Ep 18 Stories from the Sri Lankan civil war to human rights activism and decolonisationFarha Mihlar

Farah Mailer, a human rights teacher at Oxford Brookes University, shares her journey from growing up in war-torn Sri Lanka to becoming an activist and academic. She discusses the impact of living in a conflict zone, the influence of her father and grandmother, and her career in journalism before transitioning to research on Islamic extremism and human rights violations in post-war contexts. Farah emphasizes the importance of fighting for equality and justice. Hello Changemakers, welcome to my Mars Mantra podcast, stories from changemakers like you and I who are working in disasters and development. Today I have one of my colleagues, my newest colleague from Oxford Brookes University, Farah Mailer, with us to share her story. Hi Farah, how are you? Hello Romana, thank you very much for having me. You're welcome. Farah teaches human rights to students at Oxford Brookes University, to postgraduate students and Farah is originally from Sri Lanka and now she's based in the UK. So Farah, before we go to work talk about human rights and all the problems of the world and how you're making an impact as a teacher, I want to understand where it all began for you. Sure, so it's a bit of a long story. I have a career that started in journalism, moved on to working at the policy level internationally on human rights and now as an academic I'm both a researcher and a teacher. And fundamentally I think running through all these different careers is the strand that I'm an activist and I very much identify myself as a human rights activist and then an academic. So I'll kind of draw on some of the background and why and how I got here. And I think maybe I'd like to sort of remember some of the people who helped bring me along here as well. It's been quite a journey. I think the starting point is that I grew up in an armed conflict. When I was young, Sri Lanka was in war. It was a civil war that lasted at least 30 years and it was a very challenging time to grow up in. I lived in the capital city, Colombo and I remember as a child there was so much of the realities of war right in our face. We used to often have bomb explosions around where I lived. I lived very centrally amidst government institutions, defence ministry, etc. So this was quite a frequent occurrence. I remember very much in school we used to have often these practices where we would be prepared for a bomb explosion. We'd have a drill as such where there'd be like an alarm that would go and then we'd all have to do a drill on protecting ourselves. There was frequent times when there were political assassinations that took place and all of this happened in a climate where human rights violations were generally taking place in the country. I am from an ethnic minority community. I'm a Muslim in identity and origin and Muslims are 10% of the Sri Lankan population and the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka involved Muslims but was primarily seen amongst the majority community and the larger group, the Tamils. I remember when I was quite young, I think I was about 6 years old when in 1983 there was a very well-known and well-written about series of events in Sri Lanka where there was state-supported, government-supported mobs that went into Tamil people's houses, set houses on fire, set business establishments on fire and really was a turning point. Lots of people were killed, lots of women were raped. All of this happened in the capital city primarily but in all the big cities and it was a turning point in the conflict. I was quite young then and I remember witnessing some of these in my neighborhood. So, these things had a very strong impact on me. I remember one of the people who influenced me very much in my early career, I would say, is my dad. If he wasn't a corporate sector person, I think he would have been a journalist and perhaps this is why I was driven into journalism. My father was somebody who like all journalists is somebody who runs towards the event. So, if there's an explosion or some violence, most people run away from it. I think journalists instinctively are drawn towards it. My dad was one of those people and I remember from a very young age, he exposed us to all of this. For instance, during the 1983 riots, we shouldn't call them riots, they were not riots, they were really attacks against minorities. During these attacks, I remember clearly my father taking us, me and my sister, to this high point in a building, this apartment block we lived in and giving us a binoculars and looking across Colombo, the city and looking at pretty much the city burning in the night, fires everywhere. That was quite a big deal I think to expose a six-year-old to and he would do this quite frequently. We always had all the newspapers at home to read, newsmagazines. So, he was very influential in me kind of being drawn to crises. My mom was quite influential I think in that she was quite emphatic on having an educational qualification. So, I think she was very supportive in school, getting through school and then getting into university. I think that was important and so that helped keep the educational involvement in my life. But another very important person in my life was my grandmother. This is my father's mother, who in our culture we call Vapumma, Vapa for father, Umma for mother, so father's mother, who I think was a feminist at every level but not a self-declared one and somebody who just couldn't stand injustice. She was very outspoken and very principled and quite an open person and I think I'm very much like her and I had a very strong connection to her and I would spend like Friday afternoons in her house and we would have these long conversations where she'd be like calling out family, relatives, friends, people in her neighborhood with story after story of what they had not got right or not done right and she was very much about not sticking up like standing up against wrong, standing up against things that were not right, calling it out, not, you know, maintaining relationships with people just because they were important in society and I think those core principles and her feistiness and her strength in being able to state these things influenced my human rights mentality and background and this need to fight for equality and justice which has