"No God and no Norway": collective resource loss among members of Tamil NGO's in Norway during and after the last phase of the civil war in Sri Lanka

Ethnographic fieldwork methods were employed within Tamil NGO's in the two largest cities in Norway between November 2008 and June 2011.The findings suggest that collective resources became severely drained as a result of the crisis, severely disrupting the fabric of social life. Public support from the majority community remained scarce throughout the crisis.The study suggests that there is a need for public support to exile groups indirectly affected by man-made crises in their country of origin.In the final stages of the civil war between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Government of Sri Lanka in 2009, hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians became trapped in the line of fire inside an area roughly the same as New York City's Central Park. Tamils living in exile in Norway were powerless to prevent that tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were killed, many of them friends and family. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork within pro-LTTE Tamil NGO's in Norway during the period, and examines how they were affected by the crisis in their home country while living in exile.Research on the mental health of refugees has tended to focus on trauma induced by pre migration personal experiences in the home country (e.g., [1]), or on issues related to post migration acculturation and adaptation in the "host" society (e.g., [2,3]). However, when disasters occur, people originating from the affected area may find themselves affected in a number of ways although they are physically remote from the incident [4]. Nevertheless, the effects of crises that occur in the country of origin while refugees are comfortably situated in exile have been little studied. A few studies have focused on the impact of natural disasters on individual refugees [4-6]. The studies show that more than a year after the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, refugees in exile who had lost friends or family in the disaster still had strong emotional reactions.Previous resear