and she said, 'You know what? I don't want anything. I want peace.' And that's what I have heard from a lot of people.

"Everybody has done damage, and we have to look at that if we're talking about peace."

Luxmy is careful to stay neutral. She's careful not to attach herself to any group that could damage that neutrality. As for her homeland, Luxmy says Sri Lanka needs more than tsunami relief.

She says the country needs the outside world to bring international pressure to bear on all sides in the conflict to come together without blame.

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