stayed with me all through my career and which is why I think I'm primarily an activist who wants to change rather than just accept that society is a certain way. Very touching story, Farah. When you were saying that your dad was exposing you to all these events, I was just thinking that, you know, we have a young son. We try to shield him and when the news is on the radio, we try to switch it off so that he doesn't get disturbed by all the news. So this is really interesting. I know, that's a really big dilemma because I actually, Romana, do the opposite and as you know our sons are the same age so I take my son for protests and he's drawn the campaign posters he wants and they're on his windows and we discuss these things but I'm also conscious more and more about the effect it has on him growing up in a context where others are not experiencing it whereas in Sri Lanka when I was experiencing it, you know, my father was certainly really quite extraordinary in exposing us in the way he did but at some level all other children were also my friends in school, you know, when they came and we would go to school, we didn't necessarily know what would entail when we get back, you know, whether our family members went to work, what could happen in the process and I think what was also really interesting was when I first became a journalist, I started to then go off to the war-torn areas. So Colombo as a city was affected by attacks primarily from the militants who, you know, targeted areas in Colombo for attack but the north and east was where the war was taking place in full and I remember when I went as a journalist, I was completely shocked at the fact that there was devastation at a level that we had no idea of living in the capital city thinking we were affected but really not affected to that extent and more so that there was an entirely different narrative to that which we had, you know, grown up with this very dominant narrative of who is good and who is bad just shifted with understanding of what was going on there and that there's much more to the story than one baddie and one goodie in it and I think that was quite a turning point as well in terms of challenging this very dominant narrative and exploring and researching deeper into what is going on. And I remember that you shared what you were doing, you interviewed so many people as part of your PhD research. Do you want to share that experience? Well, my research has evolved quite a bit. You know, it's really interesting, Romana, that now when I took, like I met a student the other day who told me she wants to be a journalist and I started chatting to her and I realized that I had this career in journalism that I have really buried somewhere way back in my head and I hardly ever think of. So when you talk about interviews, I interviewed very well-known figures like the former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratanga at the age of I think like 20 or 21. I was really young. I was still in university. I had met Yafir Arafat at a press conference at that time. It's crazy. I don't even like, I don't, these things just are somewhere in my CV. I don't, you know, there's a tiny line at the very end because since then so much of my interest has changed and my work has changed. But my PhD research was looking at Islamic, the development of Islamic extremism in a minority context in a situation of conflict. I was looking at religious movements and a lot of that work involved, you know, speaking to community, discussing how things have changed, how conflict changes and how religion changes with conflict. Following that, I moved on to doing research that was more connected to the war and particularly with human rights and human rights and justice at the end of an armed conflict. I have done really difficult and challenging work on this and this is mainly with victims of war, victims of mass atrocities who have lost family members, who have lost pretty much everything at points of time in their life. I've interviewed lots of mothers and wives that disappeared, meaning that their sons or husbands or daughters were taken away at some point of their life by military authority or by militants and they were never seen again. And many of these women, they're primarily women, are still waiting. They're just waiting, believing that this child will come home. Some of them told me stories of how their clothes are packed in a suitcase, the suitcase is on the table, their shoes are left by the bed as if they will come and this is 10-15 years later, they're still waiting. Oh, that's so sad. And how do you absorb all this information? I find it quite difficult. There are levels of information and research that I've had to absorb in situations where it's quite dangerous. For instance, when the war in Sri Lanka was coming to an end, it was very, I would say, similar to the kind of headlines you read from Syria or Ukraine. There are similarities to Gaza at the moment but not entirely similar because Gaza has a bigger population and because it's urban warfare. But very similar themes of a humanitarian crisis, of people under threat, of vast numbers of people under threat and huge death tolls by the day. I think in those situations, absorbing the information is almost impossible. You're just driven, you're in some kind of mode of survival and having to act and try to bring about change very quickly and extreme pressure. It's sleepless nights and you just really have to try to get something done. At that point, the best is to cope with the frustration of nothing happening, which is what happens. As we are seeing it even now, very little happens to change these situations. Absorbing the aftermath, like the trauma that other people go through, I think it's a very complex question and there are many answers to it. But I think at the end of the day, you're always aware that you are privileged, that you are in a safer place. You are only going through this or hearing it in a secondary context and that you are always inspired and awed by the bravery and the courage of the people you're listening to. What you're going through or what you take and the effects it has on you is evidently so minimal. This is why I call it keeping the hope alive. People like you who are so brave to work in a situation like this, in a hopeless situation, but you still want to bring change and be optimistic, which is amazing. So Farah, now tell me about your perspective about what we teach to our students about international development and how the entire industry or the sector, you know, we talked about the politics, which is difficult for us to change, but you do inspire a lot of your students about the idea of this international development and how we should think very critically about this entire business. Yeah, I think we are now teaching and working in extremely difficult context globally with what is happening and the fact that very little is done to, I mean, at the core of it, many of us are driven into this field because we want to bring about a change for the better and many of us want to reduce suffering, right? At the least, that's what we want to do. And when you have to teach this at a time when the people who can do it are not doing it, the decision makers, the global political decision makers are actively not seen to be making the changes that are necessary, be it on conflict, be it on climate change, be it on any of the big issues, I think it's extremely difficult to teach. And I think human rights particularly is difficult to teach because results in human rights, unlike humanitarian or development sector, don't happen overnight. They take a long time to bring about changes. And I think for students to try to feel inspired in this context and aspire for that change is difficult. And sometimes I feel like I'm just standing like a manically crazy passionate person just going on and on and on and hoping that they'll get it and, you know, be part of it. But I mean, we all have, I think, in us this aspect of wanting this change, right? And many of the good thing is many of the students we teach are choosing this subject because they want to be part of it. So to that extent, I think we're in it together almost, right? But one of the big important areas that I've been increasingly getting into as well is this concept of decolonizing. And I'll simplify it for our listeners because it's really arguing that coloniality as a logic of colonialism. So not colonialism as we knew it, which ended when countries became independent in the 1940s, 50s, etc. But coloniality as the ideology, the logic of colonialism still remains. It remains in our society and it remains enabling certain powers to be dominant over others. It remains in how we do research in the power structures we maintain as researchers. It remains in how we get the knowledge, what we consider as authoritative knowledge, what is not authoritative, who do we speak to, how do we gather this, who we consider important enough and not, what is the authoritative journal we look at, right? It remains in our sector, in the practices, for example, what do we talk about as technical expertise? Why are we looking to develop capacity of people who are doing incredible work on the ground? Whose capacity needs to be built? What are we referring to, right, in terms of capacity building? And so this kind of the models, the technical expertise, the theories we use, where do they come from? What is the power structure within them? And coloniality, as a theory argues, is very cognizant, aware of the role of capitalism. So it's not just politics, but the role of capital in it. Capital and race, those are two interlinked factors. And I think from my perspective as somebody from a minority community, from the work I do, from being Sri Lankan where, you know, when the Sri Lankan war was ending, for example, Romana, there was a point of time where 300,000 people were caught up in an area of land and they were in imminent danger of being killed. How much did the world even know about this? Why did it not make it to the headlines as other contexts do? Sri Lanka did not even make it into the agenda of the UN Security Council. So the question is, why? What is the coloniality there, right? Who holds the power? Why are some people more important than others? And I think this is a really new, interesting ground that we can move into where I think it foundationally, like decolonizing to me, foundationally delinks this connection of power, of coloniality, of issues to do with race, capital and the power structures. And I think we need to do that because otherwise we are sort of trying to resolve problems on the surface. So I'm really getting into this with students and offering them like a new way to think, a new way to challenge the world and, you know, hopefully have the revolution, Romana. Exactly. And you just make me think about Tracy Chapman's song talking about revolution. You mentioned about this whole decolonization. I feel so irritated by this word decolonization. What does it mean? Because we are not colonies anymore. So if the colonies are gone 50, 70 years ago, why are we talking about decolonization now? Well, that's the point I was making, Romana. Like the argument decolonial thinkers make is exactly that. Colonization as we knew it as a political event ended. But the logic, the systems of power, the way of thinking remains, Romana. And that is what if you dig deep into how we teach in a university, how does the university structure exist? That's what I mean. What do we consider as authoritative or not? Where is the power structure there? It's the logic, it's the power structure of colonialism that's still there that gives some people linked to race and capital power over others. And you see it in everything. Once you can identify what it is, you see it in everything. It's sort of, it's underlying there in everything we do. And so until we recognize that link and break it and try to, you know, come up with something new and different, we will still have it in all that we do. So, Farah, that is very insightful. And you mentioned about the culture, the international development mindset and what we are supposed to teach. And I experienced the same thing as a consultant working for international aid agencies. It is just ingrained in our culture and the whole practice is also very old fashioned, to be honest. So I'm really glad that you are bringing in these agendas and you're speaking at different events as well as sharing your insights to the students. And I'm sure we'll be able to make changes happen. So now I want to ask you, how do you look back and feel satisfied with the work you have done? What makes you happy? Happy is a big goal, Romana. I think to be happy for me is, it's interesting because really my name in Arabic means happiness. And I find that it's quite a challenge to achieve. I think that when I'm looking at the work I do, it's really difficult. It's very, very difficult, I think, to be satisfied even, let alone happy, because it's so difficult to make big changes and it's so difficult to have, you can have impact, but I think it's really the context and the climate you work in is so hard. And it's hard to be happy when also you're aware of so much pain and agony and difficulty that people are going through around the world, right? And when you, like the kind of research I have done, you become aware of it in an extreme level that is not, you know, most people wouldn't be privy to, you don't get if you watch the news, however terrible the news is. It's not the same as reading testimony after testimony of people's experience of atrocities. So you get a depth of understanding that I think makes it quite difficult to be satisfied and happy in the work you do. I think the way I try to get it is in realizing how really being inspired by the amazing work people do in those contexts. I'm very lucky to work with a lot of incredible activists in many different parts of the world who wake up every day with all of the challenges they have, go out there, face the day and make the change or, you know, fight for the change. And I think that, and their victories and the little things they manage to get, I think helps to make me feel that this is all worthwhile at some level. Sometimes you get an occasional good piece of news. This week I found out that a woman activist in Sri Lanka who has worked to help war victims and primarily fights within, internally within her community and externally on the issue of child marriage. And I recommended her for an award, an international award, and I found out she has just got it. That's great. I know. These kind of things are incredibly, you know, they're the good news that really makes you tick, I think, every day. That's great. Yes, I think that it is always important to keep that positive mindset, to keep going. And I've got to say, sorry, Romana, I was just thinking, it's unfair if I don't say that I have a supportive, lovely family. And I have, like you, a young child who I think they just are great, aren't they, at making you realize there are other things going on in life and in the world and just drawing your attention. I can still remember finishing my PhD interview and coming out and my son at the time was like one and a half or two and I passed and I was so happy. And I was like, my husband was trying to tell my two-year-old son, mommy's passed her PhD and he just was like, swing, swing, look at the swing. So he just realized, OK, there's always something funnier and more exciting that changes your mood. Exactly, exactly, Farah. And I'm sure that when we met your son, he was also saying that he loves Sri Lanka and he liked living there. So I think that those little things, we can find happiness also, like your dad gave you that seed of inspiration to work in the human rights area. So I think that that makes us all happy. So Farah, finally, because MAR stands for Motivations, Action, Reflections and Sustainability. So with all this atrocities and all the negativities around human rights issues, how do you see a sustainable future ahead of us? And you already covered about your personal sustainability and how you keep yourself resilient. Yeah, I think with sustainability globally, I think it's really interesting how even in the field of human rights, there's now much more awareness that climate change, for example, is going to be one of the biggest human rights issues that we are going to face. It's going to cause more human rights concerns than possibly any of the other areas. So it's something those of us working in human rights are really beginning to think about. And I think, again, this decolonizing framework where you understand the relationship of power to capital and race, for instance, has a very strong contribution to make. Because I think with our current thinking, and I really admire, I have to say, our students and the younger generation in taking these issues forward, because they have really made us aware of how we failed, right, our generation failed. And I think that's fantastic what they're doing. But I do think that we have to really think through the capitalist model that we live in and the consumption we demand out of it that makes sustainability very difficult, right. So, you know, I think the solutions of alternatives is not necessarily going to work if we don't challenge the course. You know, it's great to move to electric cars, but electric cars also have an expense and a cost. If we don't reduce the consumption, it's, I think, obviously admirable to move to meat, non-meat, you know, products or meat-free alternatives where all the jackfruit trees are going to be planted, right, like in our parts of the world, whose lands are going to be taken to plant all of these jackfruit trees. So if we, I say this because Sri Lanka has amazing jackfruit, by the way. So we have, and coconut, which are considered big alternatives, right. So, yeah, I think we need to think about this greed, this greed that the world produces, understand how greed is not going to really help to sustain the world. Individually and to those of us who are in this field working in humanitarian, human rights development areas and for our students, I think, again, I think something that the younger generation has been good to teach us is about taking care of ourselves. I think they demand it much more than we did. But I joined a choir and I do do my exercise occasionally and, you know, I have come to try to meditate and take care of myself. But I do think taking care of yourself compulsively, like, or, you know, dedicatedly, not compulsively, not that I would, dedicatedly, is very important to, it's very important in so many different ways. And so I think that is critical for sustainability. That is so true, Farah. I think that once we are able to define what we mean by sustainable living, then problems will be solved easily because it's, you know, it starts at personal level. Thank you, Farah. I really wish you all the best and also to keep the hopes alive amongst all the sad things that are happening around us. Have a good day. Thank you, Romana. Thanks for having me. Take care.